Eighty-one years ago today, the United States dropped a plutonium atomic bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. Exploding at 11:02 a.m. at a height of about 500 meters, the blast killed an estimated 40,000 to 75,000 people instantly, with the total death toll reaching roughly 74,000 by the end of the year.
Today is as logical a choice, as any day this month to mark another anniversary: when Ray Bradbury first offered this short story in 1950: "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains."
Then it was fiction.
Now, we have global warming, famine and disease across many of the Third World countries; hatred of others unlike ourselves all across the globe, warfare and destruction from the Strait of Hormuz to the Crimea, and greed and cupidity fueling ignorant arrogance everywhere in the land of my birth.
We're on the path of perdition, paved with perfidy, and don't seem to know or care.
-bill kenny
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