DOCTOR ATOMIC REMINDS THAT ONLY U.S. HAS USED ATOMIC WEAPONS AGAINST CITIES AND CIVILIANS

This afternoon I listened to a WFMT broadcast of Doctor Atomic, Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of the opera by John Adams and Peter Sellars.

Doctor Atomic tells the story of the development of nuclear weapons by a team of American scientists, principally Robert Oppenheimer, in the early 1940s.

The opera ends seconds before the first bomb is exploded in the Nevada deserts in the summer of 1945. Overtones of Japanese residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned from the nuclear bombs sounds in the background together with electronic noise from the count-downs.

The United States likes to say that it is the home of the free and the land of democracy. Americans think that their country is exceptional, the beacon to the rest of the world.

Yet the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in start contrast to the American sense of "manifest destiny" and purity of purpose. No other country has used an atomic weapon against civilians or against populated cities. Each bomb took 100,000 lives, women, children, men, elderly, boys, girls.

No wonder Americans hardly remember in their collective historical consciousness what happened in 1945. No one talks about how president Harry Truman proved himself to be a war criminal, using weapons of war, in this first case of nuclear weapons, against civilians and cities. If the definition of a war crime par excellence is killing civilians indiscriminately, Truman's order to drop the bombs cannot be justified.