| In anger? Rather as a matter of cold calculation, you sad inheritor of a once-serious profession. |
In the course of discussing the event afterward, though, Williams threw some shade in the direction of the U.S. military and then-President Harry Truman by complaining that "we’re the only nation to have used them in anger" against the horrifying Axis Powers member.
Leading up to that, Mitchell pointed out that the current President has shown an interest in nuclear disarmament since he took office but lamented has made little progress since the most recent conference in D.C. "because Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...-- the other great nuclear power and the other curb on proliferation after the Cold War was the Soviet Union wasn’t present, was boycotting because of other tensions, tensions over Ukraine."
NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss compared the President’s Hiroshima speech to that of "John Kennedy at the American University -- so close to where we are now in 1963 and that was given with the same motive which was that was a time when talks about a test-ban treaty had been installed."
Asked by Mitchell to comment on the push by then-Senators Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) to curb the use of nuclear material, Williams initially praised them, but then took a swipe at the entire reason that Truman had the bombs dropped (which was to end the war):
It is and that is still the threat that people worry about that this material will fall into the wrong hands. If people have found the U.S. to be preachy in the years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the use of weapons, it’s because we’re the only nation to have used them in anger. Sometimes, I am amazed that the world has been without these weapons all the years since, but it is a point of, a great pride by the people who have seen to it.
Of course, Williams has a past on this issue (as he does on most things -- including lying) going back to 2005 when, in addition to the taped piece, he pressed Enola Gay pilot Dutch Van Kirk on whether or not he has "remorse for what happened" and how he "deal[s] with" the bomb’s dropping psychologically.