bombs were dropped. I didn't really learn about them for a number of years, of course. I was too young. Every year, around this time, the topic emerges again, and the arguments over whether we should or should not have used nuclear weapons in WWII are made once again.

As always, I can see both sides of the argument clearly. Yet, the actual correct answer is always elusive. So, I no longer participate in the argument. I'm a nuclear baby, in a way. The legacies of FDR, who authorized the development of nuclear weapons, and of Truman, who made the final decision use them hinge, in part, on the answer to the question.

As with everything, either answer is both correct and incorrect. We remain the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in wartime. We participated in the long cold war that saw the creation of a doomsday's worth of them. It's all a part of our history, some 70 years past and gone. The war ended. The cold war began.

I'll be turning 70 next week. I'm a nuclear baby. I was born in a small town in Arizona to a 21-year-old woman. At the time, my father, still just 20, was still flying B-17s out of Italy and Northern Africa, by then just ferrying people from place to place, rather than flying bombing missions in a war that had already ended. Both of them turn 91 this year. Both are still with us. We long ago stopped talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I no longer discuss it, either. It's history that happened only days after I was born. Later, I was in that group that frequently dived under school desks in "A-bomb" drills. My childhood was one where I had nightmares of nuclear explosions over nearby Los Angeles. I remember the meltdown of the first nuclear electrical reactor in commercial use when I was in Junior High School, just 20 miles from my California home town.

History is what it is. I hope we have learned from it. That's the best I can do.

... built to produce plutonium on a massive scale, many tons of it in anticipation of full scale nuclear war in Europe, first against Nazi Germany, then later against the Soviet Union.

The last reactor was shut down in 1987.

Nagasaki was horrible in every way, a ghastly deliberate study of what nuclear bombs do to people and a living city, but maybe a greater horror is that human beings could look at that, the political leaders of this world, and not immediately say to themselves, "What the hell are we doing here???" and put an immediate end to it.

We can say the same of fossil fuels too. They will destroy this civilization just as certainly as a nuclear world war would.

Just as individual humans can't quit destructive habits like smoking, nations can't quit destructive habits like nuclear weapons manufacture and fossil fuel use.