By Daniel Ellsberg

“It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb was. It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about, the previous fall.

I thought: “We got it first. And we used it. On a city.”

I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn’t make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong.”

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Robert Scheer wrote an article reflecting on terrorism in Iraq and over Japan in August, 1945 in 2007; it is reprinted in TruthDig this August — and calls our attention to HBO’s White Light Black Rain, using previously secret military footage of the destruction of Hiroshima. The film is available at NetFlix.

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