Seventy-five years ago today the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, we dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. The attacks killed over 200,000 innocent men, women, and children.

At the time, I was eight months and twelve days old living in a small trailer with my mom and dad and my sister Alice at Happy Valley (a housing camp across the road from K-25 – the gaseous diffusion plant that produced some of the enriched uranium for the bombs) just west of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. My father was an electrical supervisor of the underground cable at the plant.

Though nuclear weapons have never again been used in warfare, we must not abandoned our efforts to abolish these horrifying weapons of mass destruction.