Legacy of the Little Boy

A fair amount of time had elapsed from 8:15am August 6 1945 to a cold, late December afternoon in 2009 when a 40 year old, dredlocked, American former Marine got off a trolley in Hiroshima clad in an old field jacket. Armed with a digital camera, his mission was to capture a piece of history.
When one stands before the "peace dome" one can't help but think that mere yards away the bomb produced by the Manhattan project which was jokingly named "little boy" was dropped by the Enola Gay and detonated 600 meters above and changed not only the city of Hiroshima, but the entire world.
Co-pilot Captain Robert A. Lewis wrote in the Enola Gay's log after seeing the mushroom cloud "My God...what have we done."

The Peace Dome was one of the handful of buildings which survived when Hiroshima and the bulk of her inhabitants evaporated on that hot August morning. As a hard wind whipped your humble narrator's locks from the back of his head to his face he stood there attempting to take a photo of the building around which the present day city of Hiroshima seemed to have been rebuilt.

I stood there as my cold fingers fumbled with the buttons on my camera attempting to photograph a building which had been seen by the entire world in the 69 years since the bombing. Tears streamed down my face as I took photo after photo and thought of the men, women and children who never knew the bomb was coming and died instantly.
I thought about those who survived only to die shortly afterwards and those who survived and suffered from radiation related illnesses for the remainder of their lives.
As I ventured through the park and to the peace museum itself I saw a disclaimer from the Japanese government which said essentially that the purpose of the museum was not to place blame on the United States and how Japan's Emperial policies and it's attack on the United States meant that they could not claim to be innocent victims. The purpose of the musem was simply to show the world the consequences of war and how the losers always out number the winners.
I thought of the American, British & Australian soldiers, sailors and Marines who died at places like Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Battan and Wake Island. I thought of the Chinese butchered at Nanking, the Korean & Chinese "Comfort women" forced into prostitution to service the Japanese military and the countless Japanese civilians who died in American bombings.
Wars are started by old men, fought by young ones, but suffered by entire populations. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that a million American servicemen would have lost their lives in an attempt to invade Japan and no one is quite sure how many Japanese civilians and military would have been lost.

The bomb had been called a "nessasary evil" but as one stands in the shadow of the peace dome, one can't help but wonder HAVE we learned anything from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The bombs in the world's nuclear arsenals destroy 10,000 times more "efficiently" than little boy and fat man did. We are just as likely now to engage in armed conflict as we EVER were and truthfully there are many who can't see beyond nationalistic furor which blinds them from seeing the citizens of a country which his own has declared "the enemy" as human.

At the end of the day as I stared out the window of an okonomiyaki restaurant on the other side of a narrow street from the peace dome, all of this ran through my tired mind. How many "peace domes" will the world know 69 years hence?