Word: nagasaki
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...Kennedy government inherited from the Cold Warriors was the doctrine of preventive warfare. This doctrine, in turn, was conceived with the psychological potentialities of the atomic bomb fully in mind. To repeat an important point, there is growing evidence that the decision to use the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made within the framework of the Potsdam negotiations, not the then-foreseeable Japanese capitulation...
...killing of 100,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a tragedy of mankind: it was done by nuclear weapons...
...such temptations have been resisted, it may be because Hiroshima and Nagasaki have assumed the proportions of myth-needed and useful myth. This fact does not justify the toll of dead and wounded, nor lay their ghosts in the national conscience. Yet it gives them meaning. Horrifying as the ghosts of those victims are, there is no comparable meaning in the 135,000 ghosts of Dresden, that totally vengeful, ultimately useless crime of conventional warfare. But Dresden was a massive effort, involving 2,750 bombers. The essential terror of the nuclear bomb is that it is so small, so sudden...
Once, the U.S. tried to make it so. The alternative was an invitation missed-an invitation to moral heroism and political imagination-and an opportunity forever lost. Yet tragic errors can be the beginnings of new maturity. It may be no coincidence that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans seem to have discerned a dimension of tragedy in their lives, have been more willing to admit their faults, more able to examine the darker side of their actions...
...adventurous human gambles, perhaps, as graduated gestures of disarmament, to encourage the larger success of strategic arms limitation agreements and other rational attempts toward mutual reduction of terror among nuclear powers. Such options, for a free nation as for a free man, still remain open. Even with Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned forever in the memory, there persists the hope for new opportunities and fresh choices...