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.
This article was originally published in The National Interest.