Remember Hiroshima? Remember Pearl Harbor!

Contributed by: filbert Thursday, August 11 2005 @ 08:17 AM CST

Ralph Kinney Bennett at Tech Central Station[*1] remembers Hiroshima and what happened before the Bomb dropped, with the help of veteran Harold Agnew:

He was a young weapons scientist during World War II. He flew in the chase plane behind the Enola Gay and observed the detonation of the first nuclear weapon at Hiroshima.
. . .
Recently a Tokyo television network flew him to Japan to participate in a “discussion” with survivors of the atomic bombings. He was gracious. He was informative. He listened.

But when the group demanded an apology, Harold Agnew stood up and uttered three little words:

“Remember Pearl Harbor!”

The “discussion” was over.
. . .
In a later interview, reported in the Post, Agnew explained, “Many Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did. They can point at us. But believe me, they did some awful bad things. We saved Japanese lives with those bombs — an invasion would have been worse.”

It’s intellectually lazy to wring hands about Hiroshima and Nagasaki without remembering the years of horror which preceeded those awful events. Perhaps as many as a million Japanese lives were spared due to the use of the Bombs. Dropping Little Boy and Fat Man was as neccessary as it was horrific. That is what war is: necessary and horrific.