Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in an article posted in Consortium News on Aug. 2, writes of “The Executioners’ Lament.” He notes that while much attention has been paid to the regrets of the nuclear scientists who designed nuclear weapons, in particular Robert Oppenheimer in the US and Andrei Sakharov in the then-Soviet Union, less has been paid to those who executed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids and the generations trained since then in all nuclear power nations to execute the orders once the nuclear trigger has been pulled.
“The Russians who would execute the orders to launch nuclear weapons against the West would be operating with the same moral clarity as had Paul Tibbets and Charles Sweeney [the pilots of the B-29 bombers used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks -ed.] some 88 years ago [sic; 78 years ago—ed.]. The executioners’ lament holds that they will be saddened by their decision but convinced that they had no other choice,” Ritter writes. “Proving them wrong will be impossible, because unlike the war with Japan, where the survivors were given the luxury of reflection and accountability, there will be no survivors in any future nuclear conflict.”
