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Showing posts with the label Bert the Turtle

Duck and Cover

In August 1945, the first (and still only) use of nuclear weapons occurred in Japan, when the United States’ Army Air Corps dropped one atomic bomb each on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Within a week, the Empire of Japan had surrendered, guns fell silent in the Pacific Theater, and peace broke out all over the whole world forever.  Well, maybe not forever, but the United States did stand astride the world like a colossus.  It was a large, resource-rich, industrialized nation, and it had seen remarkably little destruction on its home soil.  While cities in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and China had seen millions of civilians killed and much infrastructure demolished by bombs, the only significant attack was on the unindustrialized American island of Oahu, in Hawaii, where a good portion of its Pacific Fleet had been stationed when the Japanese attacked it in 1941.  But now, besides enjoying a healthy industrial base and being free o...