Lessons We Still Haven't Learned From Hiroshima & Nagasaki, 75 Yrs After US Atomic Bombings of Japan
Last edited Thu Aug 6, 2020, 07:23 AM - Edit history (1)
'The Lessons We Still Haven't Learned From Hiroshima and Nagasaki' 75 years after the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan, we remain perched on the precipice of unparalleled catastrophe. *By Helen Caldicott, The Progressive, Common Dreams. Aug. 5, 2020.
My birthday is August 7, sandwiched between the anniversary dates for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively). I was six years old when the first bomb fell. My course in life was predetermined. On September 2, 1945, when the local fire siren suddenly blared, my teacher asked, What is that? and I knew: The war was over.
It had been a really scary time in Melbourne, Australia, as the Japanese had threatened to invade us. Dad dug an air-raid shelter in our back garden, and the windows were blacked out while the citys searchlights scanned the skies at night. Elated, I walked home on that lovely sunny afternoon picking flowers along the way. It would be years later before I learned the awful truth about how the war ended.
What rained down on those two Japanese cities seventy-five years ago was destruction on a scale never seen before or since. People exposed within half a mile of the atomic fireball were seared to piles of smoking char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. The small black bundles stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands. A little boy was reaching up to catch a red dragonfly with his hand against the blue sky when there was a blinding flash and he disappeared. He turned into gas and left his shadow behind on the pavement, a haunting relic later moved to the Hiroshima Museum. A woman was running while holding her baby; she and the baby were turned into a charcoal statue.
In all, about 120,000 people were killed immediately by the two bombs, and tens of thousands more died later due to radiation exposure. In 1957, when I was eighteen, I read a book by Nevil Shute, an English novelist who ended up in Australia. On the Beach described how the city of Melbourne awaited a deadly cloud of radiation from a nuclear war that was triggered by an accident in the northern hemisphere, killing everything...
Read More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/lessons-we-still-havent-learned-hiroshima-and-nagasaki
- Seventy-five years ago, newly in full awareness of its newfound ability to destroy the human race, what did the world do next? It starting mass producing these nuclear weapons of mass destruction. (Photo: Getty)
Dr. Helen Caldicott is president of the Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear-Free Planet and the author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
- Einstein wrote: The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Robert Oppenheimer, watching the worlds first nuclear explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, muttered to himself, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. -
- Nuclear Attack On Germany Would Kill Half A Million People: Greenpeace Study, DW, Aug. 5, 2020
https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-attack-on-germany-would-kill-half-a-million-people-greenpeace-study/a-54440790
Buckeye_Democrat
(14,857 posts)... to have control of the nuclear football either.
I'd prefer total disarmament, but I doubt that will ever happen unless humanity survives an "accident" of some kind. Too many people would probably need to see the destruction themselves.
I've even seen posters in DU write stuff like, "Back when nuclear weapons were a concern," as if it's all past-tense!
Side-story:
And there's many other lessons that need to be learned too!
I worked with a 20-year-old girl who asked me one morning, after getting a cup of coffee from the break room (where the TV news was probably memorializing this piece of history), "What's Hiroshima?"
Me: "Hiroshima? The city in Japan?"
Her: "I don't know, so I asked you."
Me: "It's a city in Japan where the USA dropped a nuclear bomb."
Her: "WHAT?! We nuked somebody?! Oh my gawwwd!"
Me: "Yes, yes... years ago. It helped to end WW2 in 1945."
Her: "Oh my gawwwd! The Japanese must hate us!"
Me: "Well, the USA helped to rebuild their country later and we're allies now. Although I've sometimes wondered if some of them indeed hate us, based on my experiences working at some Japanese-owned companies before coming here. We dropped another nuclear bomb on Nagasaki in Japan a few days later."
Her: "Another one?! Oh my gawwwd! What's wrong with us?!"
Me: "The common argument was that it would save more lives in the long-run because Japan seemed unwilling to ever surrender otherwise. Do you know anything about WW2? Like how we were at war with Japan, Germany and Italy?"
Her: "We were at war with Germany too?"
Me: "Yes! You've at least heard about the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, right?"
Her: "Oh, yeah! I thought they were only at war with the Jews."
Me: (Walked away)
appalachiablue
(41,171 posts)in the past,' is a fool and menace. 1945 is not that long ago.. The pervasive culture of the 'here and now' is highly dangerous and against basic principles of societies that lasted for centuries.
True Blue American
(17,988 posts)Long after that day, but I remember it well. Thank God it ended the war. Horrible as it was after Hirohito vowed to fight to the last man it saved millions of American lives.
NeoGreen
(4,031 posts)
#210 - The Logic of Doomsday
A Conversation with William J. Perry
July 9, 2020
In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with William J. Perry and Lisa Perry about the ever-present threat of nuclear war. They discuss the history of nuclear weapons, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the present threat of accidental nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, unilateral disarmament, the psychology of deterrence, tactical nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, details of command and control, nuclear proliferation, the steps we could take toward safety, strategic missile defense, nuclear winter, and other topics.
William J. Perry served as the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration and then as the 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. He oversaw the development of the strategic nuclear systems that are currently in our arsenal. His new offset strategy ushered in the age of stealth, smart weapons, GPS, and technologies that changed the face of modern warfare.
(snip)
Lisa Perry is the Communications Director for The William J. Perry Project. The granddaughter of Secretary Perry, she has dedicated her career to sounding the alarm about the modern threat of nuclear weapons for the post cold war generations. Lisa is committed to empowering the public by breaking down the complex issues surrounding these weapons.
At the Brink is a new podcast about humanitys most terrifying weapon and the stories of those who have shaped its history. When former Secretary of Defense William Perry declared he believed that the danger of a nuclear catastrophe was greater today than any time in history, his granddaughter, Lisa Perry, set out to discover why. Featuring the personal stories of presidents, cabinet members, congressmen, nuclear physicists, atomic bomb survivors, military officials, and activists, At The Brink is a primer for every world citizen to learn how close weve come to disaster, and how we can still step back from the nuclear brink.
William Perrys Nuclear Terrorism Scenario:
Website: www.wjperryproject.org
johnp3907
(3,732 posts)Thank you! I look forward to listening after work.