Sudhan @16:10 CET
The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims’ names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East
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- John Pilger. The Guardian, Wednesday August 6 2008
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 walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. 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. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.” Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie. “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. “I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared – and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical bath”, as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. “Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “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 … 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.”
Tags: allied occupation, American lies, atomic bomb, Benny Morris, criminal act, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Iran, Israel, Japan, Leslie Groves, Nationa Archives Washington, New York Times disinfoms, United States, war criminals
The man to read on the subject is Gar Alperovitz.
http://hidhist.wordpress.com/war/the-decision-to-drop-the-bomb/
Thank you Anthony for the information. I have added this link to my other two blog posts.
The darkest moment in World history. I read John Hersey’s book many years ago and will never forget it. He was a famous War correspondent during WW2 and wrote about Hirshima in 1946.
I read Hersey’s book as a 14-year old at a posh English boarding school and was so shicked by what I read that I became for quite a few days quite vocally anti-bomb. It got me into quite a few discussions as most of my schoolmates swallowed the official bullshit that the bomb was necessary.
When, more recently, I read Gore Vidal’s reviews of Alperovitz’s book and of Robert Stibbert’s Day of Deceit (http://hidhist.wordpress.com/war/the-pearl-harbor-deception/), my blood boiled.