There she is, Enola Gay, on public display in the Udvar-Hazy Center. For those of you that may not know, she carried the first atomic bomb Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in August, 1945.

I got goosebumbs all over my body standing in front of here and thinking about where in time this machine had been. One second, 78.000 people dead, children, women, man, mainly civilians. I had never been so close to mass destruction before. The only other place I had been that made me feel similar was Dachau, were 42.000 people died over a 12 years period. Dachau felt really evil. Elona Gay felt different, not from this planet.

I wondered why the plane was standing at random between other planes. No extensive display or historic context. What a lost opportunity.

Then I understood, people in the US must still struggle till this day with this part of history.

How would you have decided when you would have been president at the time? With all this responsibility for world peace and many lives on your shoulders, either way you decide. 78.000 people dead and ending a terrible WW2? Or sending many US soldiers in a terrifying death fighting Japan? We may all decide different. How a president must have felt very lonely taking it and accepting its burden.

The lost opportunity is that we do not think through this decision ourselves because the plane just stands there without context.

Do we have a different perspective today about lost civilian life in war? Like in Israel or in Gaza, or by Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine, than 85 years ago, when Germans bombarded entire Rotterdam, or when British forces bombarded Caen, aiming to hit German soldiers, but killing thousands of French civilians?

I have read that earlier attempts to have more extensive displays of the plane ended in fights. I don't know what the script at the time was. It is true, you need a truly neutral and fact based display, not a moral story of what is good or bad. Every person looking at the display should decide for himself how he feels about it.

Enola Gay: the people that took decisions and executed orders deserve a proper display. So do the people that died. All of them had to carry a lot of load no matter how you see it. They should not be shuffled away, neither side should be forgotten.

Let's not close our eyes for the past as it is often our future.

Would one make a similar decision today?