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Article: Slaughter Fits Modern Moral Concept
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- August 6, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1995 Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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In 1895, young Ernest Rutherford was digging potatoes on his
family's New Zealand farm when a cable brought word of his
scholarship to study physics at Cambridge University. Dropping his
spade, he exclaimed, "That's the last potato I'll dig!" Instead, he
and the 11 Nobel laureates he would work with produced the revolution
in physics that smashed the atom, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the war's end was its beginning. It was to Hiroshima that
Japan's fleet returned in triumph from Pearl Harbor. The torpedoes
that devastated Pearl's "battleship row" were made in Nagasaki.
Today, critics of the use, 50 years ago, of the new technology
of killing ask whether it was "necessary." The answer ...