Operation Downfall - Blog Posts

It’s odd how few people actually know about Operation Downfall. Yeah, the nukes weren’t a great thing, but the alternative was far, far worse. It happened 70 years ago and it was war. People die in war, it’s kind of the point. Either 250,000 people die or several million people die. Bad things happened, but sometimes the past plays out better for the future. It happened, you can’t change it, get over it.

Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I’m wondering if we’ve come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world’s only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people — slowly and painfully — leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000?

Yet Americans still view the bombings as an act of mercy