Seventy years ago, on August 6, 1945, the single most destructive weapon ever unleashed upon human beings and the environment – the atomic bomb – was dropped by an American B-29 bomber on theJapanese city of Hiroshima, killing approximately 80,000 people.
Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people.
"Blessing" the crews and its two missions, was the Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group – the atomic bomb group – Father George Zabelka.
In a Sojourners Magazine interview, the late Fr. Zabelka explained, "If a soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child's head, I would have told him absolutely not. That would be mortally sinful."
But in 1945 on Tinian Island in the South Pacific, where the atomic bomb group was based, planes took off around the clock, said Zabelka. "Many of these planes went to Japan with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands of children and civilians – and I said nothing. …