Happy/Unhappy Anniversary

Dr. and Mrs. Wingnut are happy to announce that they have been married for 17 years today.  Their wedding day was on a Saturday, 6 August 1988 because Mrs. Wingnut said no one would come to the wedding if they were married the day Dr. Wingnut wanted, 8/8/88.  So now he remembers it as that date minus two days.

Had the Dr. known that that August 6^th was also the anniversary of the Atomic Age — the dropping of the first atomic weapon on Hiroshima, Japan — he would have pushed harder for the other date, unlike the leaders of the free world, as described in an excerpt from the editorial Crossing the Moral Threshold by David M. Kennedy that appeared in the 1 August 2005 issue of Time:

The discomforting truth is that Allied leaders strode unhesitantly into the atomic age.  “I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used,” Truman later wrote.  “[N]or did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise,” Winston Churchill added.  Nothing in the record contradicts them.  Dropping the Bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, was among history’s most notorious foregone conclusions.

God, I pray we have learned our lesson from this terrible tragedy.