HIROSHIMA-NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE 2024 AUGUST 6 AND 9 (AUGUST 4 EVENT)

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/07/omni-war-watch-wednesdays-186-july-17.html

CONTENTS
2024 PROGRAM

Program for Hiroshima Nagasaki 2024

Theme:   What did we learn? 
Sunday August 4, 2024, Omni Center for Peace

6:00 pm meal prepared by MayDay Kitchen chefs

6:30 pm Program

 Kelly emcee

         Opening Song – Kelly and Donna

Welcome, Founder Dr. Dick Bennett

Speaker – Art Hobson – Topic:  Update on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Poem –

Keynote – Marcina Langrine, Marshallese Education Initiative

Music – Kelly and Donna

Reading the names – Karen Takemoto

Close with silence in honor of the dead

8:00 – Closing gratitudes – Gladys

 2024 ANTHOLOGY
Dick.  Robert Jewett.  Captain America Complex: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism.  Santa Fe, 1984. ICAN: 7^th ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNTPNW UN TREATY FOR THE PREVENTION OF NUCLEAR WAR.
FILM: The Vow From Hiroshima by Susan Strickler, about Setsuko Thurlow.
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.   30th Annual Sadako Peace Day Invitation, 7-9-24. 
Back from the Brink, “From Trinity to Nagasaki.”
David Swanson. Which Country Is Safest During a Nuclear War?
David Swanson.   Believing in Nuclear Deterrence and Angels
Dick Bennett and Karen Madison.  The Threat of Nuclear War Should be Studied in Our Public Schools.
Prabir Purkayastha.   “Oppenheimer Paradox: Power of Science, Weakness of Scientists.”  
Ben Norton.  “Atomic Bombing of Japan was Not Necessary to End WWII.”
MARK MUHICH.  “Oppenheimer, the Sequel.”
JOSHUA FRANK.  “Revisiting the Bombing of Nagasaki, 78 Years Later. “

Brian McGlinchey.   “Hiroshima, Nagasaki Bombings were Needless, Said World War II’s Top U.S. Military Leaders.”  
Norman Solomon.  “The US Government Once Called Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘Nuclear Tests.’”

Seiji Yamada.  “Oppenheimer, War Criminal.”

Sources
Arizona Quarterly
Back from the Brink
Bear & Co. book publisher
Bullfrog Films
Common Dreams
Counterpunch (several)
Defend Democracy Press
Geopolitical Economy Report
ICAN
Newsclick
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Peoples Democracy
World Beyond War

TEXTS 2024 HN Anthology

Biblical Contexts of US Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of Its 80 Years of Bombings Around the World.
Dick.  Robert Jewett.  Captain America Complex: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism.  Santa Fe, 1984.
“There is something distinctly American about the belief in the efficacy of bombing. . . . With this distinctive American dogma, the path into the atomic age was already determined.  Doctrines of massive retaliation preoccupied the nuclear leaders. . . .Americans reacted with amazement against realists in other countries who lack enthusiasm for redemptive violence.  That the world should be destroyed for the sake of our principles seemed self-evident to us. . . .The mystique had rendered us incapable of comprehending even our allies.  With the same ideological blindness, we plunged into the arms race without the slightest hesitation and produced an arsenal of ludicrous proportions.”  I recommend this incisive analysis of how the US rejected the Biblical path of love (the Gospels and other Books) and instead chose another Biblical path of force and violence that became Puritanism and zealous nationalism, Capt. America (Books of Daniel and Revelations and other Books)(156).   Because this is Arkansas, I will point out Jewett’s awareness of the importance to this subject of our own former Senator J. William Fulbright, who drew a direct line from Puritanism to “the peculiar mystique of violence in America in his speech ‘Violence in the American Character’” (147).

July 7, 2040, is the 7^th ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNTPNW, THE UNITED NATIONS TREATY ON THE PROHIBITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, for which ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dear Dick,

Happy BANniversary! Seven years ago today [2017], we made history at the UN when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was adopted by 122 nations. It was the long-awaited result of a decade-long, world-wide push to finally and categorically ban nuclear weapons under international law, and it was the start of a new phase of ICAN’s work to eliminate nuclear weapons.

So much has happened since: the Treaty entered into force in 2021 and continued to grow in membership, and the work to bring it into practice has truly begun with two successful meetings of states parties and a solid intersessional process. The treaty is more than a document, more than a meeting – it is a community working to end nuclear weapons around the world, and ICAN is proud of the central role we play in promoting and supporting it.  So today, we want to celebrate the treaty, look (ahead) at some of the ways it is driving change and ask for your help to keep pushing. 

Helping Cities Speak up
The number of cities joining ICAN’s cities appeal continues to grow. Spain hit the bar of 100 cities last month, Italy counts 93 cities, France 83 and Greece 72.  All these cities, and hundreds more around the world – including in nuclear-armed states, have clearly spoken out in favour of the TPNW. And who knows better what is good for their citizens than the people actually in charge?

Democracy in action
In March this year, the Swiss Federal Council rejected the TPNW based on weak grounds, prioritising pleasing NATO over its humanitarian tradition and principles. Now we are using the full might of Switzerland’s participatory democracy to get the government to listen. Last week, the Swiss Alliance for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons launched a new popular initiative to increase public pressure on the Swiss federal government to join the treaty. We now have 18 months to gather the 100,000 signatures from the Swiss public to trigger a popular vote on joining the TPNW. 

Bringing the real experts to the table 
In August, ICAN will facilitate the participation of nuclear weapons survivors from around the world in a workshop hosted by the government of Kazakhstan in Astana to explore how Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zones can help respond to the current threats challenging the international community. ICAN will organise a Nuclear Survivor Meeting in the sidelines of this event to share experiences and strategies for national action.

We are very proud of these achievements and excited for the work ahead. With risks of nuclear weapons use on the rise, we need to continue promoting the treaty in every possible way. And we could use your help. Will you make a donation to support our work?

At ICAN, we continue to do whatever it takes to ensure that nuclear weapons will never be used again. We are the campaign that takes on the most heavily armed, richest countries in the world – and wins. 

Thank you for standing with us,
Annette Willi
Operations Coordinator
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN, Nobel Peace Prize)

FILM: The Vow From Hiroshima by Susan Strickler, about Setsuko Thurlow, 85-year-old survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and life-long advocate of the Treaty to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

HOME | The Vow From Hiroshima | by Susan Strickler and …

The Vow From Hiroshima

https://www.thevowfromhiroshima.com

THE VOW FROM HIROSHIMA is an intimate portrait of Setsuko Thurlow, a passionate survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Her moving story is told through …

Videos

The Vow From Hiroshima

PBS

56 minutes, 38 seconds

1 month ago

The Vow from Hiroshima: Film, Advocacy, and Nuclear …

YouTube · Perry World House

57 minutes, 47 seconds

Apr 22, 2022

10 key moments in this video

The Vow From Hiroshima  WETA

View all

The Vow from Hiroshima (2020)

  IMDb  https://www.imdb.com › title  The Vow From Hiroshima is an intimate portrait of Setsuko Thurlow, a passionate, 85-year-old survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

The Vow from Hiroshima | Bullfrog Films: 1-800-543-3764

Bullfrog Films  https://www.bullfrogfilms.com › catalog › vow  “A moving, intelligent and perceptive documentary that reveals both the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the gallant efforts of two …

30th Annual Sadako Peace Day Invitation, 7-9-24

Tuesday, August 6.  6:00PM – 7:00PM PDT

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation <paperlesspost@paperlesspost.com> 

VIEW THE CARD

Dear Dick:

Back from the Brink believes that we all deserve a say on policies that pose a direct threat to our lives, our families, our communities, our planet, humanity’s future. We furthermore believe that it is our responsibility to act and advocate for policies to help prevent nuclear war and to honor all who have and continue to be harmed by nuclear weapons.

This summer is the 79th anniversary of the Trinity test (July 16, 1945) that launched the atomic age and the August 6th and 9th U.S. atomic bombings that killed and injured hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Will you join us in making this a summer of advocacy?

A major priority of our campaign is to cultivate leadership from your local, county and state officials, to get them involved and to speak out on this issue on a regular basis and to bring the voice and influence of communities to Washington decision makers, including your members of Congress. Here’s one thing you can do:

Ask your mayor, governor, city/town councilors, state senators and representatives and/or county commissioners to issue a proclamation or statement. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries are a somber, annual reminder of the horrors of nuclear weapons and why abolishing nuclear weapons and preventing nuclear war is every community’s business. Especially with more news coverage of the new global nuclear arms race and the flaws in the theory of mutually assured destruction (aka deterrence) that are used to justify it, this is an ideal opportunity for your elected officials to speak out.

· Here’s a sample letter/email you can adapt to write your own letter or email to your elected officials

· Here’s a link to a sample proclamation you can share with the officials and ask them to use for drafting their own version

You can find sample materials including editable versions on our website here.

Helpful Hints:

· Get Others Involved – The more constituents asking the better. Talk to friends, co-workers, family members and ask them to make similar requests.

· Be persistent (without being heavy handed) – Start with a letter, ideally delivered to their office in person; Follow-up with an email and a phone call, ideally with a senior staff person.

· Meet with/track down the officials at public events or call their office and ask for a brief (5-10 minute) meeting or phone conversation to discuss your request and why it is important.

Not sure who to contact or how to get started? Reach out to us at jeremy@preventnuclearwar.org and we can talk you through this and give you advice and suggestions—and help you identify which officials you might ask and gather their contact information (including for their key staff). For mayors, you can consult this U.S. Conference of Mayors directory of 1400 mayors in cities of 30,000 or more people. Please also consult BftB’s Advocacy Resources page which has loads of helpful tips and resources.

With your help and activism let’s build a growing chorus of elected officials who together send a clear, compelling message to Washington—Nuclear weapons ARE a local issue. Our voices matter and need to be heard and heeded.

We’ll be in touch throughout the summer and don’t ever hesitate to reach out with your questions, ideas or suggestions.

With gratitude,

BftB National Organizing Team

P.S. Great news! On June 23, the U.S. Conference of Mayors got things rolling and unanimously passed the Mayors for Peace-USA resolution, The Imperative of Dialogue in a Time of Acute Nuclear Dangers. If you’re on social media please amplify BftB’s posts on Facebook, X and Instagram and tag your local officials.

Support Back from the Brink’s work in bringing together communities to abolish nuclear weapons. Donate Today       Back from the Brink · c/o PSR-LA 617 S. Olive Street, Suite 1100 Los Angeles, CA 90014

“Which Country Is Safest During a Nuclear War?”  Which Country Is Safest During a Nuclear War?

Endangerment  By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 8, 2024

I received a spam email with the subject line “Which Countries Are the Safest If World War 3 Breaks Out? 2024 Study.”There wasn’t any study. The thing was full of links to a website selling murderous video games. And the driest place in the Pacific Ocean is as real as the safest place in WWIII.Why can people not get it through their heads that nuclear war kills the planet not just particular places on it?Here’s the laughable email text, with the links to the kill-kill-kill video games removed:

• Recent study analyzed more than 30 countries to determine the safest destination if World War 3 starts.
• Iceland is the safest destination in a global conflict, with the highest peace index, quality of life, political stability, and energy self-sufficiency.
• Norway‘s top energy self-sufficiency rate of 738.4% secures its second place on the list.

Recent study by [spammer’s name and link here] analyzed more than 30 countries to determine the safest destination if World War 3 starts. Several key indicators such as the peace index, historical involvement in wars, proximity to the nearest country, quality of life, political stability, economic stability and rates of food and energy self-sufficiency were analyzed. Each factor was scored and weighted based on its relevance to national security, forming the overall ranking.

Findings summed up

Iceland, with a composite score of 78.86, is the safest destination in the event of global conflict. Iceland’s exceptional peace levels, highest quality of life, political stability, and significant energy self-sufficiency of 92% ensure its top position. Moreover, Iceland has never been involved in any wars throughout its history.

Norway secures the second rank with a composite score of 72.13. Norway now has a high peace index, despite its historical involvement in 85 wars. Norway also stands out with the highest energy self-sufficiency rate of 738% ranking it 2nd.

Taking the third position, Australia has a composite score of 63.41. It stands out for its distance from the nearest country/land, East Timor, being over 2,013 km away. Australia’s current peace index is high, similar to Norway and it also ranks highly for economic stability.

4th in the safety ranking, Qatar has a composite score of 63.39. Qatar’s rank is backed up by the second highest energy self-sufficiency of 505%, covering for lower levels of economic stability and food self-sufficiency rate.

Switzerland, holding 5th place, has a composite score of 62.94. Switzerland is the most economically stable country in the world, which highly contributes to the ranking. It stands out with its peaceful environment and ranks high in political stability as well.

Canada ranks 6th with a composite score of 62.23. Canada’s great energy self-sufficiency rate of 178% along with its historical record of only 3 wars affect its ranking on the list.

Seventh-ranked Japan, with a composite score of 60.41, is notable for its transformation from its 55-war history to a high peace index. The high political stability contributes to its reputation as a peaceful destination.

With a composite score of 59.38, New Zealand is ranked 8th and is recognized for its geographical remoteness, over 1,463 km from Norfolk Island, and a history of only 21 wars. Its peace index of 1.313 and exceptional political stability are complemented by high quality of life.

Denmark holds the 9th position with a composite score of 58.87, showcasing its peace index of 1.31. Denmark’s solid political stability and high food self-sufficiency rate of 77.8% mark it as a safe and self-reliant destination.

Finland completes the top ten, with a composite score of 57.80. Its minimal engagement in 7 wars, strong peace index are noteworthy. Finland’s high political stability and leading food self-sufficiency rate of 83.7% show its position as a calm Nordic refuge.

A spokesperson from [spammer’s name and link here] commented on the study results: “Peace helps create a secure and prosperous society. It leads to stable governments, strong economies, and a better quality of life for people. Countries that focus on peace are better prepared for global conflicts and can protect their citizens during tough times. The research highlights the need for peaceful policies to ensure safety for everyone now and in the future.”

Believing in Nuclear Deterrence and Angels.”  Believing in Nuclear Deterrence and Angels

Endangerment, North America, World By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 4, 2024.

“Despite the fact that deterrence remains an article of faith among the ‘realists’ who have orchestrated U.S. strategic policy and who continue to do so, despite its incoherence and instability, much of this faith is lip service only, analogous to deeply religious individuals who profess belief in heaven, yet rarely rejoice when a loved one dies. Thus, if the U.S. government really believed in nuclear deterrence — or in the billions of dollars spent on Ballistic Missile Defense — there wouldn’t be such hyperventilating about the threat posed by a nuclear armed North Korea or possibly by Iran in the future.” —David Barash

There’s a webinar coming up on July 9 about nuclear deterrence. I imagine it will be excellent. I’ve also just been reading a fantastic book on the topic called Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents by David P. Barash. There’s an online book club with the author and free copy of the book coming up for that. Barash’s central thesis is that the idea of nuclear deterrence makes no sense. It’s kind of hard to see why anyone would argue with him.

MSNBC recently aired this old comment by U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard: “Here, I have made a little calculation. Assuming that we make a radioactive element that will live for five years and we just let it go into the air… forming a dust layer on the surface of the Earth, everybody would be killed. . . . And you may, of course, ask, ‘what is the practical importance of this? Who would want to kill everybody on Earth?’ I do not know whether we would be willing to do it, and I do not know whether the Russians would be willing to do it. But I think that we may threaten to do it. And I think that the Russians might threaten to do it. And who will take the risk, then, not to take that threat seriously?”

It’s unclear whether anyone has followed through on developing a single bomb to end all life on Earth, but each and every one of the tens of thousands of nuclear bombs in existence is, in a sense, that bomb. Most experts agree that any use of a nuclear bomb, even a so-called small or usable or tactical or limited bomb will almost certainly result in the use of others, with nobody able to control the escalation, and with even a “small” nuclear war a threat to all life on Earth via nuclear winter.  Of course, I wouldn’t care if anyone were to threaten to use such things, as long as they never did, but the threats are not credible in a way that deters or coerces anything, while the risk of accidental or intentional use is nonetheless disastrously real.

How can that be? Barash’s analysis of threats made by humans and other animals is enlightening. In the 1920s the U.S. government effectively poisoned alcohol as a deterrent to drinking it. Surely nobody would risk death for a drink. But an estimated 10,000 people died as a result. In the 1970s the same geniuses tried poisoning marijuana, and if the aim was deterrence it largely failed. Lagging shamefully behind most of the world, the United States still uses capital punishment, claiming it is a deterrent. But, unlike nuclear war, capital punishment is something that can be tested in a wide variety of ways while still leaving most of humanity alive. There is overwhelming evidence that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent. It may deter someone from committing some crime, but does not deter most people. Failure to deter nuclear war is not something we can afford to fail at most of the time or even a single time. We have to come to terms with the fact that the people being threatened are no more rational than the people doing the threatening.

Seriously. Read some game-theory books and then watch some reality television, and then ask yourself what one can possibly have to do with the other. Humans are not robot economists.

The notion that nuclear weapons have prevented nuclear war through deterrence is an empty correlation atop an absurdity. The absurdity is the idea of needing nuclear weapons in order to avoid nuclear war, which could be avoided very well by abolishing nuclear weapons. The empty correlation is the idea that because we haven’t yet had a nuclear apocalypse, nuclear deterrence has worked. This is not merely a correlation rather than a causal proof, but one with a lot of evidence against it.

For example, it is well established that nuclear weapons do not deter non-nuclear attacks, not by terrorists, not by non-nuclear nations, and not by nuclear nations. Nations’ possession of nuclear weapons does not make them more likely to win wars. In a study of 348 territorial disputes cited by Barash, nations with nuclear weapons were less, not more, successful than nations without nukes, and were no more successful than they had been prior to obtaining nukes. It’s a leap to conclude that nuclear weapons, which fail to deter all other types of attacks, have deterred nuclear attacks.

Of course, Daniel Ellsberg told us how frequently U.S. presidents have publicly or privately threatened to use nuclear weapons, but not that doing so has deterred anything.

Against terrorists who lack a territorial nation, the threat cannot even be attempted. But against nations, the threat is difficult to attempt because of the horrific shame that the world — to its infinite credit — will heap on the person publicly threatening to use nuclear weapons (Trump, Putin). And the attempt is difficult to make effective, because threats usually require examples, demonstrations. This is why you can read columns in newspapers suggesting that using one “small” nuclear weapons would teach everyone what they are. But if the whole purpose of using the one nuclear weapon were to prevent anyone ever using more of them, and if you could live with the shame of having used that one, and if –contrary to everyone’s predictions — using one didn’t result in using lots more, would anyone even then believe the threat to use them all or to use more of them?

What is perfectly believable, after reading through all the near misses, in Barash’s and many others’ books, is that we’ve been incredibly lucky. Incredible luck is, by definition, unlikely to continue for long. Many of the near misses involve individual saviors. But what happens when the person put in the position to prevent a nuclear war isn’t wise or heroic, as most people are not? One could never count on everyone to disobey illegal orders. Obeying illegal orders is standard practice in militaries. And now the U.S. Supreme Court has declared all presidential orders to be legal. I’d trust with nukes neither Biden nor Trump nor any of the military commanders who’ve been given the power to initiate the ending of the world — nor any other human being — any further than I could throw them. Would you? There is no other enterprise free of disaster. Why should nuclear weapons be unique?

How comforting is it that the same people who deny Biden’s dementia until it’s made painfully and disastrously obvious to all are in charge of preventing nuclear war — that is, with addressing nuclear war wisely BEFORE it happens?

How reassuring is it that during all the many near-misses of the past there was a buffer between the East and the West, there was communication between the East and the West, and there were fewer nations with nuclear weapons? Now how lucky do we need to be?

Did you see an anti-apocalypse candidate in the Trump-Biden debate, or did you see two mentally unstable old men arguing about who would best get Europe to pay for Armageddon and who had a better golf game?

The fantasy of shooting down missiles with missiles as a protection against nuclear war has fueled the arms race, created weapons that one side can call defensive and the other suspect are offensive, threatened the danger of an attack by any nation that convinces itself it is protected from retaliation, and — most importantly — failed dramatically to provide anything more than the possibility of partial protection, which means no protection at all when you’re talking about nuclear bombs getting through.

Interestingly, Barash includes in his book a survey of the data on how people who suffer, including who suffer the violence of war, and including who suffer the uncertainty of safety tend to believe more in religion. The belief in heaven or hell can follow from trauma but doesn’t tend to directly fuel the trauma in a vicious cycle. The belief in nuclear deterrence, on the other hand, is nothing other than the belief that it is a good thing to threaten to annihilate all life. That thought creates the fear and horror that can, I suspect, make one more susceptible to believing in nuclear deterrence. How do we get out of that loop? Believing in angels might do less harm.

One way out would be to use democracy rather than building life-threatening weapons in its name.
Short of that we need activism. I encourage everyone to join in unwelcoming NATO to Washington this week. for a start: https://nonatoyespeace.org
https://worldbeyondwar.org/believing-in-nuclear-deterrence-and-angels/?link_id=49&can_id=3d53bb64e2596ba3e930952f90ab3f2c&source=email-wbw-news-action-wave-after-wave-of-peace-action&email_referrer=email_2380881&email_subject=wbw-news-action-nuclear-armed-terrorist-organization-at-75

Dick Bennett and Karen Clark.  The Threat of Nuclear War Should be Studied in Our Public Schools. 
Over thirty years ago, Karen Clark Madison and I compiled a descriptive bibliography on “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Bomb: A Bibliography of Literature and the Arts,” Arizona Quarterly (Autumn 1990).  We had intended to produce a follow-up, if someone else did not compile one in a few years, but neither happened, our own lives having become preoccupied elsewhere.  So for Hiroshima/Nagasaki 2024 I decided at least to keep the project alive.  Our epigraph, from Daniel Zins’, “Exploding the Canon,” begins with these words: “For many years now our profession [literature and language] has largely ignored what surely should be one of the central concerns of our teaching and research: the threat of nuclear war.”  We divided our discoveries into seven parts:  Bibliographies; History;  Language, Rhetoric, Criticism; Personal Narratives; Imaginative Literature; Audio-Visual; and Pedagogy and Anthologies.  Perhaps because we were language and literature professors, our Parts III and V were the longest of the seven.  For example, here’s our citation from the entry by Jacques Derrida:  “Extraordinarily sophisticated weaponry coexists with ‘sophistry’ and ‘the most cursory, the most archaic, the most crudely opinionated psychology, the most vulgar psychology.’   Specialists of texts—all students of the humanities and social sciences—have a significant role in exposing the mystifications generated by power.”

Added 7-1-24.   Zins’ words have stuck in my mind these many years, and now the nuclear-armed warrior Israel nation supported by the most powerful warrior nuclear nation USA, is committing genocide among a Muslim population, and that most powerful nuclear nation and its warrior NATO allies push up against the Russian border despite the explicit warnings of possible nuclear retaliation by its warrior leader, while the majority of US people continue to cheer, or play, or dither, or acquiesce, looking away from the dangers.   

“Oppenheimer Paradox: Power of Science, Weakness of Scientists.”   Prabir Purkayastha.  Mronline.org (8-16-23). 

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 heralded the atomic age and ushered in the military-industrial complex that took over the United States.

By Prabir Purkayastha (Posted Aug 15, 2023)

Originally published: NewsClick.in  on July 29, 2023 (more by NewsClick.in)  | 

Empire, Inequality, Strategy, WarAmericas, Asia, Japan, United StatesNewswireJ. Robert Oppenheimer, Military-Industrial Complex

(For the whole article click on the title)     . . . .This is not about Oppenheimer the movie—it is about the atomic bomb Oppenheimer made, which created multiple ruptures in society. This new weapon completely changed the parameters of war. But not just that—it brought the recognition in society that science was no longer a concern of just scientists but of us all. For scientists, it also became a question that what they did in the laboratories had real-world consequences, including the possible destruction of humanity itself. It also brought home that this was a new era of big science that needed mega bucks!

Strangely enough, two of the foremost names of scientists at the core of the anti-nuclear bomb movement after the war also had a major role in initiating the Manhattan Project. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had become a refugee in England first and then in the United States, sought Einstein’s help in petitioning President Franklin Roosevelt for the United States to build the bomb. He feared that if Nazi Germany built it first, it would conquer the world.

Szilard joined the Manhattan Project, though he was located not in Los Alamos but in the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratories. He also campaigned within the Manhattan Project to demonstrate the bomb before its use on Japan. Einstein also tried to reach Roosevelt with his appeal against using the bomb. But Roosevelt died and Einstein’s letter remained unopened on his desk. He was replaced by vice-president Harry Truman, who thought the bomb would give the United States a nuclear monopoly and, therefore, help subjugate the Soviet Union in the post-War scenario.

Turning to the Manhattan Project, it had a staggering scale, even by today’s standards. At its peak, it employed 1,25,000 people directly, and if we include the many other industries that directly or indirectly produced parts or equipment for the bomb, that number would be close to half a million. The costs, again, were massive: $2 billion in 1945 (around $30-50 billion today). Its scientists were an elite group that included Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Nils Bohr, James Franck, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller (later the villain of the story), Richard Feynman, Harold Urey, Klaus Fuchs (who shared atomic secrets with the Soviets) and many more glittering names. More than two dozen Nobel prize winners got associated with the Manhattan Project.

But science was only a small part of the Manhattan Project. It wanted to build two kinds of bombs, one using a uranium 235 isotope and the other, plutonium. How to separate fissile material, U-235, from U-238? How to concentrate fissile plutonium? How to do both at an industrial scale? How to set up the chain reaction to create fission, bringing sub-critical fissile material together to create a critical mass? All these required metallurgists, chemists, engineers, explosive experts, and completely new plants and equipment spread over hundreds of sites. All of it was to be done at record speeds. This was a science “experiment” done not at a laboratory but industrial scale. That is why the huge budget and the size of the human power involved.

The United States government convinced its citizens that the Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki bombings led Japan to surrender. Based on archival and other evidence, it is clear that more than the nuclear bombs, the Soviet Union declaring war against Japan led to its surrender. It has been proved that the claim of “one million American lives saved” by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which avoided an invasion of Japan, has no basis. It was a number conjured up for propaganda purposes.

While the American people presented these figures as serious calculations, what was completely censored were actual pictures of the victims of the two bombings. The only available photo of the Hiroshima bombing—the mushroom cloud—was taken by the gunner of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb. Even months after the nuclear bombings, when a few photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were released, they were only of shattered buildings, none of the human beings.

The United States wanted to bask in its victory over Japan. It did not want that victory marred by visuals of the horror of the nuclear bombs. It dismissed people dying of a mysterious disease, which it knew was radiation sickness, as Japanese propaganda. To quote General Leslie Groves, who led the Manhattan Project, these were “Tokyo Tales”.

It took seven years for the human toll to become visible, only after the United States ceased its occupation of Japan. Even then, only a few pictures emerged, as Japan was still cooperating with the United States in hushing up the horrors of the nuclear bomb.

A full visual account of what happened in Hiroshima had to wait until the sixties. Then we saw the pictures of Hiroshima Shadows—the people who had vaporised, leaving only their traces on the stone on which they had been sitting; the survivors whose skin hung from their bodies, and of people dying of radiation sickness.

After the nuclear bombing, the scientists behind the bomb became heroes who had shortened the war and saved a million American lives. This myth-making converted the nuclear bomb from an industrial-scale effort to a secret formula discovered by a few physicists, giving the United States enormous power in the post-War era. This was what made Oppenheimer a hero for the American people. He symbolised the scientific community and its godlike powers. And it also made him the target for people like Teller, who later combined with others to bring Oppenheimer down.

But if Oppenheimer was a hero, how was he pulled down just a few years later?

It is difficult to imagine today, but the United States had a strong left movement before the Second World War. Apart from communists in workers’ movements, the intelligentsia—literature, cinema and physicists—had a strong communist presence. Scientists had embraced the idea, which JD Bernal had then argued in the United Kingdom, that science and technology could be planned and used for the public good. That is why contemporary physicists—then on the cutting edge of the sciences of relativity and quantum mechanics—also led social and political debates in and on science.

It is this world of science, a critical worldview, which collided with the new world where the belief was that the United States should be the exceptional nation and sole global hegemon. This hegemony could only be weakened if some people—“traitors to the nation”—gave away “our” national secrets. Any development anywhere else could be only a result of theft and nothing else. This campaign was helped by the belief that the atomic bomb resulted from a few equations scientists had discovered, which could, therefore, easily be leaked to enemies.

This was the genesis of the McCarthy era in the United States, its war on the artistic, academic and scientific communities and its search for spies under the bed. The military-industrial complex was taking birth in the country, and it soon took over the scientific establishment. In the United States, the military and energy—nuclear energy—budget would henceforth determine the fate of scientists and their grants. Oppenheimer needed to be punished as an example to other scientists—do not set yourself up against the gods of the military-industrial complex and our vision of world domination.

Oppenheimer’s fall from grace served another purpose. It was a lesson to the scientific community that no one was big enough to cross the security state. The Rosenbergs—Julius and Ethel—were executed though they were relatively minor figures. Julius had not leaked atomic secrets, only kept the Soviet Union abreast of the developments. Ethel, a communist, had nothing to do with spying. The only person who did leak atomic “secrets” was Klaus Fuchs, a German communist party member who escaped to the United Kingdom and worked on the bomb project there, followed by the Manhattan Project, which he joined as a part of a British team.

Fuchs made important contributions to the nuclear bomb-triggering mechanism and shared these with the Soviet Union. His contribution would have shortened the Soviet bomb, at best, by a year. As a host of nations have shown, once they knew a fissile bomb was possible, it was easy for scientists and technologists to duplicate it, as countries as small as North Korea have demonstrated.

Oppenheimer’s tragedy was not that he was victimised in the McCarthy era and lost his security clearance. Einstein never had a security clearance, so that need not have been a major calamity. It was his public humiliation during the hearings in which he challenged the withdrawal of his security clearance that broke him. Physicists, the golden boys of the atomic era, had finally been shown their true place in the emerging world of the military-industrial complex.

Einstein, Szilard, Joseph Rotblat and others had foreseen this world. Unlike Oppenheimer, they took the path of building a movement against the nuclear bomb. Having made the bomb, the scientists now had to act as conscience-keepers of the world against a bomb that could destroy all humanity—that bomb which still hangs as a Damocles Sword over our heads.

About Prabir Purkayastha:  Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the Free Software movement.

Purpose of the Bombings Was to Warn the Soviet Union.

Ben Norton (Posted Aug 09, 2023).  Originally published: Geopolitical Economy Report  on August 7, 2023 (more by Geopolitical Economy Report)  | 

History, WarAmericas, Asia, Europe, Japan, Soviet Union (USSR), United StatesNewswireDwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Hiroshima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Japan, Nagasaki, Nuclear Weapons

It is very common for Western governments and media outlets to tell the rest of the world to be very afraid of North Korea and its nuclear weapons, or to fear the possibility that Iran could one day soon have nukes.

But the reality is that there is only one country in human history that has used nuclear weapons against a civilian population—and not once, but twice: the United States.

On the 6th and 9th of August, 1945, the U.S. military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 200,000 civilians were killed.

Today, nearly 80 years later, it is still very common to hear U.S. government officials, journalists, and educators claim that Washington had no choice but to nuke Japan, to force it to surrender and thus end World War Two. Many argue that this horrifying atrocity was in fact a noble act, and that it saved even more lives that would have been lost in subsequent fighting.

This narrative, although widespread, is completely false.

U.S. government documents have admitted that Japan was already on the verge of surrendering in 1945, before the nuclear strikes. The atom bomb attacks were not necessary.

The U.S. Department of War (which was renamed the Department of Defense later in the 1940s) conducted an investigation, known as the Strategic Bombing Survey, analyzing its air strikes in World War II.

Published in 1946, the Strategic Bombing Survey stated very clearly:

… it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

The nuclear strikes on Japan represented a political decision taken by the United States, aimed squarely at the Soviet Union; it was the first act of the Cold War.

In August 1945, the USSR was preparing to invade Japan and to overthrow its ruling fascist regime, which had been allied with Nazi Germany—which the Soviet Red Army had also just defeated in the European theater of the war.

Washington was concerned that, if the Soviets defeated Japanese fascism and liberated Tokyo like they did in Berlin, then Japan’s post-fascist government could become an ally of the Soviet Union and could adopt a socialist government.

The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, therefore, were not so much aimed at the Japanese fascists as they were aimed at the Soviet communists.

This expressly political decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan was in fact opposed by several top U.S. military officials.

As one of the most famous generals in U.S. military history, Dwight Eisenhower led operations in the European theater of the war, and oversaw the subsequent occupation of what was formerly Nazi Germany.

Eisenhower later became president of the United States, following Harry Truman, the U.S. leader who had nuked Japan.

Eisenhower is renowned worldwide for his leadership in fighting fascism in Europe. But what is little known is that he opposed the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan.

After leaving the White House, Eisenhower published a 1963 memoir titled Mandate for Change. In this book, he recalled an argument he had in July 1945 with then U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Stimson had notified him that Washington was planning on nuking Japan, and Eisenhower criticized the decision, stating that he had “grave misgivings” and was convinced that “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary”.

Eisenhower wrote:

The incident took place in [July] 1945 when Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.… But the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face”. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reason I gave for my quick conclusions.

These “completely unnecessary” nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed some 200,000 civilians. But they had a political goal, aimed at the Soviet Union.

The political reasons behind the atomic bombing of Japan have been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of History, which runs a website with educational information about the Manhattan Project, the scientific initiative that developed the bomb.

The U.S. government website acknowledged that the Truman administration’s decision to nuke Japan was politically motivated, writing:

After President Harry S. Truman received word of the success of the Trinity test, his need for the help of the Soviet Union in the war against Japan was greatly diminished. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, had promised to join the war against Japan by August 15th. Truman and his advisors now were not sure they wanted this help. If use of the atomic bomb made victory possible without an invasion, then accepting Soviet help would only invite them into the discussions regarding the postwar fate of Japan.

…

Other historians argue that Japan would have surrendered even without the use of the atomic bomb and that in fact Truman and his advisors used the bomb only in an effort to intimidate the Soviet Union.

…

Truman hoped to avoid having to “share” the administration of Japan with the Soviet Union.

Mainstream historians have acknowledged this fact as well.

Ward Wilson, a researcher at the establishment London-based think tank the British American Security Information Council, published an article in Washington’s elite Foreign Policy magazine in 2013 titled “The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan. Stalin Did“.

“Although the bombs did force an immediate end to the war, Japan’s leaders had wanted to surrender anyway and likely would have done so before the American invasion planned for Nov. 1. Their use was, therefore, unnecessary”, he wrote.

Wilson explained:

If the Japanese were not concerned with city bombing in general or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in particular, what were they concerned with? The answer is simple: the Soviet Union.
…

Even the most hard-line leaders in Japan’s government knew that the war could not go on. The question was not whether to continue, but how to bring the war to a close under the best terms possible.…

One way to gauge whether it was the bombing of Hiroshima or the invasion and declaration of war by the Soviet Union that caused Japan’s surrender is to compare the way in which these two events affected the strategic situation. After Hiroshima was bombed on Aug. 6, both options were still alive.… Bombing Hiroshima did not foreclose either of Japan’s strategic options.

The impact of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island was quite different, however. Once the Soviet Union had declared war, Stalin could no longer act as a mediator–he was now a belligerent. So the diplomatic option was wiped out by the Soviet move. The effect on the military situation was equally dramatic.

…

When the Russians invaded Manchuria, they sliced through what had once been an elite army and many Russian units only stopped when they ran out of gas.

…

The Soviet invasion invalidated the military’s decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan’s options evaporated. The Soviet invasion was strategically decisive–it foreclosed both of Japan’s options–while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not.

…

Attributing the end of the war to the atomic bomb served Japan’s interests in multiple ways. But it also served U.S. interests. If the Bomb won the war, then the perception of U.S. military power would be enhanced, U.S. diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase.

…

If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Thus, before World War II was even over, the United States launched a Cold War against its ostensible “ally”, the Soviet Union—and against the potential spread of socialism anywhere around the world. . . .MORE click on title

But while the movie was celebrated for depicting Oppenheimer’s complex internal struggles, it was accused of whitewashing the brutality of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The 200,000 Japanese civilians who lost their lives in these totally unnecessary attacks were eerily absent from the film.

 Dwight EisenhowerHarry TrumanHiroshimaHiroshima and NagasakiJ. Robert OppenheimerJapanNagasakiNuclear Weapons

 MARK MUHICH.  “Oppenheimer, the Sequel.”  Counterpunch (APRIL 17, 2024).   FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

The firestorm-cloud that engulfed the city after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Public domain.

The scenes described in the following article are based on drawings and oral histories of survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. The City of Hiroshima collected these artifacts and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum exhibits the artworks.

August 6, 1945, was a Monday in Hiroshima, Japan. The morning was exceptionally clear. City residents dressed for work, filed into classrooms and rode streetcars to their shops and offices. Many people remember seeing a B-29 American bomber flying overhead as WWII wound down. Schoolboys could identify different aircraft by the sound of their engines. Hiroshima was one of the few Japanese cities of any size that the Americans had not bombed. Firebombing of Tokyo had nearly obliterated that city earlier in March.

So clear was the sky that some people on the ground witnessed the large bomb slipping from the silvery B-29. For most, it was the last thing they ever saw. The first atomic bomb in history exploded over the city center of Hiroshima at 8:15 am. Others were temporarily blinded by a pulse of light “brighter than a thousand suns”.

Seven rivers run through Hiroshima. The A-bomb detonated at 2,000 feet above the “hypocenter”, ground zero, where the Hankawa and Motoyasu rivers merge.  A fireball 1000 feet in diameter and nearly 8000 degrees Fahrenheit obliterated the city center, instantly vaporizing 80,000 to 100,000 people. Others, perhaps less fortunate, staggered through their city, deep wounds bleeding, blinded, burned and the misery of radiation sickness coming on.

Several elementary schools in downtown Hiroshima collapsed, killing most and  trapping other students under rubble. Survivors tried to free the children’s arms and legs pinned beneath huge beams and rafters. They were unsuccessful. Frantic parents and strangers brought the doomed children water to drink and washed the dust from their eyes. They abandoned them to the flames as the approaching firestorm consumed everyone in its path.

A mother wandered near the hypocenter carrying a child on her back talking to herself. “Where will I cremate my dead child”, looking for scraps of wood. “Where will I cremate my dead child?”

Some people beyond 1 kilometer from the hypocenter could survive, if only for a few days. Wounded who could walk despite second and third-degree burns instinctively turned to the rivers and ponds in city parks. They laid along the banks and gulped water, insatiable thirst being one symptom of acute radiation poisoning. Many died swallowing river water shoulder to shoulder with other corpses.

Soon after the flash and shock waves from the atomic blast leveled much of the city center, a huge column of fire swirled bodies and debris high into the sky with tornadic force. The resulting dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure caused the eyes of many survivors to fall out of their heads. Abdomens ruptured spilling internal organs onto the ground.

Blisters and burns of students at another girls’ school split open leaving their fingers melting and their skin hanging in shreds while the girls called for their Moms.

Massive doses of radiation destroyed the lymphatic systems of victims whose faces and heads swelled to twice normal size and sealing their bulging eyes and mouths.

Parched survivors searching for water drank “black rain” never knowing it was full of lethal radiation from the nuclear bomb explosion.

Near the river a woman’s body was seen, clothing burned off her back and her torso charred. The mother kneeling, bent over the infant cradled in her arms protecting it from the flames. Both dead.

Hiroshima had prepared for fire bombing by placing water cisterns throughout the city; concrete troughs to be kept full of water at all times. Fire brigades working the day of the A-bombing, comprised of young students escaped the intense heat rays and firestorm by hiding in these cisterns where they later were found knotted together, charred and dead.

Wood debris from destroyed buildings was stacked into pyres around the city and thousands of unidentifiable bodies were cremated in groups of ten or fifty corpses at a time. The flames burned the bodies but not their heads which rolled off the pyres repeatedly. Soldiers used scoops to throw the heads back into the flames. “It is hell if you see that. Hell is exactly like that”, one soldier testified. The cremations continued across Hiroshima until the end of September

Bodies packed into Hiroshima’s rivers where they had sought refuge. Stacked two or three deep beneath bridges and trestles they died there. The river currents at low tide and over time washed the bodies out of the city, through the estuary and out to sea.

A soldier who survived had returned to his unit to find his comrades standing at attention, saluting in silence. When touched them they crumbled into ashes.

Doctors, injured, some carried back to their clinics, administered what care they could, cleaning wounds, stabilizing broken bones, removing glass shards from their patients’ flesh. Many people died there and were cremated on the clinics’ grounds.

“A flash, a giant wind, and then the collective moan, the groans of death, The atomic scream”.

Hundreds of survivor stories were collected in the years immediately after WWII. After decades embargoed by the U.S. these memoirs are published in books by the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum has collected over 3000 drawings from A-bomb survivors, most of whom are now dead. Some of these drawings are displayed at the Peace Museum, but most remain to be cataloged with the name of the survivor, location and time of the scene.  The story of the 15kiloton atomic bombing that destroyed a populous city but not its people. The goal is to make a database of all these survivor drawings, and make these graphic portraits accessible to the general public.

And somehow, someway, the goal is to prevent another atomic bombing from happening ever again.

“Revisiting the Bombing of Nagasaki, 78 Years Later. “ CounterPunch (Aug. 9, 2023).  BY JOSHUA FRANK

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The Nagasaki Prefecture Report on the bombing characterized Nagasaki as “like a graveyard with not a tombstone standing.” Image by Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr.

August 9 marks the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. The nuclear fuel for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was produced at Hanford, in eastern Washington state, which is now the most toxic site in the Western Hemisphere, and the most expensive clean-up in world history. Today the site is laced with billions of gallons of chemical sewage and 56 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste. The following is an excerpt from Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, which investigates the Cold War’s toxic legacy and the looming nuclear dangers of the Hanford project.

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The United States’ decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan was not without precedent. In the winter of 1945, the United States firebombed both Dresden, Germany, killing forty-five thousand people, and Tokyo, Japan, killing more than three hundred thousand people. Some believe these estimates to be low. “I was on the island of Guam … in March of 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children,” recalled Robert McNamara, who later served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In all, the United States firebombed sixty-seven Japanese cities over the course of that bloody year. While not all—particularly US secretary of war Henry Stimson—enjoyed the targeting of civilians, no complaints were officially raised within the US government about the firebombing’s legal or ethical implications. Most officials believed these horrible bombings would help bring the war to an end, forcing the Japanese and Germans to surrender.

Nonetheless, with UK approval, President Truman ordered a nuclear bomb to be dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, less than one month after the test run at Trinity. The United States alerted Japanese citizens, dropping leaflets that warned their towns would “fall to ashes.” The bombing inflicted catastrophic damage. Temperatures on the ground topped 4,000°C. Birds dropped from the sky. Radioactive rain poured down on the city. The uranium bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” which exploded over Hiroshima destroyed 70 percent of the entire city. Nearly all of the city’s medical staff were killed, and ultimately a staggering 140,000 deaths were recorded in the months and years that followed.

The United States argued that Hiroshima and its military headquarters were legitimate targets, and conveyed little concern about the previous decision to firebomb tens of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Professor Alex Wallerstein argues that before the bombing Truman was unaware that Hiroshima was an actual city, and not simply a military outpost. In fact, Wallerstein notes, Truman was more intent on avoiding massive innocent casualties and was simply taking the lead from Stimson, albeit a misinformed one. “Truman’s confusion on this issue,” writes Wallerstein, “came out of his discussions with Secretary of War Henry Stimson about the relative merits of Kyoto versus Hiroshima as a target: Stimson emphasized the civilian nature of Kyoto and paired it against the military-status of Hiroshima, and Truman read more into the contrast than was actually true.”

“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form, these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development,” President Harry Truman read in a statement following the bombing of Hiroshima. “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

The United States wasn’t done yet. In the early morning hours of August 9, a B-29 named Box Car, outfitted with the plutonium bomb nicknamed Fat Man, took off from Tinian Airfield in the Mariana Islands, over 1,400 miles southeast of Nagasaki. Box Car was commanded by Major Charles W. Sweeney. The original target of the second bombing was not initially Nagasaki but a military cache located in Kokura. Weather, however, was not cooperating over Kokura. A haze obscured the plane’s target and anti-aircraft fire proved frustrating, so Major Sweeney changed course and headed to the secondary target, of Nagasaki. Jacob Beser, an aircraft crewman, later recalled that they abandoned Kokura and headed to Nagasaki because “there was no sense dragging the bomb home or dropping it in the ocean.”

As the plane neared Nagasaki, the visibility was equally as bad as over Kokura, but through a brief break in the clouds, Captain Kermit K. Beahan was able to spot the city’s stadium. The plane circled back, and at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped the “Fat Man” bomb on Nagasaki. The bomb caused an explosion 40 percent larger than the Little Boy bombing of Hiroshima. The bomb’s plutonium fuel was produced at Hanford.

“I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn’t have done it differently. Yeah, I know it has been suggested the second bomb, Nagasaki, was not necessary,” said project physicist Leona Marshall Libby later, defending the bombing. “The guys who cry on shoulders. When you are in a war, to the death, I don’t think you stand around and ask, ‘Is it right?’”

The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unlike anything the world had ever experienced. More than two hundred thousand people died in the fiery blasts and from acute radiation poisoning in the hours and days following the explosions. Bodies were vaporized, structures melted from extreme heat, and the radiation pulsated spherically from the bombs’ hypocenters. Unlike the Trinity test in New Mexico, where the warhead exploded on the ground, both of the bombs dropped on Japan were detonated six hundred meters in the air above the cities. If there was any good news for the Japanese, this would be it. Had the bomb exploded on the ground the results would have been even more horrific.

For survivors of the bombings, most of whom have now passed on, cancer rates remained astronomically higher than in populations unexposed to the same amount of radiation. According to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, the risk of leukemia, or blood cancer, was 46 percent higher among bombing victims. For people in utero at the time, risk of physical impairment, such as small head size or mental disability, was even more significant.

Studies of the survivors later revealed what scientists had suspected even before the 1945 blasts—that radiation can mutate DNA and in turn cause different forms of cancer, blood cancer in particular. Among Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, the rate of leukemia rose sharply in the 1950s. Their damaged cells were more susceptible to developing cancers. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), a joint US and Japanese research effort that evolved from the 1946 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, has revealed startling findings in its lifespan study of ninety-four thousand bomb survivors, which followed their lives from 1958 to 1998. The more radiation a person received, the greater was their risk of developing cancer.32 In fact, according to the RERF study, the relationship between radiation levels and cancer likelihood was linear. As radiation levels doubled, incidents of cancer doubled. Leukemia, however, proved to be exponentially correlated: as higher levels of radiation doubled, the risk of leukemia quadrupled. Had the bombs exploded closer to the ground, scientists believe that higher radiation levels would have led to more cancers, and ultimately, more deaths.

“I was three years old at the time of the [Nagasaki] bombing. I don’t remember much, but I do recall that my surroundings turned blindingly white, like a million camera flashes going off at once. Then, pitch darkness,” reflected bombing victim Yasujiro Tanaka.

I was buried alive under the house, I’ve been told. When my uncle finally found me and pulled my tiny three-year-old body out from under the debris, I was unconscious. My face was misshapen. He was certain that I was dead. Tankfully, I survived. But since that day, mysterious scabs began to form all over my body. I lost hearing in my left ear, probably due to the air blast. More than a decade after the bombing, my mother began to notice glass shards growing out of her skin—debris from the day of the bombing, presumably. My younger sister suffers from chronic muscle cramps to this day, on top of kidney issues that has her on dialysis three times a week. “What did I do to the Americans?” she would often say, “Why did they do this to me?”

A number of historians, including the late Howard Zinn, argue the nuclear bombing of Japan was not only criminal, it was unnecessary:

The principal justification for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it “saved lives” because otherwise a planned US invasion of Japan would have been necessary, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Truman at one point used the figure “a half million lives,” and Churchill “a million lives,” but these were figures pulled out of the air to calm troubled consciences; even official projections for the number of casualties in an invasion did not go beyond 46,000. In fact, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not forestall an invasion of Japan because no invasion was necessary. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and American military leaders knew that. General Eisenhower, briefed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the imminent use of the bomb, told him that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

JOSHUA FRANK is the managing editor of CounterPunch. He is the author of the new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, published by Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Twitter @joshua__fran

“Hiroshima-Nagasaki Bombing: U.S. Domination of Post-war World.”  Editor.  mronline.org (8-8-23).

Originally published: Peoples Democracy  on August 6, 2023 by ND Jayaprakash (more by Peoples Democracy)  |  (Posted Aug 07, 2023)

Empire, State Repression, Strategy, WarAmericas, Asia, Japan, United StatesNewswire

On the occasion of Hiroshima Day, we publish an extract from ‘The Meaning of Hiroshima Nagasaki’ written by ND Jayaprakash.

IN July 1939, Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist and a refugee in U.S., had sought the help of Einstein to persuade the U.S. administration headed by President Roosevelt, to construct an atomic bomb as a counter to an identical programme that, it was then suspected, Nazi Germany had embarked upon. But nearly six years later, in March, 1945, Szilard again approached Einstein, this time with a request that he should use his influence to prevent the United States, which was on the threshold of acquiring atomic weapons, from holding out threats to other countries. Einstein once again concurred with Szilard’s apprehension and accordingly sent another letter with a covering note by Szliard to President Roosevelt. But neither Einstein’s final letter nor Szilard’s opinion against employment of the atom bomb on Japan ever came to the notice of the president. Both the letters were still on his desk, untouched, when suddenly on April 12, 1945, Roosevelt passed away.

Following Roosevelt’s demise, Szilard tried desperately to meet the new president, Harry Truman. But all his attempts proved futile until finally he was told to contact James Byrnes, a close associate of the president. Thus, Szilard along with two of his senior colleagues, Dr Walter Bartky and Dr Harold Urey, met Byrnes on May 28, 1945. They soon found out that Byrnes had no sympathies with their arguments. According to Szilard:

Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war…. Mr Byrnes’s… view (was) that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable.

THE INTERIM COMMITTEE ON DROPPING OF THE BOMB

U.S. secretary of war, Henry Stimson on his own had been urging the setting up of a committee of experts to advise the new president on these questions (use of the bomb). Thus, on May 4, 1945, an advisory body called the interim committee was set up with Henry Stimson as its chairperson. At its first informal meeting, on May 9, 1945, Dr Bush, a member of the committee, supplied the other members with copies of his own and Bohr’s memoranda for consideration, which advocated a voluntary abstention from dropping the atomic bomb in the interests of future international control.

Interestingly when the interim committee formally met on May 31, 1945, it discussed only how, and not whether the A-bomb should be used. This was despite the fact that the committee was set up precisely to examine the desirability of employing an atomic weapon on Japan. According to Arthur Compton, one of the three members of the scientific panel attached to this committee: throughout the morning’s discussion it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used. It is regarding only the details of the strategy and tactics that differing views were expressed.

Equally surprising was the fact that in the meeting that day, the significance of the Soviet entry into the war against Japan was a factor that was never taken into account. Arthur Compton testified to this:

At the meeting of the interim committee which I attended, nothing was said about this matter, but we were all aware of the Russian intention.

The conscious attempt to side step these issues—(a) whether the A-bomb should be used at all; and (b) the likely effect of the entry of the Soviet Union into the war—makes it quite apparent that the proceedings of the interim committee were manoeuvred in such a way as to concern itself only with employing the atom bomb as early as possible irrespective of its military necessity. . . .MORE click on title

“Hiroshima, Nagasaki Bombings were Needless, said World War II’s Top U.S. Military Leaders.”  Editor.  mronline.org (8–23).    Mythology about these mass civilian slaughters warps thinking about U.S. militarism.

Originally published: Defend Democracy Press  on August 1, 2023 by Brian McGlinchey (more by Defend Democracy Press)  |  (Posted Aug 07, 2023).  Empire, History, Inequality, WarAmericas, Asia, Japan, United StatesNewswireHiroshima and Nagasaki

The anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki present an opportunity to demolish a cornerstone myth of American history–that those twin acts of mass civilian slaughter were necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender, and spare a half-million U.S. soldiers who’d have otherwise died in a military conquest of the empire’s home islands.

Those who attack this mythology are often reflexively dismissed as unpatriotic, ill-informed or both. However, the most compelling witnesses against the conventional wisdom were patriots with a unique grasp on the state of affairs in August 1945–America’s senior military leaders of World War II.

Let’s first hear what they had to say, and then examine key facts that led them to their little-publicized convictions:

SEIJI YAMADA.  “Oppenheimer, War Criminal.”  CounterPunch (AUGUST 3, 2023).   

(for the entire article click on title)   . . . .Was Oppenheimer a war criminal? In a moment of contrition, Oppenheimer bemoaned the blood on his hands to Truman. For his part, Truman later noted, “he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have.” Of course, Truman was the true war criminal. Were the members of the Scientific Panel mere yes-men? The “just following orders” defense did not work so well for the Nuremburg defendants. While Oppenheimer, as “the father of the atom bomb,” might have provided the U.S. military with the means of mass destruction – consider how Wernher von Braun, the physicist who led Nazi Germany’s rocketry program was treated after Germany’s defeat. Von Braun was whisked out of Europe and would eventually lead the U.S. Army rocketry program. Eventually, nuclear bombs were placed on rockets, becoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. The point is that von Braun was not treated as a war criminal. If Nazi scientists had been successful in constructing an atom bomb, they probably would not have been treated as war criminals either.

As the promoter of the new physics of the quantum on the Berkely campus, as the Bohemian who treated his guests to strong martinis and nasi goreng, as an opponent of segregation and fascism in Spain – Oppenheimer cut something of a countercultural figure. He funded the extrication of Jewish people from Nazi-occupied Europe. His commitment to the socialist cause turned out to be superficial, however.

From 2020 to 2022 the BBC aired a podcast about early atomic history. Season 1 focused on Leó Szilárd, the Hungarian Jew émigré physicist who opposed the dropping of the bomb on civilians. Season 2 focused on Klaus Fuchs, the committed Communist German émigré physicist who passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. As a young man, he fought in the streets with Nazis, was thrown into a fjord, and left for dead. We are introduced to the idea that Soviet possession of nuclear weapons prevented the U.S. from continuing to freely utilize its own nuclear weapons in warfare. (Utilizing nuclear weapons on experiments on Marshallese being another story.)  In another BBC In Our Time podcast on the Manhattan Project that aired in 2021, British physicist Frank Close suggests specifically that the Soviet possession of the bomb might have specifically prevented U.S. hawks from deploying nuclear weapons in the Korean War. No, proliferation is not good, but the U.S. being in sole possession of the bomb didn’t work out so well for the people of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Perhaps in the U.S. we are excessively wont to only look for our heroes among U.S. Americans.

Notes.

^1. Ellul, Jacques (1964) The Technological Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

²Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee. Recommendations on the Immediate Use of Nuclear Weapons. June 16, 1945. http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/history/pre-cold-war/interim-committee/interim-committee-recommendations_1945-06-16.htm

³Szilárd, Leó. A Petition to the President of the United States. July 17, 1945. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/szilard-petition/

⁴Laws of War : Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague II); July 29, 1899. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/hague02.asp

⁵Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

Seiji Yamada, a native of Hiroshima, is a family physician practicing and teaching in Hawaii.

H-N AFTER THE BOMBINGS

OMNI

HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE

AUGUST 6 & 9, 2023

OMNI’s War and Warming Newsletter: OMNI HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE AUGUST 6 & 9, 2023 (jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com)

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

Program for Hiroshima Nagasaki 2023

Theme:   What did we learn? 
Sunday August 6, 2023, 7:00 pm, Omni Center for Peace

 Program
7:00 – catered meal served
7:30 – Program
Opening song, Dale Carpenter
Welcome, Founder Dr. Dick Bennett
Announcement from Nuclear Campaign Coordinator, Abel Tomlinson
Gladys Tiffany moderator, introduce Benetick Maddison video on the Marshallese perspective.
Gladys, Introduce Art Hobson, What Did We Learn?  
Music – Dale Carpenter
Reading the names – Karen Takemoto
Close with silence in honor of the killed
8:35 – Closing gratitudes – Gladys

Contents:  Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings August 6 & 9, 1945
Dick.  What’s at Stake.

Gonzalo Armúa.  “The splendor of a thousand suns: Hiroshima and imperial forgetfulness.”   
Seiji Yamada. “White Supremacy and the Bombing of Hiroshima.”
Scott Ritter.  ”Oppenheimer and the ABC’s of the Apocalypse.”
HOPE: Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons
Abel Tomlinson.Stop Ukraine War & No Nuclear War, Protest #5
United for Peace and Justice: 18 Actions of Hope.
Robert C. Koehler. “Oppenheimer’s Posthumous Exoneration.” 
Brett Wilkins.   “Nobel Peace Prize Winner Denounces G7 Failure….”
Fran Alexander.  “The will to live.”
Ground Zero Marks the 77^th Anniversary.

UAF Japanese Student Association
John Steinbach.   “Remembering One of Humanity’s Worst  
      Catastrophe’s—Seventy Seven Years On.”

Venessa Hanson, ICAN .  Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.