Happy Nuke Day!

On this date 62 years ago, a virtually unprecedented era of peace --- peace in the sense that there was not a catastrophic war between the world's major powers --- was ushered in with the use of the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, dropped from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the last atomic shot to be fired in anger was aimed at Nagasaki, Japan.

I'm proud to say that two other native Pineknotters --- i.e., natives of my hometown, Northumberland, Pennsylvania --- played key roles in accomplishing this mission. General Uzal G. Ent was the officer who chose Colonel Paul Tibbetts to lead the 509th Composite Group, the outfit that accomplished the mission. A man much younger than Ent, also from Northumberland, Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, was the navigator on Tibbetts' plane, the Enola Gay. He later told me that he bought his first Pontiac from my grandfather, a local automobile dealer after the war.

While the far Left, those who believe that you can appease your way to peace, and other moonbats are bemoaning the development of atomic weapons and their use to end the most devastating conflict in human history, realists recognize that it probably was only the existence of such weaponry and fear over their use which has prevented the devastation and catastrophe of another direct major power conflict for the last 62 years, and counting, a period unrivaled since the years after the Congress of Vienna (1815).

So Happy Nuke Day! Contrary to what you will read elsewhere, the Nuclear Age is something we should be celebrating, not bemoaning.