We Who Have Vaporized Others

     Seventy years is less than the lifespan of an average American adult (seventy-eight years).  Seventy years, half of 140, goes back to 1945-1946, when World War Two ended, but before the Cold War.  No one who lived 140 years ago, 1875-1876, is alive.  Crazy Horse, Custer, Sitting Bull, Ulysses Grant, are dead, the wars they fought in overgrown with grass, monuments, and foliage.  Seventy years, though, isn't enough time, yet, to wear down into the ground all World War Two survivors, much less the philosophies, attitudes, lessons learned, of that war from the victors' perspective.
     Children of World War Two participants now run the world.  One of them, President Obama, will travel to Asia from May 21 to May 28.  On May 27, he'll be the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, a Japanese city that received exactly one bomb from U.S. forces on August 6, 1945, three days before Nagasaki received its bomb.
     The United States invented and put into practice nuclear warfare.  More people died from radiation effects during the months following the bombings than in the explosions, which were nonetheless devastating.  It's a generally accepted idea in U.S. political thought that the A-bombs were necessary to end the war.  A massive invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall, was planned for late 1945, involving a sweep of the islands and extraordinary intensities of killing (the kind of thing some want done to ISIS).  The assumption that the Japanese, military personnel and civilians, would've fought to the death by that point in the war, when most cities on the home islands were
pulverized and burned out courtesy of the mind of Curtis Le May, is arguable, but don't try to argue it with members of the Greatest Generation.  Whatever the case, talking about possible outcomes of events that didn't happen remains speculation.
     General Le May's bombing strategies were like the calculations of a mathematician playing a game, but lacking empathy for civilians.  Japanese civilians were to him like pieces of dry wood.  Fire bombing, or incineration, was widely practiced by low-flying B-29 bombers on Japanese cities.  This annihilation through burning of cities and flesh, added up in casualties and property destruction, overwhelms the atomic devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The nature, though, of those cities' fall sets them apart, not just in that war, but in history.  They are templates for anyone evil and rash enough to make a third city go away, with radioactive pollution following and drifting with weather patterns.
     According to Reuters, Josh Earnest, Obama's press secretary, stated the official U.S. position on nuclear weapons: "'[the United States] bears a special responsibility" as the only country to use nuclear weapons in wartime, the president will emphasize [in Japan during his trip] Washington's responsibility "to lead the world in an effort to eliminate them.'"
     What is the nature of this "special responsibility"?  I suspect it has to do with making sure no other country practices such a killing method.  This, on the one hand, is a goal worth pursuing.  We've all been lucky no nuclear weapon has gone off in a populated area since Nagasaki (ignoring Pacific island atolls, like Bikini, where the inhabitants were bought off and relocated so the U.S. government could blow the shit out of their homeland).  On the other hand, Earnest seems to be saying that, righteous killers that we are, no one should ever presume to acquire nukes without our say so, much less use them.  The final hope, that Washington has a responsibility "to lead the world in an effort to eliminate them," is as impractical an idea as it would've have been to convince the makers of the first flint knives to cease production on a weapon proven to work.  If something works, it's reproduced, it's used.  Nuclear weapons, ironically, have proven to be most effective as defensive options.  Saddam Hussein's lack of nuclear weapons contributed to Iraq being attacked by the U.S. in two wars.
     According to Reuters, a heated debate went on in the White House about whether or not Obama should visit Hiroshima.  Would this be regarded by his critics as "an apology"?  It took a Pope, John Paul II, about 900 years to apologize for the Christian Crusader massacre of the population of Jerusalem in 1099.  I don't expect Obama or any other president to apologize for horrors visited on others.  They operate in a political realm having nothing to do with real, human feelings.  It makes me wonder, though, what the harm would be if he apologized to victims of atomic warfare.  He'd be attacked in the press and in Washington by the same kinds of America First odious sacks of shit who always find compassion towards America's victims offensive.  No apologies for the Contra War.  No apologies for enslaving human beings and shipping them like sardines across the Atlantic Ocean to make them into the foundation of an agricultural industry so important to the people running it they went to war with the rest of the country.  No apologies for the thousands of lies, concealments, the Orwellian activities of the NSA, no apologies for relentlessly giving us political candidates who suck.
     Survivors of the A-bomb explosions want the president to seek a world without nuclear weapons, rather than an apology.  No doubt, Obama will make one of his typical "soaring" speeches, one on ridding the world of nukes, but I judge this "no nukes" world will more likely happen than the United States ever apologizing to those victimized by its policies.
     Obama plans also to visit Vietnam, another country he won't, on behalf of the United States, apologize to.  Part of the stance of cruelty--a necessity in maintaining power--is never saying you're wrong.

                                                                                Vic Neptune