Fifty-six years ago yesterday, at 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the first ever atomic weapon used in war on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Only seconds after the bomb found it’s mark – more power than 20,000 tons of TNT was released – instantly killing 71,379 people and injuring 68,023 others – 19,691 of them seriously.

The bombing of Hiroshima caused the most instantaneous deaths in human history and changed the course of war forever – and until my friend Montel reminded me of the anniversary of the tragedy – I did not know that yesterday marked the infamous anniversary – and neither did anyone else that I know.

It’s hard to believe, but on that day fifty-six years ago – a single bomb no bigger then the chair I sit in destroyed almost seventy percent of the city of Hiroshima and killed almost half of it’s population. Even to this day, the citizens of Hiroshima are still suffering from a bomb dropped so long before I was born – that my mother was still a child. But what I think is even harder to believe is that no newspaper did stories remembering it, no television specials documented it – and the world at large seems to have forgotten about it.

How can the world forget one of the most horrifying moments in world history? How can no one remember that infamous picture of the naked girl running down the street crying as the flames burned all around her? And more importantly – how can we still build and store nuclear missiles with the intent to use them if we know what they are capable of?

From the very beginning of the nuclear age – we were doomed. We were so impressed as a nation that we were able to make something, “fall down and go boom” louder and larger then anything else ever invented that we saw it as our saving grace – rather then our biggest mistake. When then President Truman, after giving the go ahead to commit the most brutal and swift act of war in history said the last line of his speech to the United States – I knew instantly after I read it that our lust for nuclear weapons had just begun:

“I shall give further consideration and make further recommendations to the Congress as to how atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence towards the maintenance of world peace.”

“World peace”? How can something that can end tens of thousands of lives be considered an instrument of peace? Do you know that over 67,500 nuclear weapons have been built since 1951 and the United States has most of them? Did you also know that more land in America is occupied by U.S. nuclear weapons bases and facilities then the total land area of the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and New Jersey? And that the U.S. has detonated 1,125 nuclear devices in America – 911 of them in Nevada? Worse then that – do you know that eleven U.S. nuclear bombs were lost in accidents – and never recovered?

How can we build these weapons of mass destruction to use against our “enemies” at a cost of millions, test them on our own land – never use them against our enemies – but spend millions of dollars each year to make more? If we know for a fact that even a small scale nuclear war would destroy the Earth ten times over – why would we build more if we know that none of us would be left alive to use them?

I think nuclear weapons are a schoolboy attempt at being the one with the biggest toy at our cost. Even with our transparent START II reductions that begin in 2003 and are a follow-up to the post Cold War START program that led to the disarmament and destruction of nuclear missiles – the Government still plans – according to the United States Department of Defense; Natural Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons Databook Project – to hold 2,500 additional warheads to "hedge" against future “threats”. So what are we really disarming? And worse – if we have the ability to portray a substantial disarmament and still hold on to 2,500 active warheads – then how many do we actually have?

I think that the nuclear weapon proves the theory that some inventions are not good ones – and not worth inventing. I just hope that the horror of what happened fifty-six years ago is more entrenched in people’s memory then it was yesterday – especially those in this world that hold the launch codes.