The world is pausing this week to look back on a pair of events that occurred 70 years ago.

On this date in 1945, a B-29 U.S. Army Air Corps bomber took off from Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean, flew to Hiroshima, Japan, and dropped an atomic bomb on the city.

Roughly 70,000 lives vanished in an instant.

Three days later, another B-29 took off en route to Nagasaki. That bomb did even more damage.

It was near the end of World War II. On Aug. 14, 1945, Japan surrendered. The war was over.

The nuclear age had been brought to bear in the most horrible fashion imaginable.

I remain committed to the notion that President Harry Truman made the correct call by dropping the bombs. Declining to do so would have resulted in the invasion of Japan by U.S. and allied forces, likely killing many more thousands of lives than were lost in those two blasts.

So, the president had to kill people to save people. It’s a terrible irony, to be sure.

But this look back also brings to mind something that one of the creators of this terrible weapon once said.

It comes from Albert Einstein, who noted: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

May we never forget.