Hiroshima is a city, not a shrine and certainly not a mausoleum. People live there, many of whom were deliberately denied the full history of WWII by a culture that still struggles between deserved shame for the war and deserved pride in the phoenix-like rise of Japan afterward. There has been an effort of late to remediate this convenient amnesia. The first time I visited the Peace Museum I was infuriated at the degree to which the war consisted of two bombs and some vague goings-on leading up to it. The last time I visited it, things had changed somewhat.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did serve to inoculate the world against the incredible destructiveness of nuclear war. Like all inoculations, it fades with time, and it is disturbing to consider what it might take to remind the world now that these weapons are very serious business indeed. That only sounds trite to those who remember. To those who are capable of dismissing the Holocaust as a historical non-event, surely Hiroshima and Nagasaki must make little impression.
The problem with that lies not only in the principals. The U.S. and the Soviet Union did, after all, manage to conduct a world war without using these weapons. The damage has been done in Europe, where the amnesia concerning two destroyed cities half a world away has been hastened by the memories of the damage to their own. For this reason, perhaps, there is less of an impetus to stopping nuclear proliferation in Iran than there ought to be. It will not be a fatal error to either the U.S. or the remnants of the U.S.S.R., who have retained a retaliation capability. It might be for those who have none. And that is a lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that no one seems to wish to talk about.
You're right. I'm convinced that if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki we would have gone toe to toe with the Russkies using nukes in the '50s or '60s.