It didn't occur to me to click on the ideographs hereinabove, so I /msged the author and said "what is that?". Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The end of the war in the Pacific at the time it did meant my dad got to go home without having to endure another bombing. A selfish point for mass destruction if ever there was one; but it did make me think about my dad. And my uncle, who traveled every year to Pearl Harbor to remember his Navy buddies who lost their lives there.

Both of these men are gone now. We live in a different time. Far fewer civilians are involved in the obscenity we call war than in any time in history.

However much I hate the fact that one civilian; child, woman, man — old or young — had to be lost in the name of Hirohito's desire to save face, that's the way it was.

It took not one but two of the most horrific events in history to get the Japanese to raise their white flags.

It's hackneyed to raise my old "coulda, woulda, shoulda" argument, but perhaps had those two horrible explosions not occurred, the future would have been changed dramatically at the hand of one who had not hesitated merely because of the memory of the incredible loss of life, destruction, and atomic fallout. Yes, I'm saying that those civilians, perhaps, did not die in vain. That perhaps other nuclear "close calls" have been merely that and not disasters of far greater magnitude than what happened so many years ago in Japan have been averted because the world saw what happened. And nobody wanted it to happen again.

Coda: Doyle reminded me that Hirohito himself indeed got to save face. He also much more simply put my final thought; we used the bomb to show Russia what we had (his words). The thing was gonna be used, in my opinion, and best that it was used in its infancy than later on, when proliferation certainly got out of hand.