Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday at the start of our Memorial Day weekend, President Obama was in Hiroshima, and laid a wreath at a memorial.  A touching moment was when a survivor of Hiroshima stepped forward and hugged the President.  Incredibly strong symbolism and a major plus for our foreign relations. 

If you are interested in the story of the development of the atomic bomb, I would recommend, American Prometheus:  The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.  It won the Pulitzer Prize winner in 2005 and covers well Oppenehimer’s life, his work at Los Alamos where the bomb was developed, his emotional struggles with dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the brutal federal investigation of his Communist sympathies.

Tony