Nuclear arms threat

The recent clash of opinions regarding the action of President Truman in the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is off the mark. The real question is not about the destruction of Japan's cities, but rather, whether the United States should have developed the atomic bomb in the first place.

The documentary film "Countdown to Zero," now showing locally, offers the answer in a brilliant tracking of nuclear proliferation over the past several decades that increasingly threatens the world daily through "mistake, miscalculation or madness." In a series of well-placed interviews, the film recounts repeated pleas of presidents, scientists and international statesmen to support total nuclear disarmament. Yet with each appeal, there is the admission that abandoning nuclear warheads depends largely on a public outcry for American policy that will lead the world in this effort.

Clearly, we must understand that if we do not terminate weapons of destruction, such weapons may indeed terminate us.

Carol Ann Breyer

2 September, 2009: Letter to Herald-Tribune by Carol Ann Breyer,

"Kennedy's Liberal Values Defined Life of Service"