After sixty years, the motives and results of the nuclear attacks against Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still being debated by historians. Tsuyohsi Hasegawa has concluded that Japan's surrender was more the result of the Soviet declaration of war against Japan on August 8, 1945, just after the Hiroshima bombing, than of the bomb itself. Remember, we had already fire bombed many of their cities.

In "The Fog of War," Robert McNamara says that the nuclear attacks were done to prove to the world, not that we "could" do it, but more importantly, that we "would" do it.

A short discussion of the motives and causes of the Japanese surrender can be found here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0803-26.htm

Finally, has the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused other nations to reject war altogether as an option?

I really believe that an open and inclusive democratic society that focuses on the individual rights and the collective well-being of its citizens represents a high point in the history of civilization. (I'm talking about America, believe it or not.) On the other hand, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that America is one of the most violent societies in the world today. In the first hundred years of our history, that violence was the result of geographic expansion and our own internal politics. In the past hundred years that violence has been used in the service of self-defense and global economic hegemony.

The divide that exists in our society regarding violence is not new. It has been with us since the beginning. I firmly believe that it boils down to empathy and the idea of Self and Other. The more the Other is like you (i.e, Self), the more difficult it is to hurt them. You would not hurt your arm. You would not hurt your heart, your children, your spouse, your family. The less the Other is like you, the less difficult it is to imagine the greatest possible harm upon them.

That is what I see quantified in polls like the ones Glenn presents today.

America has turned the majority of the people in the world into the Other. That is why some people in America don't even blink at the prospect of killing millions of innocents from other nations, cultures, races and religions.

Even inside America, there are those who would turn the majority of their fellow citizens into the Other. To voice a desire to kill the Other as defined by the term "liberal" is just about as crazy as you can get.

I'm hoping that what we are experiencing is some form of millennial madness (like the Crusades) that will settle down before too much longer. America is definitely caught in a madness at present, a madness running at fever pitch that has only served to exacerbate our well-documented tendency towards violence.

The poet W.B. Yeats anticipated our millennial madness in his poem "The Second Coming"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Pure unselfish commonsense reason.

I've learned this about you. You help keep us honest.