Whether that is true or not isn't the point. O'Reilly is trying to say that we better have some clear evidence that Saddam Hussein is building weapons of mass destruction before we start a war with Iraq. I agree, but I'm not too happy with the analogy and I don't put it past Washington to fabricate proof.

Let's look at a better analogy.

After Pearl Harbor, all communication between the scientific communities of Germany, Italy, and Japan, was cut off. No longer could American scientists communicate with their colleagues in these countries.

In no time at all, we were told that the U.S. was in a race with Germany to develop "the bomb."

The reason for this race was due to one man and one man only. Werner Heisenberg, the man considered to be the top scientist in nuclear research and development at the time was part of Hitler's team and a loyal German.

At a very young age, Heisenberg had developed the Principle of Discontinuity also known as the Law of Uncertainty that shook the world of physics. While applicable to many forms of molar behavior, this law stated that on a molecular level the very act of observing nuclear particles caused them to behave in a manner other than normal. The observer introduced a bias. Therefore, direct observation of protons and neutrons in their natural state was impossible and science would have to proceed by inference. In other words, if you shine a light on a rat he's going to behave differently than he would in the dark.

Fortunately, America had Enrico Fermi who successfully split the atom at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, a football field that had not been used since Robert Hutchins became Chancellor of the once great football school. And then we had the Manhattan Project that actually developed and tested the first atomic bomb by 1945 and obviously ahead of the Germans. We won the race.

Germany surrendered in March of 1945, well ahead of Japan that didn't surrender until September.

Once lines of communication were reopened between German and American scientists, particularly those in the Manhattan Project, the question put to Heisenberg was "how close were you?"

The answer was that Germany wasn't close at all. Heisenberg had told Hitler that it couldn't be done.

Recognizing the ploy, many in the Manhattan Project then did a complete about face and began pleading with Truman not to use the bomb.

But it was too late. By this time, the bomb was in the control of the military. And the military wanted to know the effects of this new weapon dropped on a city, its infrastructure, and its citizens.

Instead of bringing Japan to its knees by dropping the bomb down the throat of Mount Fuji, in the ocean, or on the Teahouse of the August Moon on the island of Okinawa that we now possessed just off Japan, we set out to drop it on the zero-zero corner of some major city.

On August 6, 1945, we dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and three days later, before the Japanese could even convene their people to surrender, we dropped another through cloud cover on Nagasaki. If the Manhattan Project had put together more of these first weapons of mass destruction, we would have dropped them too.

While several German scientists like Werner Von Braun, the rocket expert, came to the United States, Werner Heisenberg did not. He said that he loved his country too much to leave and took over the Chair of Physics at the University of Munich well inside the Russian occupational sector.

Within two years, Russia had nuclear capability.

And the main question still remains; did the communist country with half our population spread over a vast territory take on the task of keeping the United States in check?

If you can consider the above without the hate propaganda that you've been taught, then and only then might you be honestly capable of thinking about the current all out effort to invade Iraq under the new "first strike" policy.

You will not read this in American history books.