'Barbenheimer' highlights U.S. ignorance of nuclear reality
'Barbenheimer' highlights U.S. ignorance of nuclear reality
The “Barbenheimer” craze shows the U.S. education system needs work and Americans need lessons on nuclear weapons.
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Almost certain aftermath photos are included in textbooks when I was in school. As well these images are found on the internet.
I know these things aren’t mutually exclusive but Japan should focus more on apologizing for its own atrocities in WWII that led to the necessity of the bombs. The Rape of Nanjing had as many innocent deaths as the 2 nuclear bombs combined.
(Also also it seems to get overlooked frequently, but the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths then the atomic bombs caused.)
the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths
This is an underappreciated fact. I grew up in U.S. public schools learning in elementary school about the massive scale of destruction that atomic bombs did bring (and, well, the Cold War was still going at the time). We knew the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki very early on. But it wasn't until I was in college that I learned about the destructive scale of firebombing Japanese cities (and frankly, I learned it from a film class discussing Grave of the Fireflies, not from a history class).
And maybe I'm jaded because I'm a combat veteran who has seen firsthand the toll that an extended period of conventional warfare and insurgency brings on urban areas with millions of residents, but I don't think of nuclear war as really that big a departure from the shittiness of things that are actually within more recent memory. Or maybe that's a misconception I hold that should be corrected, and these anti-nuclear people are right to express concern about cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, I don't know.