Hiroshima, Nagasaki… and Tehran? Posted by Mike E on August 5, 2008 4 August 2008. A World to Win News Service. On the anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945), we are reprinting the following article from our 6 August 2007 news service. Unfortunately, it is still timely and relevant, and needs no updating. [images of the 1945 attacks] * * * * * * * “That fateful summer, 8:15. The roar of a B-229 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast – silence– hell on earth. “The eyes of young girls watching the parachute melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. Their hair stood on end. Their clothes were ripped to shreds. People trapped in houses toppled by the blast were burned alive. Others died when their eyes and internal organs burst from their bodies. Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead.” (From the 6 August 2007 memorial statement by Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, in a plea to rid the world of all nuclear weapons) On 6 August 1945 the US unleashed the atomic bomb on humanity. The world’s first use of nuclear weapons, against the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was followed on 9 August by the bombing of Nagasaki. As the US threatens war – including the use of nuclear weapons – against Iran, supposedly because the Islamic regime seeks nuclear weapons capability, it is more important than ever to emphasize what country has been the first and only to ever actually use such weapons. The two atomic bombs dropped at the end of World War 2 were deliberately set to explode high in the air. The point was to maximize the killing, not the destruction of buildings. More than 110,000 people died immediately in the two bombings and the radiation eventually killed hundreds of thousands more. Many years of painful death by cancer and later birth defects lay ahead for the survivors and their descendents. If terrorism is defined as the killing of innocent civilians for a political purpose, then the world has seldom seen such terrorism. Think of 40 times 11 September 2001 in New York and you will only imagine the first few seconds. Shortly after, Japan surrendered. But its economy and capital city had been destroyed before the atomic bombs reduced two non-military and relatively unimportant cities to towns of the dead. Many historians believe that country was on the verge of surrender before those terrible days in August 1945. The main reason the US wanted to use atomic weapons was as a demonstration of strength to threaten the USSR. The Soviet Union was then a socialist country. It had been allied with the US against Germany and Japan during the war, but even before that war was over, the US was baring its teeth to the USSR and setting out to dominate the world. Before World War 2, bombing civilians was considered a barbaric and illegal act. The US was not the only nation to commit that crime in WW2, but along with the British it did so on an enormous scale. Since then the US has threatened to use nuclear weapons on dozens of occasions, not only against the USSR when that country later became an imperialist rival to the US, but also Vietnam and China. That the US would make first use of nuclear weapons whenever it felt its interests sufficiently threatened has been official US doctrine and the cornerstone of American military policy from the 1950s through today. Currently, despite the fact that the US’s rival in Cold War nuclear terrorism, the USSR, has collapsed, the Bush government has launched a plan to redesign and rebuild every weapon in its nuclear arsenal, which still contains, like Russia’s, roughly 5,800 active atomic warheads. This includes both giant city-crushing long-range-missile- born bombs and smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons to vaporize smaller targets. The Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab in California, which is carrying out this project, was the target of a planned series of demonstrations to commemorate the bombings of the two Japanese cities and oppose an American attack on Iran. The use of “tactical” nuclear weapons against Iran is a popular topic of discussion in Washington. It is also criminally ironic that just the week before the Hiroshima anniversary, the US and Indian governments reached agreement on American technical assistance to India’s nuclear programme at the same time the US is threatening Iran for undertaking its own programme. Unlike Iran, India has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation pact, and unlike Iran, India has developed and tested nuclear bombs. Obviously, for the US the question is not preventing nuclear proliferation but supporting or toppling regimes according to its perceived interests. As the UN International Atomic Energy Agency has said, there is no evidence that Iran’s nuclear programme includes weapons at this time. It is true that nukes are nukes and much of the same technology and skills used for nuclear power plants can be used to make nuclear bombs. It also may be that the Iranian Islamic regime seeks nuclear weapons. It would be wrong to deny these facts and prettify an anti-people regime. But the world has only known one nuclear war criminal, and that criminal must be stopped from doing it again.
Interesting read. To any who read this and are tempted to make comments about the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities of Japanese fascism: This is in no way meant to defend the fascists..but as this article shows, any Japanese atrocities pale in comparison to America's criminal actions of indiscriminate murder of a civilian population. As for Japan being on the verge of surrender, here's what the reactionaries had to say about that: "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..." -Supreme Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380 "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." -Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. "The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." -Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, White House Chief of Staff under Truman. As for Iran: Even if reports hadn't indicated that there was no nuclear weapons program there..it would be only natural when a state like Israel has so many nuclear warheads capable of attacking practically every city in the Middle East. I'm no fan of the reactionary Ahmedinejad, but Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and of Lebanon is a good cause for caution and defense of any Arab state.
