Richland High School in Richland, Washington uses a nuclear bomb explosion, or a "mushroom cloud," as a school mascot since 1945 to celebrate the end of World War II in Japan via the dropping of nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing tens of thousands of civilians.  The city of Richland is located a few miles south of the Hanford Nuclear Site, which helped make plutonium for one of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.  Use of the mushroom cloud painted on a bomb as a mascot has been the subject of intermittent controversy. In 1988, amidst visits by Tom Brokaw (NBC Nightly News) and Japanese delegates, a vote was taken by the students making the Bomb (with the R-MushroomCloud logo) the official mascot of Richland High School.  This needs to change, although dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan to end the war there is thought of by most to be the best solution to ending the war with Japan, it was still not a good solution because of it's immediate human, environmental, and physical devastation.  A symbol representing that kind of destruction is not a proper mascot for a public high school; also, it is insensitive and demaning towards the civilians that died in Japan from the nuclear bombs that were dropped.