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Hiroshima

Activists Mark 77th Anniversary Of Atomic Bombings At Nuclear Sub Base

August 11, 2022 Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Approximately 40 people were present on August 5th at a flash mob demonstration against Trident nuclear weapons at the Bangor submarine base. The demonstration was in the roadway, and blocked traffic entering the Main Gate of the Trident nuclear submarine base during rush hour traffic. Thirteen demonstrators were detained and cited by authorities. Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor is homeport to the largest concentration of deployed nuclear warheads in the U.S. The nuclear warheads are deployed on Trident D-5 missiles on SSBN submarines and are stored in an underground nuclear weapons storage facility on the base. Activists gathered early Monday morning on August 8th at the the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo to remember the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 77 years ago and to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

John Pilger: Another Hiroshima Is Coming — Unless We Stop It Now

August 7, 2022 John Pilger, Consortium News. , , ,
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river where the survivors still lived in shanties. I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped. He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell.

The People In Hiroshima Didn’t Expect It Either

August 5, 2022 David Swanson, World Beyond War. , , ,
When New York City recently released a grotesque “public service announcement” video explaining that you should stay indoors during a nuclear war, the corporate media reaction was principally not outrage at the acceptance of such a fate or the stupidity of telling people “You’ve got this!” as if they could survive the apocalypse by cocooning with Netflix, but rather mockery of the very idea that a nuclear war might happen. U.S. polling on people’s top concerns find 1% of people most concerned about the climate and 0% most concerned about nuclear war. Yet, the U.S. just illegally put nukes into a 6th nation (and virtually nobody in the U.S. can name either it or the other five that the U.S. already illegally had nukes in), while Russia is talking about putting nukes into another nation too, and the two governments with most of the nukes increasingly talk — publicly and privately — about nuclear war.

Where We Stand On August 6 And 9, 2022

August 5, 2022 H. Patricia Hynes, Portside. , , ,
August 6 and 9 mark the 77th year since the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, annihilating instantly an estimated 170,000 women, men and children and sentencing tens of thousands more to eventual death from radiation poisoning and injuries. American military leaders from all branches of the armed forces strongly dissented from the decision to use the bombs, some before August 1945, some in retrospect, for both military and moral reasons.  On Armistice Day 1948, Army General Omar Bradley captured the soulless militarism ruling the US government: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

Atomic Bomb Survivors—A Model For Us In COVID-19 Era

August 13, 2021 Robert Jay Lifton, The Bulletin. , , ,
Survivors of Hiroshima are a dying population. People who were 20 years old at the time of the bomb would now be 96. The survivors still alive were mostly children then, and they too are dying out. Does this suggest that the message of hibakusha, the original survivors, has come to an end? I do not think so. Consider the message that Hiroshima survivors have brought to the world. A history professor I interviewed during my 1962 study of hibakusha — “explosion-affected people” — described how, soon after the bomb, he looked down at the city from a high suburb: “Hiroshima had disappeared. … I was shocked by the sight. … Hiroshima didn’t exist — that was mainly what I saw — Hiroshima just didn’t exist.”

Hiroshima Is A Lie

August 6, 2021 David Swanson, World Beyond War. , ,
In 2015, Alice Sabatini was an 18-year-old contestant in the Miss Italia contest in Italy. She was asked what epoch of the past she would have liked to live in. She replied: WWII. Her explanation was that her text books go on and on about it, so she’d like to actually see it, and she wouldn’t have to fight in it, because only men did that. This led to a great deal of mockery. Did she want to be bombed or starved or sent to a concentration camp? What was she, stupid? Somebody photoshopped her into a picture with Mussolini and Hitler. Somebody made an image of a sunbather viewing troops rushing onto a beach. But could an 18-year-old in 2015 be expected to know that most of the victims of WWII were civilians — men and women and children alike? Who would have told her that? Certainly not her text books.

‘Black Rain’ Victims Finally Win In Court

August 6, 2021 Linda Pentz Gunter, Beyond Nuclear International. , , ,
Just weeks before the 2021 commemoration of the August 6, 1945 US atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima, a Japanese court ruled that victims of the radioactive “black rain” who were living beyond the officially recognized contamination zone at the time, should be included in the group considered bomb “survivors” or “Hibakusha” and receive the same benefits. A Hiroshima high court acknowledged in its July 14, 2021 ruling that many more people suffered as a result of exposure to “black rain” than have hitherto been recognized as victims. “Black rain” was described in a CNN story as a “mixture of fallout particles from the explosion, carbon residue from citywide fires, and other dangerous elements.

Hiroshima-Nagasaki: The Story They Want Us To Forget

August 5, 2021 Bruce K. Gagnon, Organizing Notes. , , , ,
The world's first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the barren plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known as the Jornada del Muerto (day of the dead). US President Harry Truman ordered the first atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Days later (August 9) Washington dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. Official figures of those killed by the atomic bombs is well over 150,000 from the two cities. More than 100,000 were injured with most likely dying. Then over the years many thousands have died from the initial radiation poisoning.

Why We Can’t Give Up On A World Free From Nuclear Weapons

February 2, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Peoples Dispatch. , , ,
Nine countries of the 193 member states of the United Nations possess nuclear weapons. Two of them—the United States of America and Russia—have more than 90% of all the 13,410 warheads. Four countries—the US, Russia, the UK and France—have at least 1,800 warheads on high alert, which means that they can be fired at very short notice. To compare the warheads currently deployed with the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima is enough to make the heart stop: the yield from the “Little Boy” used on Hiroshima is estimated at 15 kilotons, whereas the yield from one W88 warhead that is deployed on a Trident II submarine is estimated at 475 kilotons.

Remembering Hiroshima And Nagasaki By Shutting Down A Nuclear Base

August 12, 2020 Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. , , ,
At around 6:45 AM on Monday, demonstrators arrived at the Main Gate and formed a vigil line along the roadway. At around 7:05 AM, four “peacekeepers” entered the roadway and stopped traffic, while behind them, six demonstrators set themselves and their banners on the roadway. Three of the demonstrators carried a banner stating, “Hiroshima Nagasaki Never Again!” Two demonstrators held a blue painted banner stating, “No More Genocide in My Name.” One demonstrator carried a banner, “Peace Walk Nuclear-Free World, Black Lives Matter.”

Why The United States Shouldn’t Have Nuked Japan

August 7, 2020 By Brett Wilkins, Asia Times. , , ,
Among the truths held self-evident by millions of Americans is the notion that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, both American and Japanese. The choice, Americans learn, was between atomic bombs and an even bloodier invasion of Japan, whose fanatical citizens would have fought to the death defending their homeland and their emperor. This narrative is deeply flawed. Seven of the eight five-star US generals and admirals in 1945 opposed using the bomb. One of the opponents, General Dwight D Eisenhower, later said that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” “Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” Eisenhower wrote in 1954, by which time he was the president. “I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory 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.”

Another Hiroshima Is Coming

August 6, 2020 John Pilger. , , ,
In a major essay to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, John Pilger describes reporting from five ‘ground zeros’ for nuclear weapons – from Hiroshima to Bikini, Nevada to Polynesia and Australia. He warns that unless we take action now, China is next. When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open.

Nuclear War Can Be Stopped Before It Begins

August 6, 2020 Marina Martinez, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
Nuclear weapons have been posing a threat to humanity for 75 years — ever since the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These days, our focus is understandably on the COVID-19 virus and the threat it poses to human life. But as we commemorate the anniversary of these bombings, it is important to acknowledge that unlike the coronavirus, nuclear weapons can only be remediated with prevention. Millions of people could be killed if a single nuclear bomb were detonated over a large city, and the added threats of radiation and retaliation could endanger all life on Earth.

Atomic Bombings At 75: The Illegality Of Nuclear Weapons

August 5, 2020 By Francis Boyle, Consortium News. , , ,
The mere possession of nuclear weapons violates the Nuremberg Principles (decreed a day before Nagasaki) and other international laws. The human race stands on the verge of nuclear self-extinction as a species, and with it will die most, if not all, forms of intelligent life on the planet earth. Any attempt to dispel the ideology of nuclearism and its attendant myth propounding the legality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must directly come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8, 1945 [promulgated two days after Hiroshima and a day before Nagasaki], and violated several basic provisions of the Regulations annexed to Hague Convention No. 4 Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907), the rules of customary international law set forth in the Draft Hague Rules of Air Warfare (1923), and the United States War Department Field Manual 27-10, Rules of Land Warfare (1940).

US Launches Missile Test Less Than 48 Hours Before Hiroshima Anniversary

August 5, 2020 Sandy Jones, Waging Peace. , , ,
Santa Barbara, CA – The U.S. Air Force launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile Tuesday morning, August 4, at 12:21 a.m. PDT from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The missile traveled over 4,200 miles to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. While Air Force Global Strike Command asserts that missile tests are scheduled years in advance, it is difficult to ignore the timing of this test – less than 48 hours before the 75th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
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