"It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a downtown street corner, looking at the front page of the Detroit News in a news rack. A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was.” It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at fourteen, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn’t make me think that my first reaction on August 6 was wrong. I felt uneasy in the days ahead, about the triumphal tone in Harry Truman’s voice on the radio—flat and Midwestern as always, but unusually celebratory—as he exulted over our success in the race for the bomb and its effectiveness over Japan. This suggested, for me, that our leaders didn’t have the full picture, didn’t grasp the significance of the precedent they had set and the sinister implications for the future. Unlikely thoughts for a fourteen-year-old American boy to have had the week the war ended? Yes, if he hadn’t been in Mr. Patterson’s social studies class the previous fall."