[Oatka]

Tibbets: Then he laid out what was going on and it was up to me now to put together an organization and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific - Tokyo.
Terkel: Interesting that they would have dropped it on Europe as well. We didn't know that.
Tibbets: My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem - you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other.

In the early '80s I was taking a Jr. College class in Oceanside, CA that had a Paki instructor. Kinda humorous guy and I got to like him - until he said that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was racist.

Now this was Marine Corps country (Camp Pendleton) and when he said that, I braced for a half dozen retired Marines in the class to jump all over him. Instead, to a man, they sheepishly hung their heads - that's how strong the Racism! epithet was then.

The continuing silence pist me off and I got up and told the Paki that I had just seen a show (History Channel then?) where Tibbets was saying what an administrative nightmare it was to plan for bombing both Japan and Germany. I also mentioned to him that my grandmother on my dad's side, along with tens of thousands of other Germans were incinerated in the Hamburg raid, so racism had no part in the atom bombing. In modern war there are no civilians and everybody gets the wrong end of the stick.

[Williams]

I had a radical Iranian foreign policy professor of all things, who said we dropped the bomb on Japan because we wanted to use it on “yellow people” and not white Europeans.

I knew and told him we built the bomb in a race with Germany to develop it before they could, and use it against them, but the war in Europe ended before the bomb was ready. He scoffed at that.

[Williams]

I had a radical Iranian foreign policy professor of all things, who said we dropped the bomb on Japan because we wanted to use it on “yellow people” and not white Europeans.

I knew and told him we built the bomb in a race with Germany to develop it before they could, and use it against them, but the war in Europe ended before the bomb was ready. He scoffed at that.