After listening to Japanese friends as they shared stories of running to caves for protection as US bombers approached, seeing the flashes and feeling the impact as bombs exploded on Japanese towns and villages, and living in the extreme poverty that war engenders it struck me that the US has never been exposed to such terror. That led me to wonder if US citizens would be so quick to support war if we had been subject to air raids in the middle of the night or even worse.
My guess is no.
From The Times (UK)...
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato are either the luckiest or the unluckiest men alive, and after three days in their company and long hours of conversation, I still had no idea which.
Mr Yamaguchi and his friends are freaks of history, victims of a fate so callous and improbable that it defies belief. In 1945, they were working in Hiroshima, where the world's first atomic bomb exploded on August 6, 60 years ago this morning. One hundred and forty thousand people died as a result of the explosion; by chance, Mr Yamaguchi, Mr Sato and Mr Iwanaga were spared. Stunned and injured, reeling from the horrors around them, they left the city for their home town, Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west.
There, on August 9, the second atomic bomb exploded over their heads.
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