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For the Sixty-Fourth Time: No More Nuclear War
Reflections on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Our World
In this, at least, I know I'm not a typical American: Hiroshima and Nagasaki still seem all too real to me. As the child of anti-nuclear activists, I was raised to pay attention to two significant dates in American history -- the day when the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber named after the pilot's mother, dropped Little Boy, a five-ton uranium explosion bomb, on Hiroshima; and the moment, three days later, when another plane, jokingly named Bock's Car (after the plane's original pilot), dropped Fat Man (a moniker supposedly given it in honor of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill), a more complex plutonium implosion bomb, on Nagasaki.
When I was little, in preparation for those dates -- and in this we were truly a minority of a minority in this country -- we showed films documenting the aftermath of the atomic bombings. To this day, I can remember threading our old 16mm projector and then watching the shocking, shaky, grainy, black-and-white footage of ruined cities and ruined bodies filling the living room wall as one of those somber male over-voices narrated the facts.
So now, as the 64th anniversary of so many deaths approaches and thinking the unthinkable remains incomprehensibly in vogue, it seems worth the bother to recall one more time just what it means for the unthinkable to become reality.
The Death Count
In Hiroshima, Little Boy's huge fireball and explosion killed 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly. Another 70,000 were seriously injured. As Joseph Siracusa, author of Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, writes: "In one terrible moment, 60% of Hiroshima… was destroyed. The blast temperature was estimated to reach over a million degrees Celsius, which ignited the surrounding air, forming a fireball some 840 feet in diameter."
Three days later, Fat Man exploded 1,840 feet above Nagasaki, with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT. According to "Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered," a web resource on the bombings developed for young people and educators, 286,000 people lived in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped; 74,000 of them were killed instantly and another 75,000 were seriously injured.
In addition to those who died immediately, or soon after the bombings, tens of thousands more would succumb to radiation sickness and other radiation-induced maladies in the months, and then years, that followed.
In an article written while he was teaching math at Tufts University in 1983, Tadatoshi Akiba calculated that, by 1950, another 200,000 people had died as a result of the Hiroshima bomb, and 140,000 more were dead in Nagasaki. Dr. Akiba was later elected mayor of Hiroshima and became an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.
Surviving Hiroshima
Those who somehow managed to survive call themselves Hibakusha, which literally means "those who were bombed." Most of the inhabitants of those two cities who miraculously made it through those hot and terrible August days are, if alive, now in their seventies or eighties, and they continue to tell their unique stories of horror, destruction, and survival. Their urgent pleas for peace, disarmament, and atonement often go unheard by a twenty-first century American culture that often seems to barely recall what happened last week, much less 64 years ago. Many of them have, over the years, traveled to the United States to tell their stories and show their scars, demanding that we never forget and that the world work towards nuclear disarmament.
Akihiro Takahashi is 77 years old now, but part of him will always be the 14-year-old boy standing in line with his classmates on August 6, 1945, less than a mile from where Little Boy detonated. He still recalls how he and his classmates were knocked off their feet by the blast. When he stood up again, he "felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden. Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the heat. I was probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both legs. My skin was peeling and hanging."
Since that time, Takahashi has endured many operations and spent countless hours in the hospital to repair the damage wrought in that single instant. On that August morning, he began to walk home -- though there were few homes left in the leveled city -- stopping to relieve the terrible heat and pain of his burns in the Ota River that flows through Hiroshima.
Along the way, he encountered injured friends, including a boy with terrible burns on the bottoms of his feet whom he half carried along with him. "When we were resting because we were so exhausted," he related in an oral history, "I found my grandfather's brother and his wife, in other words, great uncle and great aunt, coming toward us. That was quite [a] coincidence... [W]e have a proverb about meeting Buddha in Hell. My encounter with my relatives at that time was just like that. They seem[ed] to be the Buddha to me wandering in the living hell."
Jigoku de hotoke ni au you is the phrase. In English, the equivalent would be "an oasis in the desert," something rare that provides great relief. There were not many such oases in Hiroshima that day.
Imagining Nagasaki
Akihiro Takahashi's story (of which the above was but a small part) is just one of so many thousands -- and hardly one of the grimmest. Of course, 80,000 to 140,000 stories went with their potential tellers to their graves that day. Along with the stories that could be told, there were also the photographs to help us imagine the unimaginable.
Yosuke Yamahata was 28 years old and working for the Japanese News Information Bureau in August 1945. Along with Eiji Yamada, a painter, and Jun Higashi, a writer, he was dispatched to devastated Nagasaki by the Japanese military just hours after Fat Man exploded and instructed to "photograph the situation so as to be as useful as possible for military propaganda."
Their train arrived at the outskirts of the ruined city in the middle of the night. Here's how Yamahata describes the scene: "I remember vividly the cold night air and the beautiful starry sky... A warm wind began to blow. Here and there in the distance I saw many small fires, like elf fires, smoldering. Nagasaki had been completely destroyed." By the time the sun rose, Yamahata had made his way to the center of what was no longer a city. As the day went on, he retraced his steps, along the way taking photographs of the carnage and destruction until he was back at the train station.
All in all, he took 119 photographs that day, capturing some of the most haunting and enduring images of the atomic age. In one, a bloodied boy holding a rice ball stares, his head covered with an air raid hood (a dark cloth that the Japanese military handed out to civilians telling them it would protect them from American bombs); in another, an exhausted-looking woman nurses a badly burnt baby.
In almost every image, the ground is littered with burnt bodies and unattached limbs, household items, rubble, and timbers. As he walked through the missing city, people cried out for water or for help uncovering bodies buried in the rubble. "It is perhaps unforgiveable," reflected Yamahata, "but in fact at the time I was completely calm and composed. In other words, perhaps it was just too much, too enormous to absorb." Returning to Tokyo, Yamahata took advantage of the general confusion that surrounded the Japanese surrender to the Americans and managed to hold on to his negatives, rather than turning them over to his superiors.
A handful of his images were published in Japanese newspapers at the end of August 1945, before the American army arrived and the U.S. occupation began. In October 1945, occupation authorities imposed a ban on photographing the atomic sites and on the publication of all atomic-related stories (and the images that went with them). Most of Yamahata's photographs from Nagasaki were not seen until 1952, after Japan was once again an independent nation and Life Magazine published a few of his Nagasaki photos. That same year almost all the Nagasaki photographs were published in Japan under the title: Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki, A Photographic Record. The book includes sketches by Eiji Yamada and an essay by Jun Higashi, his two companions in Nagasaki that day.
In the introduction, Yamahata wrote: "Human memory has a tendency to slip and critical judgment to fade with the years and with changes in life style and circumstance… These photographs will continue to provide us with an unwavering testimony to the realities of that time."
Remembering
When I was young, to keep memory from "slipping," our family and friends marked the anniversary of those terrible days in a distant land with a demonstration or vigil. Often, we ended with a ceremony of remembrance, setting paper lanterns afloat on water in honor of those who died.
Admittedly, this would not pass for a carefree American summer evening, but even as a little girl I came to feel as if I knew some of the A-bomb survivors personally -- the experience of Akihiro Takahashi, the photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, and perhaps closest to my heart, the story of Sadako Sasaki.
The children's book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, written by Eleanor Coerr, brought me close to one girl whose life was cut short by my government's A-bomb long before I was born. I was then a chubby, sedentary kid, and so found myself strangely intrigued and confused by Sadako's deep love of running.
She was just two years old when Little Boy exploded above her city, but eight or nine as the book begins, impatient and uncomfortable with all the obligatory ceremonies surrounding the anniversary of the bomb in Hiroshima. She did not like to look at the survivors or care to hear the terrible stories. All she wanted to do was run. Lithe, athletic, and popular, Sadako joined a footrace on the very anniversary of the destruction of her city and, when she found herself unable to finish, was taken to the doctor only to discover that she had "atom bomb sickness" -- in her case, leukemia.
In the hospital, a friend reminded her of an ancient Japanese belief: if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, the Gods will grant you a wish. So with the help of her classmates, she began to do just that. Scrap paper, candy wrappers, fancy printed paper: all become tiny origami birds of hope.
With her as an inspiration, I learned to fold paper cranes, practicing until I could do so with my eyes closed and fold them as small as a pea. Childhood being childhood, what may have impressed me most was a friend of mine who could fold those origami birds with her toes.
On October 25, 1955, with 356 birds left to go (as Coerr tells it), Sadako died. Since 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden folded crane has stood in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, draped with small paper birds sent from children all over the world, a symbol of peace.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki Today
Sixty-four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we need more than symbols of peace. Folding paper cranes alone cannot, unfortunately, end the threat of nuclear war. Memories of the destruction fade, the hibakusha grow even older and die, the haunting pictures end up in books stored spine out on bookshelves.
Meanwhile, the terror of nuclear annihilation -- so keen at certain moments during the long superpower Cold War stand-off -- seems to have worn off almost completely. That's too bad, since the actual threat of nuclear war remains hidden but potent. The nine nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia, France, England, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea -- have more than 27,000 operational nuclear weapons among them, enough to destroy several Earth-sized planets. And in May, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that the number of nuclear powers could double in a few years unless new disarmament is a priority. Is it any wonder then that, according to a recent Rasmussen opinion poll, one in five Americans believe nuclear war "very likely" in this century, and more than half, "likely"?
The unthinkable is still under consideration -- even as the Obama administration takes its first steps in the right direction. In an April speech in Prague, President Obama publicly embraced the goal of seeking "the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." In its wake, his administration has begun taking still quite modest but potentially important steps towards that goal, including: renewed talks with Russia over mutual nuclear reductions, conversations initiated in the Senate about jump-starting the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban, stalled these last 10 years, and of negotiations for the also stalled Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, imagined as an internationally verified ban on the production of nuclear materials for weapons.
Right now, however, the American nuclear landscape -- little acknowledged or discussed -- remains grimly potent. According to the authoritative Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the United States still maintains a nuclear stockpile estimated at 5,200 warheads -- of which approximately 2,700 are operational (with the rest in reserve), while the Obama administration will spend more than $6 billion on the research and development of nuclear weapons this year alone.
At some point early next year, the administration will complete a Nuclear Posture Review outlining the role it believes nuclear weapons should play in the American pantheon of power, and, if the president follows through on his anti-nuclear statements, perhaps that document will at least begin to limit the scenarios in which such weapons could be used. In the meantime, the policy of the United States remains no different than it was in 2004, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy. It said, in part, that the United States possesses nuclear weapons for the purposes of "destroying those critical war-making and war-supporting assets and capabilities that a potential enemy leadership values most and that it would rely on to achieve its own objectives in a post-war world." Read that sentence again, and think, under such a doctrine, what might the United States not bomb?
Keep in mind as well that the bombs which annihilated two Japanese cities and ended so many lives 64 years ago this week were puny when compared to today's typical nuclear weapon. Little Boy was a 15 kiloton warhead. Most of the warheads in the U.S. arsenal today are 100 or 300 kilotons -- capable of taking out not a Japanese city of 1945 but a modern megalopolis. Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and a former launch-control officer in charge of Minutemen Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles armed with 170, 300, and 335 kiloton warheads, pointed out a few years ago that, within 12 minutes, the United States and Russia could launch the equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshimas.
It is unthinkable. It seems unimaginable. It sounds like hyperbole, but consider it an uncomfortable and necessary truth. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the children of our future need us to understand this and act upon it -- 64 years too late... and not a minute too soon.
- Posted in
46 Comments so far
Show AllAnd do not forget the six warheads "mistakenly taken" from a US Air Force base recently. Many, many lapses in security were required for the bombs to be taken from the base and we still do not know the details of what happened that day.
And now seven of the airmen involved in the incident have died - from accidents or aledged suicides. Think what would have happened if the bombs were not discovered by alert airmen when the plane landed? Were there others involved who did not fulfill the final stage of the plan? Or was it just an incredible coincidence that so many procedures went wrong and so many airmen were asleep on the job? If they are that lax in their procedures in the USA, how lax are they in the other nuclear powers?
For a great story with the details of all of the actual coincidences documented in the footnotes, see www.9112010.com
Black Flag?
Someone's gonna get sued by the producers of "Jericho" :)
These were sad stories, there are more from families that lost their husbands and fathers to these same people. War is a horrible business with no winners.
There has been no nuclear war. Lets hope there won't be. But there will be no disarmament and only naive people would think there would be.
To these same people?
Since when do an entire people pay for the crimes of its Military.?
Were American Children guilty of the 2 million plus killed in Vietnam and is it your contention that their lives therefore forfeit?
This was a war crime.
This was no different then a Military unit trying to take a hill where an enemy dug in and dragging up the CHILDREN Of that "enemy" and putting bullets into their heads as they shoot them over a ditch UNLESS that enemy surrenders unconditionaly.
This was the greatest single act of terrorism ever committed by one nation on another.
Yes war is a horrible business. That hardly means that the slaughter of Civilians is justified.
Henry8: "There has been no nuclear war. "
So - and just why do the bombings of these two cities not qualify as such?
There are nuclear wars going on right now wherever Depleted Uranium Munitions (DUM) are being used.
The calculated risks of "mutually assured destruction" that kept the US and then-Soviet bigwigs from hitting Defcon 1 and turning the missiles loose are no longer a consideration. With nukes in the hands of India, Pakistan, and Israel, and their internal as well as external influences with no qualms about the consequences, the outright ban and demobilization of nuclear weapons is the only real alternative. People are so afraid of North Korea, which does not have the means for a successful launch, that they forget about the other members of the Nuclear Club. Even in the US, Neocons still maintain that a theater or limited deployment is feasible. Sorry kids - no such thing.
And the the US happily sells nuclear technology and supplies to India who has not signed the non-proliferation treaty while the US continues to moan about Iran.
Could there be hidden agendas here?
Sioux Rose
I was born on August 9 (about a decade after) and perhaps am imprinted by the legacy of this date. I have been a peace-activist since 13.
It amazes me, truly proves telling in a manner consistent with Mars rules, that so-called "God-fearing" nations would invest in more of this. 100 Hiroshimas? Is not the magnitude of the blasts along with the heat of the flames consistent with the image most summon for HELL? And so, in the name of God, (the most apt god being Mars, the entity that takes glory in war and destruction) what truly is pursued is a worship of death, dismemberment, and a diabolical assault on all things living. Such action (and expensive preparations for more of same) is an attack on the God of the living!
Of those hundreds of thousands who died those days, or succumbed to slow deaths as a result of the radioactive exposures, it would be my earnest hope that in reincarnating, they would serve as great peace advocates having retained (at the level of soul memory) so direct an imprint of what war costs. When enough truly recognize the folly, and do what they can in their own small worlds to defuse anger, prejudice, vengeance and narrow, inflamed "sense of other" easily morphed into pseudo-enemy status, then perhaps all that has fueled Mars these long centuries will collapse into the blackhole (absence of Light!) that constitutes its true essence. That of the No-thing place... a vacuum that extinguishes all bright life into its utter darkness.
What a legacy for the U.S. And as I related yesterday in response to this same theme, America's leadership & military act like a drunk driver who already has on his record what should pass for manslaughter charges. And still he determines to drive under the influence, now in a faster, more deadly vehicle. This is progress? Hardly. It is the hubris typically associated with the warior mentality, not unlike the type of macho driver who is lost and running out of gas, but can't compromise himself to stop and ask for better directions!
wow,sioux rose, what a beautiful and deservedly scathing comment, thanks. With your permission i would add that the "No-thing place" you refer to ,from my experience is full. Full of light and full of darkness. a kind of self effulgent darkness/light. A brilliantly shining ebony held by an exquisite stillness.
Sioux Rose
SIRIOS: I think we all "see" what we project to an extent. I guess I might have used a sound metaphor more effectively; as I intended to invoke a zone where all the harm that Mars does passes. Perhaps the cadence of so many cries and screams all echoing at once would better deliver the image I'd intended. I appreciate your input and honor your interesting response.
Siouxthsayer Rose, lots of Leo's here, RV, (me too), you and Mortechai with the same birth date as the Nagasaki bombing. What's the meaning of it all? If Mars rules, what then? Are we mere victims of cosmic forces? if so who are we to question why? ours is to do and die. Or, if we have free will, what does Mars have to do with it? It's just a force (symbolic?) in nature along with innumerable others that are available for us to choose from (or are we chosen by?), forming a cocktail of intricate personalities and situations. IMHO, The symbolic nature of Mars doesn't rule a damn thing unless we let it. BTW I have Mars in Scorpio on the midheaven as part of a grand cross, sometimes I scare people and I don't even mean to. Who's in charge here? Me or the stars? From stardust ye came and to stardust ye return. What a strange trip it's been.
Sioux Rose
REBEL: I feel I have led a very strange life and seen evidence of "fate" (what others might dismiss as "coincidence") operate SO often that when I attended a lecture on eclipses at a professional astrological convention (Miami, l985), as soon as the speaker explained that eclipses recur, which is to say these are permanently MARKED meridians relative to earth's journey around the sun, and their energies are recapitulated at 9.5 year intervals... I KNEW I was born on one. That is true. August 9 represents the date of a major eclipse cycle. (I lost my book on this subject, but the eclipses are named after their astronomer discoverers.)
Nixon resigned on August 9, a horrific weapon exploded over Japan that day, and there are probably many more MAJOR events that TIE IN with this eclipse cycle. I had the opportunity to interact with a trance medium who I believe to be bona fide (I have met a far greater number of frauds in this field, to be sure) who told me that persons born at such times MUST take in a much wider angle reference, so to speak, in terms of their perceptions (across their lifespan).
Perhaps you recall an article published by CD about 2 years ago where the statistician believed Republicans to be happier than democrats. For one thing, the definition of happiness, as in what makes an individual feel happy, was not discussed. I point this out because simpletons whose reality stops at their front door can be relatively "happy" with a slice of pizza and a decent movie featured that night on HBO. The greater the expanse of personal consciousness, the more it perceives its welfare in terms of the welfare (or suffering) of others. This is one stage (of many) in the mandatory curriculum of Earth School 101 as intended for human spiritual evolution, a parallel to its biological equivalent.
I wonder if we instructed all school children that ultimately they are part of a time-share experiment. Would they not treat better the vacation home they are bound in time to return to?
Excellent article, though one very important point was omitted, likely unintentionally.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian cities, and provided no armaments for the war effort. They were completely undefended.
Hiroshima had an army base and Nagasaki had a navy base.
Both cities had been left untouched by conventional bombing so that our military could better assess the damage from the nuclear weapons.
Because they were not being bombed, many civilians came to these cities for safety.
Thank you for the correction! [Embarassed]
No problem.
This of course is cited by some as a justification for using these terrible weapons (weapons which never should have been used).
My thought is always for this justification: "If these targets were so important, how long did the US prolong the war by leaving these military targets untouched by conventional bombs?"
The depravity of reserving several cities for nuclear experimentation has always disgusted me.
It could have taken little sophistication to measure the blast radius at Alamagordo and work out what would happen.
Even data on radiation damage to humans could be easily acquired working with a small population rather than entire cities.
Even the argument that this was done to save US soldiers is bogus. The force could have been palpably demonstrated outside a city - with some damage, most likely, but far less.
No.
I have to assume such things are done for anger and the fascination of seeing human bodies marked by the wounds one carries in soul.
Sioux
BARDAMU: Another explanation, which I have recently come to as quite viable by my own observations, is that many persons interested in this sort of "personal big bang thing," are perhaps intellectually developed, but their "emotional I.Q" is stunted, or in a category that would approximate a form of retardation. They have these kick ass expensive "toys" and damn it, they want to use them and see what happens; and use them they will! Besides (given this nation's allegiance to Mammon and Mars) they cost a whole lotta money! The human portion of the equation in the form of the remotest capacity for empathy may not exist for these military planners (and their civilian bosses) at all. However, that neither saves the dying nor neutralizes the karmic accounts incurred. "Thou Shalt not Kill" is about as plain as it gets.
Interesting. This kind of thing nearly always leaves me perplexed.
I wonder though what an "emotional IQ" amounts to, though I see that people can be cerebrally agile yet dense about feelings. But I suspect that it's not a question of the same kind of intelligence about a different thing, but a holistically distinct arrangement of perceptions (or intelligences?) within a given person.
For example, I have the impression that an emotional spectrum informs your posts continually, whatever other information you may integrate into a given response. We all function differently from day to day, and we all respond to different problems differently, but I doubt I would recognize your posts without this factor, whatever we might call it.
Now, to those whom "Thou shalt not kill" is not plain, do we have a failure in some alacrity, or the loss of some spectrum of sense, or does that vary between individuals?
I suspect a missing or undeveloped spectrum, though, as I say, I'm puzzled.
Since abuse and exploitation run rampant, might the numbness not descend from trauma?
I can't prove it. However --
I remember a physics professor who had purchased a Luftwaffe officer's uniform for a Halloween party, a uniform with a crop, black boots, and a long coat.
He began to talk about how he could understand how the Nazis were taken with the style of the uniform, how it covered so much of him, how he could step on things with the boots and not feel them, how the shades hide his expression, how the long coat hid the flinches in his gestures.
He finished by talking of how his parents burned down in his house when he had been a young boy, and how he never never never wanted to feel for anyone again. His expression barely, barely changed.
That was dramatic. But I wonder at the outwardly, supposedly small slights most all the children I have ever known have faced.
I suspect that beneath these numb insistences on practicalities patently false lie tears and rages that only sallow, seldom or never ripple the faces.
You know, I think, that sense that you can watch someone and see that place where something stops and something fails and face and body hedge to move around it. Think of the responses when one or another time you touched that spot in someone.
Now, to pull it out? -- how I would know the how and when!
Sioux Rose
BARDAMU: I have lots of reactions to your evocative post. First, I don't think one explanation precludes another. Think of them rather like layers of an onion. Trauma alters persons in ways that may be unseen, but usually results in permanent wounds. The choice is whether to actively face the pain and learn to heal through forgiveness (which does carry the gift of transformation along with it, something like drawing poison from a wound so it can heal); or submerge it, in which case sadistic impulses that seem unrelated to that initial trauma occur at sometimes strange and seemingly unwarranted intervals.
I do NOT think the emotional range can be measured in something so succinct as an "I.Q" test. And as you probably know, I feel that the entire "side" of sentience that is more developed in women (I am speaking about that diffusive knowing typically referred to as intuition) has been discounted in both individuals and as a collective resource. I am a bit pumped up at the moment because I recently completed a book that teaches women to reconnect with estranged/disowned feelings. Our society does NOT want people to feel. Did you catch the article about anti-depressant prescription numbers going up? Like recessions/depressions make anyone (apart from the bankers who engineer them like tunnels in order to take their cut of profit on the going and the coming back around) feel especially good? What happens to a society that disallows feelings? That has millions shutting down with TV, alcohol, street drugs and/or antidepressants? I believe this is a much greater factor in explaining the seeming political apathy (in the face of so much egregiously bad government) than any other. And I don't think it's accidental, by a long shot.
Wow, Sioux!
This sure deserves a thoughtful response, but I haven't half the thinking done.
Your "not mutually exclusive" is duly noted.
No, I don't expect you'd find any of this succinctly measurable.
I find the antifeeling thing very central and crucial. And I don't think "accidental" describes it well at all, though "conscious" fails as well, doesn't it?
Denial is such a peculiar thing, though so common and so familiar - to know so well as to thrust knowing away, yet to unknow it somehow, to breathe it daily uncomposed, to embody it unawares.
Got me.
Sioux Rose
BARDAMU: As per "the spot" you referenced, one of my favorite films of all time was Fellini's "La Strada." The scene where Zompano, played by Anthony Quinn, realizes the little companion he'd treated so harshly has passed out of this world, a fact learned when he confronts a little boy whistling the tune she always whistled.
I read a biography on Fellini that listed his street address in Rome. Before the great director passed out of this world I wrote him a letter relating how it touched me as a child to see my father, not unlike Zompano in certain emotional ways, break down and cry when he'd watch that movie.(Fellini wrote back to me!) It opened for me a lifetime attraction to foreign films; and the university I attended happened to have offered a great program in that regard. My college roommate always thanks me for opening that door to her. She lives in NYC where film choices so far exceed the options where I live; but of course, now there is Netflix to even the gap!
"Even data on radiation damage to humans could be easily acquired working with a small population rather than entire cities."
Actually, there was precious little information on radiation damage, through to the end of the 1940s.
Witness US policy of sending largely unprotected soldiers into early blast zones just hours after a detonation.
The first standards for monitoring exposure indicated that humans could accumulate X (sorry, I don't recall the exact value) roentgens over a year's time span without danger. Some bright spark in the Army thought that the human body could absorb the same roentgens over a brief period of several hours without danger (as long as the body accumulated no more over the succeeding year).
Every single man from those early exposure experiments are now dead.
Errors & errors, sure, but none to imagine it were safe, and all discoverable without an entire city of human victims. They could as easily have created the kind of data they would get later from sheep.
And of course the blast crater at Alamagordo would have been unsubtle.
Not that the treatment of American ranchers in the '50's and 60's was otherwise better, but there were fewer people involved.
FOR THE SIXTY- FIFTH TIME, NO MORE WAR . I guess it is ok to kill someone as long it is done in an acceptable manner. My, how polite and compassionate. Yes, i understand the collateral damage and fallout issue, around A bombs but how about addressing the intense fear based stress that all individuals carry with them and project into the atmosphere on a daily basis. this stress, at some point becomes manifest in the form of individual and world conflict. war is not only a reflection of this inner chaos but is also used by the powerful to make money and control those who buy into the lie that war creates peace. Real peace has absolutely nothing to do with war. War and the "absence of war" is appearing inside of real peace. the only thing that nuclear weapons provide is a deterrent. A deterrent to love,compassion and peace. These are the only states in life that have any intrinsic value. all else should be thrown into a pile of shit where they will instantly become indistinguishable from their surroundings. All naturally occurring states know themselves by themselves. All thoughts and actions arising out of the human mind, need their opposite, to exist. And, you know how opposites feel about each other.
In 2005 I attended a House Appropriations Committee Meeting where a military officer was bragging to the committee that they had brought Fallujah, Iraq in "under-budget". Apparently it is quite economical to squirt an entire city with nepalm and burn it down - UNDER BUDGET.
The most depressing part of the committee meeting was that all the members were impressed - not a single Democrat on the committee had a problem with this sort of barbaric behavior. Of course the "Supplemental War Spending" was easily passed - as it has been ever since. PRAISE THE LORD!
. . . in the introduction, Yamahata wrote: "Human memory has a tendency to slip and critical judgment to fade with the years and with changes in life style and circumstance."
I was born on August 9, 1945. So every year at my birthday I am always reminded of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The Yamahata quote above is important, even crucial, because it explains why the Republicans will eventually come back to power and control yet again the federal government. They will be led (if you can call it that) by yet another dumb, witless, aggressive religious fanatic who, like George Wanker Bush, will live and breathe apocalypse and bring the world closer to thermonuclear destruction which they yearn for. I am not looking forward to shuffling off out of this life but I certainly don't want to experience yet again the rabid junkyard dogs, the runaway train, of Republican rule. As Yamahata points out, however, it is inevitable.
Sioux Rose
Mordechai, we share a birthday? Dang. We're the virtual Steve Lawrence/Eddie Gourmet cosmic equivalent on this site. Our postings should be choreographed a little tighter, don't you think?
Happy Birthday, Sioux Rose. I'll think about you on Sunday the ninth.
The U.S. will NEVER give up the threat of nuclear weapons, nor even the threat of first use. As an imperial power, the U.S. looks upon that threat as an existential necessity just as the British empire once looked upon its naval supremacy.
Since current U.S. policy doesn't even forego the possible use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations, there is little incentive for others to deny themselves a nuclear deterrent. To the contrary, U.S. policy provides a strong positive incentive for other nations to acquire whatever nuclear weapons they are capable of creating or obtaining from any source.
Coupled with U.S. "strategies" for creating terrorists on a global scale faster than it can kill them, it's a great recipe for imperial self-destruction and should probably be applauded as such.
Having been born in August 1941, I, like Mordechai Shiblikov, am quite willing to miss the ultimate denouement. Good luck to the survivors, if any.
Sioux Rose
RV: I'm glad you didn't say "inevitable denouement."
Taking your analogy of the British navy a step further, the U.S. came to replace them. What is to say something is not in the workings to replace America's hegemony? The thing about looking back for answers is that one never anticipates a great many things, inventions for one, that inordinately alter life as known in any given era. Thus the thing that shifts around the premise of supremacy might not even BE a weapon. Suppose it turned out to be something that had the capacity to energetically undermine the frequency at which specific weapons function? The best my imagination can conjure would be something tantamount to utilization of the NEXT dimension. Certainly there are others out there. Metaphysically-oriented types believe the reason we don't recognize the UFOs and their inhabitants is because they move through frequencies that bypass our senses, altogether. I believe I heard somewhere that when the white colonialists from Spain first landed on the South American shores, because the indigenous had no conception that something as vast as a large ship-vessel of that stature existed, they were not initially even seen. The art of disguise is nothing new to persons or nature (the whole realm of camouflage comes under this rubric); what promises to prove unique likely first exists on supersensible planes, until that time comes which will open another door. That's what the discoveries of Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto catalyzed, or coresponded with as their "discoveries" linked directly with the onset of new energy mediums that radically shifted much of civilization. My point as the moon grows to fullness in Aquarius, my favorite time of the month for really creative perception, is that "there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of..." by most.
I'll have to admit, Sioux Rose, that I'm not very much of student of metaphysical phenomena, but I'll willingly bow to your expertise in that area.
I can, on the other hand, entertain the possibility of currently undreamed of scientific advancements with military applications that could conceivably render nuclear weapons obsolete. I just don't anticipate such an occurance within my remaining lifespan, but no one would be happier than I to be proven wrong.
Sioux Rose
RV: I merely sought to mention that the future can always shape itself in an unanticipated way. Even though much of astrology is geared towards the art of prediction, there are always unforeseen elements and consequences.
In some of my reading I've come across compelling spiritual voices that state (and believe) Divine intervention would stop an all-out nuclear war on this planet. Now it could well be that intervention comes from a more evolved type of being, one that resides within our "universal neighborhood," and has had about all they can take of the "noisy neighbors blasting boom box equivalents" at all hours.
In a channeled session with a trance medium I was told that human life on this planet WAS purposely "seeded" with a genetic line from higher beings several thousand years ago. IF we are something of an experiment to that entity, it would seem they would check in on our progress from time to time.
Human beings today are messing around with genetics, forming their own potential "life forms" as a result of the braiding together of genetic lines. Is it really outside the realm of possibility that WE are that experiment to a higher form of life? I rule out nothing. So much that we take to be "real" today SHOULD qualify as science-fiction; why the very nature of corruption in our country seems itself implausible given the ideals we were raised to believe about our nation, and our selves.
Sorry Sioux, but why do we have to look outward to find a higher form of life, when that higher form is manifest within each one of us.
Just because the planet is plagued by a few sociopathic Neanderthal idiots who cannot evolve further than seeing their power in terms of mutually assured destruction (MAD), does not mean that the rest of us must forfeit our world and rationality to their view.
I am a little tired of the resignation expressed by so many commentators here today. The fact is that a few of these power mongers who see themselves as "leaders" and attend stupid self aggrandising meeting like the Trilateral Commission, or Bilderberg Group, or CFR, or Scull and Bones, or some other form of power masturbation fest that have you all convinced that its all because the other guy won't give up his weapons, and you cannot trust a ___ (fill in the blank).
Well did you ask him? Do you really want a few tens of thousands of nuclear war heads to obliterate the world 6 times over, does the average Russian or Brit or Israeli, or Indian; no, of course not. It is just those power mongers, and the corruption they serve. Most people have been indoctrinated by them too.
So when you break it down, perhaps you can figure who really is the enemy, and who is the slave, who the fool.
At the end of the day we will in any case have to rely on the higher self within anyway, also we will be dead anyway. Since the first nuclear attacks directed against civilian populations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which by the way all nuclear weapons are built to do, the so called developed nations who posses these abominable weapons became pure and simple terrorists, each nation holding the other nations people hostage to obliteration and instant anarchy.
Effectively this has put governments beyond people, and we the people have become slaves to the fear that keeps them in power. But, that power derives from us "citizens" in the first place, so why do we accept their paradigm. Its consequence has already denied our relevance, accepting our demise as a collateral loss. What the weapons are protecting is just "their power", not us. And we can live better without them, that is to say both the weapons and the sociopaths...
So lets get rid of them and start living with our higher selves, and seek the higher selves in others rather than be guided by the fear! 'The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave, only one.'
British naval supremacy was based on having the best navy, not the only navy.
Nuclear weapons are different. Nuclear weapons can be used to bully if only the bully has them. It doesn't matter that the US might have better nuclear weapons than China or India. The US can't bully China or India with them, given the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
Missy Beattie
"Imagine there's no heaven." it isn't hard for me to try.
In 1995, from Ashkelon Prison, Mordechai Vanunu noted: "A radioactive cloud consumed rubbed out Hiroshima...A live nuclear test sentenced you. A nuclear laboratory…children women trees animals in and under a nuclear mushroom…burning… burned…flattened to ground radioactive ash-Hiroshima...Nuclear weapons gamblers win against you…Hollywood doesn't know you - you are not a Jewish Holocaust."
In April 2004, and just three days after Vanunu was released from 18 years in jail for providing the photographic proof and telling the truth about Israel's clandestine seven story underground WMD Program in the Negev, Uri Avnery wrote:
"Everybody understands that he has no more secrets. What can a technician know after 18 years in jail, during which technology has advanced with giant steps?
"But gradually it becomes clear what the security establishment is really afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close partnership with the United States in the development of Israel's nuclear armaments.
"This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the State Department for 'arms control', Under-Secretary John Bolton, has come to Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can cause severe damage to the mighty super-power.
"The Americans, it seems, are very worried. The Israeli security services have to dance to their tune. The world must be prevented by all available means from hearing, from the lips of a credible witness, that the Americans are full partners in Israel's nuclear arms program, while pretending to be the world's sheriff for the prevention of nuclear proliferation."
The rest of The 64th Anniversary of USA Terrorism Enlightened by the Wisdom of Nonviolence @
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
well, all we have to do to convince the president of the united states to disarm the nuclear weapons would be to find his speech writers and convince them there's something hilarious about the whole thing --
everyone should just kick back with a brewski --
if the president gets enough good lines, and some jokes, and it maybe improves his ratings a little...he might just
end the nuclear arms race
good luck on your mission
Sioux Rose stated:
“I believe I heard somewhere that when the white colonialists from Spain first landed on the South American shores, because the indigenous had no conception that something as vast as a large ship-vessel of that stature existed, they were not initially even seen.”
... I’ve been sharing this very story for over twenty years now -although in much greater detail. At one time I thought it might be nice to be able to quote the source, so I began a long, extensive search through my personal library in an effort to find that mysterious volume I was certain I had still possessed. I never found it. There were times when I began to question whether or not I simply dreamed up the poignant narrative myself in order to make a more telling metaphorical, mystical analogy. You can’t imagine what a relief it is to see that this isn’t the case after all. Although I must admit that it would have been quite the honor to have had an initial hand in co-creating such a magical interpretation none the less. I moved many years ago, and had to leave behind a nice library of very eclectic, very esoteric and very mystical volumes. What I can gather from your own unique perspective is that I suspect we have read many of the very same books, and I am sure it was from that old collection of mine where that story first came to my attention… I still do not know the title of the book, the author, or the source. I do remember however that the author did mention that this very story was recorded for posterity in the ships –and the Captains- own log books –except I no longer recall the ship, or the Captain… Interesting...
"He who is swimming against the stream comes to the source" Gottfried Muller
Sioux Rose
Lawrence R: During my "gypsy phase" I retained a storage facility and was very grateful no tornado (as yet) took away all my books. Yes, I have an EXTENSIVE collection. I believe that allegory you sought a reference for was delivered in a lecture I attended. It could have been Deepak Chopra who related it, or more recently, Dr. Alberto Villoldo. I never wrote down the source of the reference.
Did you read "The Wisdom and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East," by Baird Spalding? One of my favorites. How about, "The Wheel of Rebirth," by H.L. Chaloner. Items by Seth/Jane Roberts, Leadbetter, Besant, Charles Fillmore, Eric Butterworth, notable astrologers (Alan Leo, Robert Hand), Casteneda, anything by or about Edgar Cayce, are some of MY favorites. Also anything by Yogananda.
Glad to find another kindred spirit in this eclectic forum!
Dear Ms Berrigan,
I am a nuclear veteran (Operation Redwing, Bikini Atoll, 1956) and have spent most of my adult life working for peace because I know the alternative at first hand. I am going to repost a poem I posted on another article on the bombs.
------------------------------
VJ Day plus 60
by
Steve Osborn
15 August, 1945 and the world went wild!
The insanity that had begun in 1939 was over.
Imperial Japan had surrendered, its one wish granted.
Few knew it had been trying to surrender for months,
Asking only to keep its Emperor, but no one would listen,
Except a small group who wondered why.
We had a lesson to teach, to Japan and the world at large.
On 16 July, 1945, in the American desert, Trinity was detonated.
Far more powerful than expected, the super weapon worked!
Horrified, many scientists said, “It must never be used.”
The war department said, “Just what we need.”
Intelligence said, “They’re trying to surrender.”
“Bomb an offshore deserted island,” the scientists said.
“Maybe it won’t go off,” the military said, “we’d look foolish.”
“Destroying a city without warning is barbaric,” said the diplomats.
“They really want to surrender,” said intelligence.
“We’ll call the city a military target,” said Truman,
“The Russians will get a big surprise.”
6 August 1945, an elderly gardener looked up from his spade
Admiring the silver plane flying far above.
His shadow remains etched in the concrete wall behind him.
Schoolchildren, housewives, tradesmen
Blown to rags of flesh or vaporized, the lucky ones.
Thousands of others doomed to slow death and disease.
“They keep asking for someone to take their surrender,” said intelligence,
“Can’t we at least talk to them?”
“They have to be taught a lesson and the world must see our power,”
“Besides, we have to test the second bomb,”said the military.
And so the wheels were set in motion for the second demonstration
Of Hell on earth.
9 August 1945, above the city of Kokura, the Gods of Chance roll the dice.
A hundred thousand or more go about their business,
Unsuspecting of the doom flying above the thick cloud cover.
In Nagasaki, the people enjoyed the sunshine as the cloud cover broke.
“Secondary target is clear,” and their world suddenly ended in fire and shock
And radiation sleeting through their bodies.
“Now let them surrender,” said the military, “The test is completed.”
Two cities vaporized, two hundred thousand dead,
Survivors to suffer, some for days, some for decades,
And the nuclear arms race begun.
“By golly, we sure showed them!”
“We’ll let them keep their Emperor.”
15 August, 1945 and the world went wild!
The end of the war and of war itself!
There was dancing in the streets and love in the parks,
The blackouts ended in the streets and the homes.
Japan and Germany licked their wounds and hoped to recover.
In Washington, and the Kremlin, midnight oil was burning.
15 August 2005, nations have risen and fallen;
War and genocide again ravage the world.
Treaties made by thoughtful men have been discarded
In the name of profit and greed; nuclear horror again hovers
Over a world exhausted by war, famine and disease.
Only the aging survivors remember the bloody lesson, taught so long ago.
Steve Osborn
15 August 2005
------------------------------
As Pete Seeger sang so long ago, "When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?"
I'll post another commemorating the Castle-Bravo shot in 1954, which devastated Rongalap, on a following post.
Best of luck,
Steve O.
The Day of Two Sunrises
My brother and I went to play
By the boats pulled up on the beach.
We raced and played tag
And chased land crabs in the predawn light.
The sun began to light the east
As it always had before,
Suddenly, a second sun arose in the west
Where never the sun had risen!
We ran to Mama to ask her what and why.
She did not know and the new sun died
As quickly as it grew.
In the Men’s House, they talked and remembered.
The day began as always, the men to fish in their outriggers,
The mothers cooking and digging taro, gathering plantains
And watching over the children
Who played at fishing and gathering and ran and played tag.
Suddenly, from the sky fell white powder!
Once a missionary had told of snow. Perhaps this was snow!
It came down covering everything. It was sticky.
We played, and scooped it up and threw it at each other. It was fun!
That evening I did not feel so well. My eyes hurt and my stomach turned to water.
My brother’s body was covered with blisters and his skin began to fall off.
Mother was vomiting, too, and her beautiful hair
Began to come out in handfuls.
Mother wondered if it was the snow, so she washed us,
But the water was filled with snow and the scrubbing removed the skin.
Soon, the whole village was sick, and the animals, and the plants,
All were sick.
After two days, the strange men came, in boats with a large mouth
Which dropped open on the beach and white clad creatures came out.
They wore masks with strange eyes and a long round mouth.
They pointed sticks at us which buzzed and crackled.
They pointed the sticks at everything, the trees, the well, the fish,
And listened to the buzz and crackle, then made marks on little boards they carried.
Finally they left, but told us we were very sick and not to eat
Of the fish, the coconuts, the plantains, the taro, that they were now taboo.
The men returned in their large boats and said our island was now taboo.
They gathered us up, leaving everything behind
We were taken to another place where we were poked and bled.
We looked so terrible that the people must have been afraid.
They wore the strange white suits when they looked in on us.
My brother looked the worst, like an old man with scabs
Which broke and bled and his teeth fell out
And then he was dead.
Mama became an old woman with patchy hair
And always a sickness.
Each time she saw me, she cried.
I was so sick, so tired, and then one day I died.
* * *
In memory of the Rongalapese and other Islanders who were poisoned by Castle Bravo (13.5 megatons, 1 March 1954) and other bombs. Just collateral damage in the quest for knowledge and power.
Steve Osborn
25 February 2004
Thank you for both of these most moving postings.
(collateral - descended from a common ancestor)
Siouxrose stated:
"I believe that allegory you sought a reference for was delivered in a lecture I attended. It could have been Deepak Chopra who related it, or more recently, Dr. Alberto Villoldo."
... As for myself, it was definitely taken from a book. I can still almost visualize the passages as they were written...
“I never wrote down the source of the reference.”
... Yeah, me neither...
“Did you read "The Wisdom and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East," by Baird Spalding?”
... Wasn’t that a five volume affair? I remember Fillmore, Butterworth and others from my old Unity church days. I recall picking up my first Seth book when they were still located under ‘Witchcraft and the Occult.’ I’ve probably read every Seth book since. Almost the same with Edger Cayce as well. I know a lot of people have less than charitable opinions of old, New Age folks, but they still hold a soft spot in my heart since in many respects –they were some of my first. My first introductions to more unconventional wisdom, discourse, and alternative viewpoints, that is. Not unlike this very site here at CD. I've always been fairly politically aware, which greatly perplexed many of my would be 'spiritual' friends. I never saw a contridiction to seeing the truth spiritually, or seeing the truth politically. It was one and the same to me. And liberal and spiritual are about as close to being the same thing in my interpretation as any two words or concepts could be. It still puzzles me why most liberal folks 'and' most spiritual folks just don't see it that way themselves...
“Glad to find another kindred spirit in this eclectic forum!”
... And I'm glad to finally see that our mutually shared story has another source other than my own fertile imagination!... :-)
Lawrence R
"He who is swimming against the stream comes to the source" Gottfried Muller
So why is it that the Yosuke Yamahata photographs from _Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki, A Photographic Record_ are so hard to come by? I've memorialized Hiroshima Day for 35 years on the beach and in churches and parks. Once a few years ago I was able to obtain some of the photos for display in our church, but it was an exceptional opportunity.
These photographs ought to be readily available on the net. They are not. Is somebody making money by restricting their audience? It's just like the government conspiracy to cover up the Guantanamo Camp X-Ray photographs.
Keeping such secrets for so long is antithetical not only to our first amendment rights but also against Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and recognized in international human rights law in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Show. Show. Show.
Show his eyes, and grieve his heart;
Come like shadows, so depart!
Our over-developed visual cortexes need these shadow images as we need images on the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan. Blacking them out makes everything phantom-like and unreal. A brainwash of excellent efficacy.