Learning from Hiroshima

“We can't undo the past,” said Ron Hertz in the Ventura County Star, “but we better learn from it.” So we should all do some soul-searching following the 63rd anniversary of the day when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima to bring Japan to its knees at the end of World War II. If we don’t swear off these “genocidal weapons” for good, “the nightmares” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen again.

The U.S. is already letting its nuclear arsenal dwindle, said Frank J. Gaffney Jr. in The Washington Times, but that’s not the way to make sure there is never another Hiroshima. “The proverbial nuclear genie is out of the bottle,” and the only way to prevent terrorists and rogue states from using atomic bomb blueprints available to all is to maintain America’s nuclear arsenal as a deterrent.

You don't have to be a peace activist to recognize what dangerous thinking that is, said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in an editorial. With “the dangers from proliferation and terrorism” now on everyone’s mind, major U.S. foreign policy thinkers, including former secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and former Sen. Sam Nunn, have been converted, and “called for a world free of nuclear weapons.”

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