Cloud logo and history

I am writing in response to the May 14 article, “Welcome to Nuketown.” Tim Praino, Richland High School’s principle, boasts that he was a part of the class of 1988 that voted 95 percent to 5 percent, to keep the school’s logo of a mushroom cloud as the school’s symbol. This sounds like a vote that would come from a company town, which indeed Richland is. Historical interpretations of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck with atomic bombs has over the years shifted.

The simple binary argument, had the atomic bombs not been unleashed on Japan, the United States military would have had to invade Japan at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, has been debunked.

By August 1945, General Curtis LeMay’s B-29 bombers were fire-bombing Japanese cities at will. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two of the few cities that had not already been incinerated. The atom bombs that were dropped on these two cities were terror weapons designed to show the Soviet Union the United State’s atomic capability, not to defeat an already crippled Japan. I would hope that a school principal’s interpretation of events would evolve along with the historical evidence.

Michael Edwards

Spokane