The Daily Briefing

ENOLA GAY PILOT DIES

Theo DouglasThu. November 01
 

Paul W. Tibbets, Jr. delivered the first atomic bomb

Let’s be honest: you probably didn’t know his name, or if you ever heard it, you probably forgot it–and maybe that’s the way he would have wanted it.

Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., who died at his Columbus, Ohio home earlier today at age 92, was one of the thousands of people across the country who are somehow forever thrust into the media spotlight. And perhaps it never bothered him at all.

“I never lost a night’s sleep over it,” Tibbets is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying about piloting the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in war, on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.

The thinking in Washington at the time–among the very few who knew–was that using nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and, three days later, against Nagasaki, would shorten the war and save thousands of American lives. It did.

But as the New York Times reports, the morality of killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to ensure Japan’s surrender–which occurred Aug. 15, 1945–has never stopped being questioned.

We’ll always ask ourselves about it, as we should.

“I made one great mistake in my life–when I signed a letter to President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made,” the late trailblazing physicist Albert Einstein is quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times.

Many Americans alive today would no doubt agree with that statement.

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