Year Zero

Have you ever had the experience of someone else explaining to you how and why you were wrong in doing something?

You may have not appreciated the gravity of your actions when you took them, but you are brought around to seeing it from the other party's perspective. And even if you don't hate yourself for doing it, you give yourself a thorough self-assessment and vow to amend your behavior, to think more about how your actions could be interpreted, how your actions will affect people you don't even know, people who haven't even been born yet.

If you have never run this gauntlet, I can guarantee that you are unfit to be a citizen, a spouse, or a parent. Hiroshima is the ultimate example of this dynamic. We as Americans still take far too casually the decision that was made by our government 65 years ago. Year Zero.

"Year Zero" was a phrase proposed by a physicist whose name escapes me at the moment. The premise is more important than the name. The premise is as follows:

If the birth of a Palestinian pauper who claimed to be the king of the Jews before being executed by the Romans was reason enough to start time over (i.e. this is only 2010 because Jesus Christ, aka Yeshua Ha-Nostri, was born 201o years ago) then surely man's harnessing and unleashing of the very power of the sun was a more compelling reason to start time over.

That's how big a deal this was. We as Americans have not grappled with this. We look at it as just another bomb used to end just another war. And that it was. But it was more.

The atomic bombs that America dropped on Japan were toys compared with what was to come. Within 5 years of Hiroshima, America had bombs that were 10,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, which was powerful enough to kill 100,000 people instantly.

The United States is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on people, and on civilians for that matter. This is a huge load-bearing beam in the architecture of America-haters and of ignorant Americans.

We nuked people. Civilians. On purpose. Our president called it a "service of God". We did that. Everyone else knows that. We forget. So the question is, was it justified?

Yes.

That's the worst thing about us as human beings. Japanese and Russian and American human beings created a situation where it was actually better and safer to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians in 1945 than to entertain the alternative. Yes, the alternative was worse.

Let's think about the alternative. We don't use nukes. We continue bombing Japan with conventional bombs, which kill just as many people as nuclear weapons, until they surrender.

So, we have nukes, but we don't use them. So nobody knows exactly how deadly they are. The Soviets proceed to get nukes, as they would have regardless since they had spies deep within the American nuke program.

So imagine a Cold War standoff in a world where Hiroshima never happened, where people had never been confronted to what the use of these weapons would mean.

The world has avoided nuclear war. A nuclear war, like all wars, would involve at least 2 combatants. The only time nuclear weapons were used, there was only one nuclear combatant. When we nuked Japan, nobody had any nukes to hit us with, so it was a demonstration rather than a war.

Without that demonstration, human nature being what it is, the first use of nuclear weapons would have happened eventually, and it would have happened in a world with more than one nuclear power. And the only thing worse than a nuclear attack is the retaliation to a nuclear attack.

We don't invent weapons that we don't use. Nukes were going to be used. Thankfully, they were used in a vacuum. They were used without possibility of escalation, and they were pathetically weak prototypes. That's the good news.

The bad news is that human nature demands we incinerate 200,000 people in an instant before we reconsider our behavior just a little bit.