lighting the skies

Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1 One of my common topics is the history of nuclear weapons. The "atom bomb" is a rich vein of history because its impact has been as much cultural as technical. Dramatic depictions like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer have recently enforced, perhaps even revived, the perception of nuclear weapons as an innovation that forever changed warfare. More quietly, historians and strategists tend to wonder if that is still true today, or if it was ever as true as was supposed—the conventional firebombing of Tokyo probably claimed as many victims as the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Besides, it's not unusual to hear people overstate the significance of nuclear weapons to WWII in a way that is obvious…