The decision to use atomic weapons near the close of WWII on the Japanese civilian populace has been fractious lingering to this day. Having visited the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima several years ago I found it both a chilling and very moving experience. Given the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the rise of the terrorists in our age some have said it is not a matter of ‘if’, only ‘when’ a weapon would be loosed on America. The ability to accomplish this has become much easier. For example, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki weighed more than 10,000 lbs. Today’s weapons are so much smaller. They have shrunk in proportion with computer hardware. The first 1 gigahertz Mac was deemed to be a super computer and was for a time banned from sales to the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations. After all those Macs could calculate and crunch the numbers for missile trajectories. Time was when whole rooms at the Merrill Engineering Buliding of computers could not move as quickly as the Intel Duo Pro Mac I am using to post this piece on my blog.
Popular authors, as in Tom Clancy, have written about a doomsday scenario for the US in the book and film, “The Sum of All Fears” where terrorists gain control over a weapon and detonate it on US soil. Perhaps the most sobering statement and prediction growing out of the Hiroshima atomic bomb was made two days after the attack by then First Counselor in The First Presidency, J. Reuben Clark, I quote: “Its (the atomic bomb) use to kill will become the aim and practice of all nations. Sometime our children’s children will have it turned against them, that they, too, may be exterminated, annihilated. When that time comes they will have no moral weapon against it, for we, their ancestors, will have cursed hmanuty by its first use; they may (also) have no physical weapon to combat it. And humanity may be as depraved and Christian virtue as dead then as now. Our posterity must pay the penalty, to the last farthing.”
A sobering if not frightening appraisal by a very intelligent and wise man as to the nature of man, politics and of the world. Truly he was one of the great leaders and thinkers in the 20th Century LDS Church.
