This is a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is easier to show Oppenheimer than the pictures of the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima where the first and only atomic bombs were unleashed by the United States against Japanese citizens.
I am not the author of this impressive analysis by Sophia, but I have read a lot about Russia and its invasion of Ukraine in the past ten years, and the making of the atomic bomb. I have a general sense of the energy force within such an explosive, and the effect that this much energy and heat makes on Earth’s life forms. I’ve seen pictures of the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I encourage you to look, too.
Sophia writes about two topics with an understated graciousness that belies her age and status: young, student. Painful for me to read her analysis of an article about Russian history and Russia’s war against Ukrainian citizens. This is not a war of soldier against soldier, it is a war of Russian soldiers against Ukranian civilians.
I used to teach a class called Chemistry for Citizens and one-third of the class was devoted to nuclear energy. I still harbor some hope that students left that class to think again about the power of energy to destroy others. It’s so easy to do, and so hard to undo.
A U.S. president I greatly admire otherwise, Harry Truman, never lost sleep over the dropping of atomic bombs on the citizens of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, bombs that annihilated square miles of man-made structures and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and maimed hundreds of thousands of others. I wish I had a calculation of life so clear as Mr. Truman, but I don’t. I see crippled hands of a woman, blistered skin of a child, a mother, a father. Cancers, exterminations, destruction.
Thank you for learning so much about the past, Sophia. I place my hope in students like you.
—Maggie O’Brien
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