Obama, Romney and The Bomb
The would-be President responds to the Sikh temple shootings by “mourning those who lost their lives” and with “prayer for healing.”
On another August 6, we are jolted into realizing that Mitt Romney wants his finger on the trigger that 67 years ago took more than a hundred thousand lives in the name of peace.
In Japan, the Mayor of Hiroshima cites efforts to provide health care for survivors, now almost 80, so they can continue to bear witness to what human beings can do to one another.
On that day back then, I was in Germany, one of untold thousands waiting to be sent as foot soldiers to invade Japan. All we knew 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 later and that our country would forever bear the burden of being the first to use such 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.”
As voters consider Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on this day in August, those memories must be part of the equation.
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While I certainly appreciate the magnitude of the responsibility a president bears regarding nuclear weapons, and really really don’t think Romney is the best man for the job, I don’t think he’d be dumb enough to be an issue on this topic. Essentially you are worried he’d precipitate a nuclear exchange? I’m going to stick with not liking Romney because he basically wants to reboot Bush’s policies despite the fact they clearly lead to a financial meltdown and screwed the middle class and the overall economy in favor of the upper class. That is plenty of grist for my mill all by itself.
What is the point of this article? That Romney will get us in a nuclear war? What was the point of even mentioning Wisconsin, that Romney will get lots of people killed?