In the first week of August every year the Star Tribune publishes letters to the editor about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Usually those letters, including the three that appeared on Tuesday, claim that the nuclear assault on Japan ended the war in the Pacific. This rewrite of history asserts that the destruction of those cities rendered the invasion of the Japanese homeland unnecessary thus sparing the lives of hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese soldiers and civilians. Even if that was the logic driving the choice to use nuclear weapons, killing at least 200,000 noncombatants constitutes a war crime as it was an indiscriminate attack on civilians. But those cities were not bombed to bring an end to the war. Both General Eisenhower and Admiral Halsey said that the war would have ended soon without an invasion of the homeland and without deploying nuclear weapons. During the summer of 1945, Japan had been seeking a face-saving way to end the war. The air war against the people, housing resources, and industrial capacity with incendiary weapons had greatly reduced the ability of Japan to continue the war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not bombed to hasten the end of the war. They were bombed to send a message to Russia. President Truman was saying, "Behold, Russia, the power of the USA to destroy its enemies." The nuclear attacks on two days in August of 1945 consumed as many as a quarter million Japanese people in an attempt to influence the strategic planning in Moscow. Little value is served assessing blame, but getting the facts straight and understanding our own history is critical to the health and integrity of American culture. In the letters to the editor about the use of nuclear weapons and the effort by the conservative media to reframe the insurrection on January 6 as the actions of patriots rather than violent criminals, we continue to tell each other stories to conceal the truth of who we are and how we make decisions. We reduce our ability to solve real problems by doing so. Denial of climate change and the reality of the pandemic are other examples of how choosing to feel good about ourselves degrades our ability to survive. Truth matters.