I was born one week and a day before the Hiroshima bomb.

[MineralMan]

I'm an "atomic baby." I've always had mixed feelings about our country being the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons in wartime. I had no idea, of course, that the bomb existed, for many years. With its development begun by FDR and the decision to use the weapons made by Truman, it was an event that has always been fraught with dispute.

In the aftermath, it led to the Cold War, which threatened all of us. I was in the generation that dove under desks in A-Bomb drills, and that had nightmares of bright flashes in the sky and certain death.

I still have mixed feelings about our use of this weapon. They will never be resolved in my mind. I don't enter into arguments about it, because there are arguments on both sides that have validity. I remain saddened that any such weapons were ever made to exist and deep regrets over the international divisiveness they created for so many years.

Each year, the issue is raised, and that is a good thing. We need to think about this. We need to examine our consciences about this. We need to resolve that such a thing will not occur again. We cannot change what happened, but we can change how we think about the use of such weapons in the future.

It is a sad anniversary in many ways.

[yuiyoshida]

1. Otanjoubi Omedetou gozaimasu!

happy birthday...

[MineralMan]

2. Thanks! Being 70 years old is a bit sobering.

It's an odd feeling, but it will soon pass. It's a birthday that tends to lead people to look back on their lives and assess decisions they have made. As I do that, I find that I'm pretty much OK with the ones I have made, generally.

[TM99]

3. I was born about twenty years later

and am part of the last generation to grow up with the fear of nuclear holocaust always present. Movies like Threads and Miracle Mile were cinematic reminders as was Sting's The Russians as musical one.

I was an exchange student to West Germany almost a decade before the Berlin Wall came down. I remember it very well. Checkpoint Charlie, ghost stations on the ride to East Berlin, and visiting some distant cousins in Communist Czechoslovakia. The reality of the Cold War is lost on the current generations. They were born well after it supposedly ended.

Atrocities occurred on so many sides in World War I and II. No student of history should forget that.

Unlike you, I have no mixed feelings. These atomic bombings were our atrocities, and as a country we have never owned them. I know all of the rationalizations and the reasons and the imaginings of what might have, could have, ought to have been. It still does not excuse the deliberate mass murder in these two cities. The immediate effects really pale though to the decades of radiation damage.

It is a sad anniversary. Our country has so much blood on our hands that I sometimes wonder how we will last another century.