I was disappointed with the column that ran on Aug. 6, the 60th anniversary of the attack on Hiroshima (“The devastation didn’t begin with A-bombs”).

I have been there and walked through the peace museum and stood at the sculpture midway down the mall where a flame burns and an inscription in Japanese and English states that the flame will only be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon has been destroyed. At the other end of the mall in downtown Hiroshima is the atomic dome building, which was at the epicenter of the bomb blast.

We looked up into the sun that day with a very uncomfortable feeling as we tried to visualize the explosion that was set off about 800 meters off the ground for maximum destruction. Six rivers the size of the Spokane River run through Hiroshima, and the bomb sucked them into the stratosphere from which they descended as the “black rain” on a cloudless day.

Columnist Max Boot was highly inaccurate in his death count. While the statistics are somewhat controversial, there is general agreement that the blast alone killed around 80,000 people. The subsequent deaths from radiation, including the contamination from the black rain, run to more than 70,000 by most calculations. The official figures from Hiroshima of all related deaths put the number at 240,000 and counting still. Boot’s number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deaths at “more than 100,000” is more than misleading.

He would also like us to believe that there is little difference between the results of conventional bombing and atomic bombing. The insidious death by radiation should render that analogy useless.

I am particularly troubled by Boot’s ending statement that one shouldn’t re-examine historical events even if new information comes to light. What are his historical credentials?

Some would say that we should move on to more immediate events that need our attention rather than dwell in the past. I say they should go to Hiroshima, look up in the sky at the epicenter and read about the current desire for nuclear weapons in the world today, on all fronts. The Japanese call out to the world to think of Sidako.

There is a children’s memorial near the peace museum with a statue of Sidako. She was a survivor of the bomb and was a gifted runner and athlete. She contracted leukemia, and Japanese legend has it that if you become seriously ill you will survive if you fold a thousand cranes. Though her efforts were chronicled, she was unable to fold a thousand cranes.

So today people from all over the world send cranes to the children’s memorial in Hiroshima, and the ground is always covered with heaps of color.

Mr. Boot should learn to fold some cranes for Sidako.