One side effect of Hiroshima-Nagasaki

Churchill waves to crowds in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945
(Photo from Wikipedia Commons: public domain)

I remember reading John Hersey's Hiroshima when I was a young lad of about ten or eleven, perhaps twelve, years old. One more tile in the mosaic that is my abhorrence of war.

Back in those days every American calendar noted V-E and V-J (or V-P) days, when the wars in Europe and the Pacific ended. I was born on the first anniversary of V-E day, so there were always little crossed Unites States flags marking my birthday on the calendar in our kitchen.

It is amazing how slow one can be to do the math. Only as we approached the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII did I realize that I would have been conceived on or around the days when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. In other words, I may have been a byproduct of the atomic bomb.

In a universe where everything is linked to everything else, I can hardly distance myself from that horror, now, can I?

--the BB