I’ve often marveled about how the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan saved my father’s life, along with the lives of a million of his fellow American soldiers, plus 10 million or more Japanese soldiers and civilians, on top of millions of innocent Asian lives in the Japanese-occupied territories. But they also saved the lives of tens of millions of Americans, Europeans, Russians and others in the much larger war that never came, by dissuading Joseph Stalin and his successors in the only way possible.
Just as Adolf Hitler’s maniacal, antisemitic rise to power caused the bomb to be developed in America rather than in Germany — ultimately (and ironically) ending the very war Hitler began and saving the world from the specter of nuclear-armed Nazis — American dollars, technology and desire to save soldiers’ lives in World War II uniquely and unilaterally saved much of the entire world from a communist system that has sadly ground up more than a hundred million souls. Like countless numbers of Japanese children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of you reading these words today are alive — and free — because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Rob Kerchner
Valencia
