The Day the World Changed

Sixty-three years ago, America won a war and lost its innocence. On August 6, 1945, the world's first nuclear weapon was detonated over Hiroshima, and six days later, World War II ended.

I was in uniform then in Germany, one of thousands waiting to be sent as foot soldiers to invade Japan. All we knew then was that a mushroom cloud had ended our dread of going to the Pacific to storm beaches and fight through cities. For the first time in years, we could wake in the morning without feeling there was an IOU out on our lives, held by someone unknown and payable on demand.

It was weeks before we learned the moral price for our relief--that over 200,000 would die from that explosion in Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki three days afterward and that our country would forever bear the burden of being the first to use weapons of mass destruction.

Almost two decades later, in August 1963, I was interviewing John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. "Since 1945," he said, "we have gone into an entirely new period of nuclear weapons. Most people have no conception of what it all means. A nuclear exchange lasting sixty minutes would mean over 300 million deaths. We have to prevent the end of the human race."

This August, as presidential candidates argue over gasoline prices and each other's celebrity status, it's easy to forget they are asking voters to give them a Godlike control over the lives of multitudes of people, not only in our own country but all over the world.

It's too late to anguish over that decision 60 years ago but not too soon to remember how much power of life and death will be in the hands of whoever we choose this November and what qualities of judgment, character and human feeling he will need to make such choices for us in the future.

Requiem for the Candy Man

Paul W. Tibbets Jr. died yesterday at the age of 92. He will go down in history as the pilot of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb in history ultimately killing more than 100,000 people.

I was in uniform in Europe then, waiting to be sent off for the invasion of Japan, and what Tibbets did may very well have saved my life. Afterward, he insisted his bombing of Hiroshima "saved more lives than we took" and that it would have been "morally wrong if we'd have had that weapon and not used it."

But the question of whether mass murder of civilian populations can ever be moral is far from settled. For more than six decades, after the second atomic bombing in history, of Nagasaki, there has been no use of nuclear weapons. But given the irrational hatred that exists in today's world, how long will that moratorium last?

In Tibbets' first flight as a teenager, he dropped candy bars with tiny parachutes on a beach to promote his father's confectionary store. It was a long way from there to dropping death on women and children.

In interviews late in life, Tibbets said he didn't want a funeral or headstone to attract protesters to his burial site. But he deserves better than that. He was a soldier doing his duty, not a head of state with the moral responsibility for sending him to do what he did.