The Fall of Rome

Today is traditionally noted as the date Alaric, a Visigoth leader, entered and sacked Rome in 410 AD.  It was the first time since the Celtic sack of Rome of 390 BC that the city had been taken by force, a period of 800 years.

Alaric had served as a Roman officer and was on a quest to punish the Roman government for failing to grant him a senior military command in the Roman army.  As it was, by that time in Roman history large numbers of so-called barbarians - Goths and others - were serving in Roman armies, especially in the east.

Alaric withdrew after 3 days of plundering and the Romans closed the gates, then reinforced the 150 year old Aurelian walls.  There would be several more incursions by marauders as the empire in the West weakened, even while the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople was being fortified by Theodosius.  That wall withstood assaults for a thousand years, until the Turks built a giant cannon that battered a breach in the wall and the city fell.

When barbarian armies entered Rome in 476 CE the western empire finally "fell" once and for all.  Upon visiting the plundered former greatest of capitals, the poet Rutillius left these words:

Thou hast made of alien realms one fatherland,

The lawless found their gain beneath thy sway.

Sharing thy laws with them thou hast subdued,

Thou hast made a City of the once-wide world.

Fat Man

On August 9 1945 the second atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.  Even though the bomb was off target by a couple of miles, most of the city was destroyed in a flash of nuclear explosion.

Whether this act was necessary is still debated.  It is likely the case that the allies would have had to invade the home islands of Japan, causing perhaps millions of casualties for soldiers and civilians.  Yet, some argue that a demonstration over water would have driven the point home and motivated the emperor to sue for peace.  We will never know.

The war was notable for bombing of civilians, in Japan and Europe.  London was bombed by German planes, and German cities were reduced to rubble.  Dresden's bombing and the firebombing of Hamburg are the hardest to rationalize.  In a time of total war, civilized people committed horrors that our fathers witnessed.

As we consider nuclear weapons issues today, let's make sure that people realize the grave consequences for our planet if even a brief exchange between nations occurs.

Nuclear powers - US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India, North Korea, and probably Israel.