A record of every bomb the United States military has dropped is now in a database and maintained by its creator, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson. THOR, Theater History of Operations Reports, was previewed last month at the Air Force Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala, after .

A quote by Robertson in a Boston Globe article about THOR asks: “What if you had the detailed data on when and where every bomb was dropped from an airplane in combat? What would you know?”

What would we know? The truth. Robertson spent six years extracting it from archives and databases. Now it will get put to good use by the military, governments, and other organizations. But could the public handle the truth?

Here is a more pertinent question: If the archival materials Robertson used to build the database are available to the public, shouldn’t the database itself allow public access?

I scoured the Internet for a URL, only to conclude that it has not released to the public. For the sake of detonating an angry backlash tsunami, I can see why. A few mouse clicks and keystrokes into the database would “shock and awe” me into a state of disturbia similar to the one I have for our early settlers’ role in the plight of the prairie buffalo.

For researchers interested in this topic and others, however, our “browse topics” list on the ArchiveGrid homepage is a good place to start. “War and military” and “Activism” both retrieve relevant findings aids to read.