Nicholas Goldberg: The nuclear threat the US unleashed on the world 75 years ago is still terrifying

The bombs dropped by the United States on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago, in the final days of World War II, incinerated some 200,000 people, most of them civilians.

And they did much more than that. They also transformed the nature of war, raising the specter of Armageddon and ushering in the bizarre and terrifying nuclear age that defined the Cold War over five decades.

After two back-to-back global wars, the world was used to death and destruction, but the devastation unleashed by the atom bomb in those early days