Mushroom Cloud

If you were born on Aug. 6, 1945 (and, in fact, former major league baseball pitcher Andy Messersmith, who played a pivotal role in the 1975 ruling that nullified baseball’s reserve clause, was born on that day), you are 63 years old today.

The history books tell us the nuclear age also was born on that day.

Actually, I guess the nuclear age was born technically three weeks earlier, on July 16, when the first successful test was conducted in New Mexico.

That first test was called the ”Trinity” test — and it was so awe-inspiring that Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, was reminded of a line from the ”Bhagavad-Gita” — ”'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — as he observed the rolling, boiling cloud that accompanied the explosion.

But August 6 was the day the first atomic bomb was detonated on a target — Hiroshima, Japan. And, therefore, that is the date that lives in history.

Only a handful of people witnessed the ”Trinity” test. The whole world saw what happened to Hiroshima.

Dubbed ”Little Boy,” the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima killed as many as 140,000 people. The total number of dead, both from the initial explosion and the radioactive contamination that came after, has been in dispute in the decades that followed.

But there’s no debate that massive death and destruction was caused by the bomb and the radioactive fallout.

Hiroshima was leveled — literally — as was Nagasaki, when it was bombed three days later.

Many people believe the phrase ”mushroom cloud” came into being that August day.

Certainly, that phrase is strongly associated with a nuclear blast, but the fact is that any large explosion can cause a mushroom cloud — whether it’s a volcano or the kind of bombings that occurred during the world wars of the 20th century before the first detonation of a nuclear bomb.

As I say, that’s what most people think of when the phrase ”mushroom cloud” is mentioned.

They don’t think about volcanoes.

They think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Which is precisely the kind of reaction Condoleezza Rice was counting on when, as national security advisor, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, in an interview a few months before the invasion of Iraq, that ”[t]he problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

That comment, along with former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations, prodded a nation, still nervous from the 2001 terrorist attacks, into accepting the alleged necessity to invade Iraq — which went against the United States’ long-standing policy of going to war only after being provoked.

Isn’t it astonishing that America was so eager to take Rice’s word about the ”mushroom cloud” when she herself acknowledged that she paid little, if any, attention to reports of Osama bin Laden’s determination to attack the United States about a month before the September 11 attacks?

The reports on bin Laden were tragically accurate. And bin Laden has remained free as a bird — probably plotting his next attack on America.

Meanwhile, five years after the invasion of Iraq, we still have no evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam is dead, as are a few thousand Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

America continues to spend billions of dollars every month — on a war that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks and which, in any event, would be paid for by the oil profits that would be coming our way, according to Vice President Dick Cheney.

We didn’t get those oil profits Cheney promised us. Instead, we’re paying a lot more for gas, with much of that money lining the pockets of wealthy oil producers in the Middle East.

And we didn’t even need a mushroom cloud to get hopelessly mired in a never-ending conflict.

It's always a possibility, of course, that a terrorist group will gain access to nuclear weapons.

But, as September 11 demonstrated, they're a creative bunch. They didn't need nuclear weapons to bring death and destruction to American soil.