Saturday, August 06, 2005



Hiroshima Day

Hiroshima_aftermath

...Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steam-roller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can, in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb, I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

I picked my way to a shack used as a temporary police headquarters in the middle of the vanished city. Looking south from there I could see about three miles of reddish rubble. That is all the atomic bomb left of dozens of blocks of city streets of buildings, homes, factories and human beings.

There is just nothing standing except about twenty factory chimneys - chimneys with no factories. I looked west. A group of half a dozen gutted buildings. And then again nothing...

(Wilfred Burchett, "The Atomic Plague", London Daily Express, 6th September 1945, as quoted in John Pilger's Tell Me No Lies. Burchett was the first western journalist into Hiroshima after the bombing, and he wrote this perched on a concrete block admist the devastation he was describing.)

Today marks sixty years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The bombing killed an estimated 80,000 people instantly, and another 60,000 died of radiation poisoning before the end of 1945. Since then, almost one hundred thousand more have died from the long-term effects of radiation exposure.

The horror of the devastation described and shown above is bad enough, but the true horror is in the stories of the survivors - stories of people with their eyeballs melted, their skin falling off, or just lying crushed in the rubble and left to burn in the ensuing firestorm as people struggled to save themselves. I've read too many of these stories while trying to work out what to post here, and for once I just don't have the stomach to quote them.

There is one simple message we should take to heart on Hiroshima Day: Never Again. Never again should we permit our governments to wage war using such indiscriminate means, and never again should we allow a city to be destroyed in this way.

15 comments:

I visited hiroshima last year and will never forget taking a stroll through peace park and the museum. Even the most cold hearted of people would have trouble not feeling sympathy for what happened there.

I marvel that the city managed to rise up of the ashes after total distruction.

Posted by Stephanie : 8/07/2005 02:48:00 AM

"Why do not blame the Japanese"

Because that would be no different than blaming the Americans for the September 11th terrorist act. It's the old playground "they made me do it" argument. That argument reduces people's actions to those of mindless automata.

Posted by Anonymous : 8/07/2005 10:28:00 AM

> Never Again. Never again should we permit our governments to wage war using such indiscriminate means

Just to be pragmatic here - if lets say Russia or China went insane and attacked the USA (with the idea - lets say - of wiping out their jews and black people) and the USA refused to use indiscriminate weapons - then their best strategy would be to surrender (or possibly to die).

Sure it is a hypothetical but if someone else using a weapon is a hypothetical not worth worrying about so is you using that same weapon.

secondly assuming hte other side never has atomic weapons think how much shorter the war with the germans would have been if they had been able to demonstrate nuclear power at the begining of the war?

It might have saved tens of millions of lives at the cost of a couple of hundred thousand.

Posted by Genius : 8/07/2005 10:28:00 AM

The Americans have a very longstanding disregard for civilian lives as we've seen in Iraq and other places but if the atomic bombs hadn't have been dropped this http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/okinawa-battle.htm would have reoccured on a larger scale all the way to Tokyo.

Up to a third of the civilian population of the island died in the battle for Okinawa...most as collatoral damage, some by jumping off cliffs or comitting suicide in other upsetting ways rather than risking capture by the Americans, others as conscripted cannonfodder who got to run at American guns weilding sharpened chopsticks or whatever...so in reality the use of atomic bomb and the early end to the war probably saved a fair few Japanese lives as well as American ones. The scarey thing is that the Japanese leaders wanted to fight on after Hiroshima and Nagasaki but fortunately calmer heads prevailed.

Posted by Michael : 8/07/2005 12:11:00 PM

Well, er, actually they have, especially civilian lives..." We will bomb them into the stone age..."

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/3086/rev_tuchmanb.html

Posted by Unknown : 8/07/2005 08:29:00 PM

Not sure if you aent wandering off topic merc but anyway it is interesting that it talks of underestimating the VC when the VC was jsut a shell by the end of the war - it was mostly the nth vietnamese army and chinese support that was fighting.

Posted by Genius : 8/07/2005 09:06:00 PM

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserve to be commemorated, but at the same time let's not forget what happened in Nanjing during Japan's invasion of China. A greater number of people died there than at Hiroshima. I don't think their deaths were any less horrifying, or less worthy of being remembered.

Posted by Anonymous : 8/07/2005 10:27:00 PM

it's all too often forgotten that the US was engaged in supporting Chain against the Japanese, and was conducting the same sort of war against them as they were against the germans.

weren't they blockading supplies to the Japanese? things like oil etc?

anyhow, the main reason Pearl Harbour was such a shock was American complacency vs. their ability to be attacked. which bears a striking similarity to recent events.

step back and use sixty years worth of hindsight, in a strategic sense, PH was a brilliant stroke by the Japanese that very nearly saw the Americans knocked out of their Pacific colonies permanently. if it hadn't been for Midway they would have finished the job.

and again, the US didn't have to use the bomb. all that 'saving american lives' guff is sixty-year-old spin. they could have carpet bombed the entire archipelago from top to bottom, prevented any food at all from reaching the civilians, and forced them into submission, just like they did the Germans.

but letting off that bad-boy in Nagasaki made a very, very big statement to the Soviets. i.e. don't fuck with us or this is moscow.

Posted by Anonymous : 8/08/2005 08:44:00 AM

Funnily enough, there was a guy on Radio National here in Oz making a very good case that it was the entry of Russia into the Pacific war that precipitated the Japanese surrender, not the atom bombs. He also made the point that Hiroshima was a civilian target. That was why it burned so well and was so devastated; it was full of wooden houses.

Chris (clongson [at] bio.mq.edu.au)

Posted by Anonymous : 8/08/2005 04:34:00 PM

> Hiroshima was a civilian target.

a nice army that was concerned about human lives would have nuked an empty part of japan and said "just imagine if this was your city". that would have been the minimum casualties strategy - possibly accompanied by the starving of civilians suggested by che.

But Im afraid countries at war tend not to think like that. they tend to stop thinking about the best way to minimise enemy deaths when the enemy has been eating and raping them and their allies.

Besides - it is much more attractive to fight a country that consideres minimising your casualties.

Posted by Genius : 8/08/2005 06:53:00 PM

chris,

yeah, i heard a similar argument somewhere, where japan was making tentative negotiations with the soviets for a surrender, but cut to the chase when the bombs went off.

and genius, well, if i'd seen a bomb like that go off in the distance, and it devastated say, a forest?

i'd be looking for the dotted line.

Posted by Anonymous : 8/08/2005 07:41:00 PM

That fat bomb said one thing to the entire world...

We are the new world order.

Posted by Unknown : 8/08/2005 08:23:00 PM

Indeed Che - that is what i would have done... with the first bomb (then waited a few days for a surender).

I expect japan was thinking in a few months it might offer a peace treaty with the US that was reasonably favourable but far from a total surrender.

The US wanted unconditional surender. This is another policy you could dispute of course and argue that for example once the allies reaced the boarder of japan and germany they could have immediatly offered a peace treaty.

Posted by Genius : 8/09/2005 07:40:00 AM

genius, nah, i wouldn't dispute that the US wanted a total surrender. but i would insist, using the 60 years of hindsight, that it wasn't necessary to use the atomics.

i think another much overlooked factor in the need to use them is that the US just didn't have a very good military. they had a BIG military, well-supplied etc, but US troops were known during WW2 to no be particularly good, nor bad.

If they had have been as good as say, the Australians (i.e. the Kokoda Trail), they could have defeated the Japanese without anywhere near so many losses as say, Okinawa.

Posted by Anonymous : 8/09/2005 07:47:00 AM

I'd suggest that a combination of blockade and conventional bombing over may months would have killed more Japanese people (from bombing and starvation) than the atom bomb did.

The view at the time was that a demonstration explosion in an unpopulated area would have failed to convince the Japanese high command to surrender, and would have been simply kept from the population. After all, without publicity the people in Alberquerque knew nothing of the Trinity test (300km or so away).

Posted by Rich : 8/12/2005 11:00:00 AM