VJ Day In Retrospect

  August 12th was VJ Day or formerly known as Victory Day.  That was a great day when the war in the pacific was over.  A sad day when we lost 2400 lives during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  I can't help but think about August 8th and 9th of 1945, a few days before VJ day, when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming 150,000 lives, a very sad day for the Japanese.  That doesn't even include the tens of thousands that died later from radiation sickness.  An action a bit excessive, I think, to bomb Hiroshima and then do the same thing the next day to Nagasaki.  I don't think the US realized how powerful a weapon the nuclear bomb was and probably one of the most irresponsible actions we ever took as a country.

  Bottom line, war is a terrible thing and we should celebrate when it is over, as depicted in this marvelous video but we should never celebrate to glorify it.
 

 The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem.  It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. - Albert Einstein