Thursday, August 6, 2015

Japan remembers but the world seems to forget

Hiroshima has marked the 70th anniversary of the moment the city was flattened by an atomic bomb with prayers, a moment’s silence and vows to redouble efforts to halt nuclear proliferation.

On a sweltering day in the Japanese city, tens of thousands of people lowered their heads and stood in silence at 8.15am, the time the bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945, killing 80,000 people instantly and another 60,000 in the months that followed.

Doves were released into the morning sky and a Buddhist temple bell tolled as people across Japan marked the anniversary of the first nuclear attack in history.

On Sunday, a similar event will be held to remember the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki. More than 70,000 people died.

Eric Schlosser's 'Command and Control' tells a frightening story of how insecure nuclear arsenal is around the world, in all seven countries that have nuclear weapons. And that includes some terrible security breaches in the US.

Schlosser argues that we have become far too blasé about nuclear weapons and points out that what was dropped on the Japanese cities in 1945 was a tiny inefficient bomb compared to what is in storage today.

2 comments:

Andreas said...

Unfortunatelly are tactical nukes very common on the modern battle fields for instance in Yemen, Syria or Urkaine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ6c6DO_T5Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz5Psm2RC74

Besides that nearly every bigger missle head uses depleted uranium which turns into nuclear dust when it hits the target. A good documentary about all this is 'Quietly into desaster': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIEzTKO03do

Back to Japan:
Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York & Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was “looking for peace”. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-worst-terror-attacks-in-history/785

Michael Commane said...

RTE showed a documentary last night on the Japan bombing and it was pointed out that the US knew the Japanese were about to surrender.

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