Myth of Lives Saved by A-Bombs

I am tired of pundits like Bernstein and their crying over the necessity or unnecessity of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They miss the mark when they play the numbers game over whether only tens of thousands of Americans would have died or whether a million would have if we had not dropped them.

The point is that the two bombs created the same havoc in seconds that months of bombing did over Tokyo, or Berlin, for that matter, where we used “simple” fire bombs day in and day out to kill and maim tens of thousands and possibly millions of women and children. What is the difference? Only time.

War is Hell. This is true whether it takes years or seconds to run its course. It may be more humane for it to take seconds. The fear of what will come tomorrow, the what ifs, the gut-grinding hunger of being cut off from food supplies for months and all of the ret of it do not happen when war is over in a flash. Of course, the aftermath may be as bad.

Instead of harping on the morality of atomic weapons the pundits should be writing out against the immorality of all weapons of destruction and how they are being used today under an atomic umbrella that will explode only by accident. We are still killing each other in dozens of “little” wars all over our planet with those weapons.

Does anyone really believe that a discussion of the morality of Hiroshima is germane in today’s world?

DANIEL HON

Newhall