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Visiting Hiroshima Changed My Mind. It Should Change Obama’s Too.
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Visiting Hiroshima Changed My Mind. It Should Change Obama’s Too.

As President Barack Obama prepares to visit Hiroshima, author Lawrence J. Korb reflects on his own visit to Hiroshima and urges the president to rethink his administration's nuclear modernization plan.

As President Obama prepares to become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, the site of the world’s first nuclear attack, I have begun to reflect on my own experience with these appropriately labeled Weapons of Mass Destruction.

When I was a naval flight officer on active duty in the 1960s, assigned to a patrol squadron, our crew practiced loading a dummy nuclear weapon on our aircraft several times a year so that we would know what to do if we ever had to load a real one. However, I could never find out under what circumstances we would load a real one, what would be our target or even where the nuclear weapons were.

The above excerpt was originally published in The National Interest. Click here to view the full article.

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Authors

Lawrence J. Korb

Former Senior Fellow