Atomic Mythologies

[Burgess, John]

I have to agree here...  death isn't pretty, death in war is uglier.

I don't think of myself as particularly cold, but I see no real 
difference between melting someone's body into slag (a la Dresden) and 
incinerating it in an atomic flash.  Radiation sickness is no more 
horrible than dying from the long-term effects of mustard gas, or  -- 
after languishing for 40 years in a VA hospital --from having had your 
head staved in by a rifle butt...

Murder is wrong.  Deaths caused by war have always been seen as something 
other than murder.  The scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not make them 
record-holders in terms of the numbers killed in one attack or series of 
attacks.  The long term effects are no more horrendous than those caused 
by poison gasses in WWI.  The radiation effects from those attacks are 
remarkable mostly for their near-non-existence.  The effects of the bombs 
themselves were "whimsical" -- if I may use that term.  I read an article 
in a London paper this past week which discussed the 24 Australian POWs 
who were in Nagasaki (about 2 km from ground-zero) when the bomb went 
off.  Six have died since the bomb, one may/may have been the result of 
radiation.  All the others are now men in their 70s, suffering the kinds 
of things men in their 70s suffer from:  bad hearts, cancer (well within 
norms), rheumatism, strokes.

A- and H-bombs are bad business, I have not one doubt.  That they are so 
terrible has helped to ensure that they've not been used since 1945.  I 
don't think that's a bad thing.

When it comes to inhumanity, though, there are far worse things out 
there, including some of the lowest-tech tortures that have been around 
for probably as long as H. sapiens has roamed.