By Robert C. Koehler | Tribune Media Service
“Within 10 seconds the fire that wiped out the city came after us at full speed. Everyone was naked. Bodies were swelling up. Some people were so deformed I couldn’t tell if they were male or female. People died screaming, ‘Please give me water!’
“There was nothing to eat, not even garbage, in the burned down city.”
What if schoolchildren stood facing not the American flag every morning before class started but a photograph of a devastated Hiroshima, shortly after it was obliterated by our atomic bomb, and pledged their allegiance to the idea that such a thing will never happen again?
Do you think we’d start growing up as a country? Do you think we’d still have several thousand nuclear missiles on hair-trigger alert, pointed at Russia (with Russia having about as many pointed at us)? Do you think — as I begin reaching wildly for the impossible — we’d start facing our fears instead of living in fear?
Do you think we might start questioning the nuclear weapons industry and stop worshipping our own weapons of mass destruction — or at least stop selling Fat Man and Little Boy earrings at the gift shop of the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas?