Instant Meditations on The Bomb

Paul Tibbets died today. There's news about it here at Yahoo; "Pilot of Plane that dropped A-bomb dies". If you can't name Paul Tibbets you might not know what an A-bomb is.
If you don't know what an A-bomb is, then maybe flying 747s into buildings is the worst thing you can imagine ever happening.

When I was 9 years old, I remember going to Claremore Oklahoma for a parade celebrating the 100th birthday of Will Rogers. To my almost ecstatic delight, I got to watch Jimmy Doolittle drive by, waving to the crowd amongst the shriners and cavalry. I knew all about the raid on Tokyo from the USS Hornet just after Pearl Harbor.
Paul Tibbets could have been in that same parade and I would not have known him nor remembered him at the time.

I once knew a man who had fought with the Marines at Guadalcanal & had also lost his only brother in the same war. He was an old family friend. In his autobiography, he wrote of meeting Harry Truman at a funeral & finally mustering the courage to ask the former President about the Decision he had to make concerning the possible use of the first atomic weapons against Japan. "T'weren't no decision at all," replied Truman.

In Errol Morris' The Fog of War, Former Secretary of Defense to John Kennedy & Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara explains at terrible length his role in the destruction heaped upon Japan in terms of the contemporary bounds of warfare prior to The Bomb. He demonstrates the parallels of devastation by comparing equal populations of decimated Japanese cities to untouched American cities. Imagine the comparable populations of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Miami, St. Louis, Las Vegas, Kansas City, et cetera, all wiped out in completely routine bombing raids one by one for some perspective, McNamara argued...

Justice is our last refuge & we all know we can justify anything if we like.

UPDATE: More here.