Lessons We Still Haven't Learned From Hiroshima & Nagasaki, 75 Yrs After US Atomic Bombings of Japan

Last edited Thu Aug 6, 2020, 07:23 AM - Edit history (1)

'The Lessons We Still Haven't Learned From Hiroshima and Nagasaki' 75 years after the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan, we remain perched on the precipice of unparalleled catastrophe. *By Helen Caldicott, The Progressive, Common Dreams. Aug. 5, 2020.

My birthday is August 7, sandwiched between the anniversary dates for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively). I was six years old when the first bomb fell. My course in life was predetermined. On September 2, 1945, when the local fire siren suddenly blared, my teacher asked, “What is that?” and I knew: The war was over.

It had been a really scary time in Melbourne, Australia, as the Japanese had threatened to invade us. Dad dug an air-raid shelter in our back garden, and the windows were blacked out while the city’s searchlights scanned the skies at night. Elated, I walked home on that lovely sunny afternoon picking flowers along the way. It would be years later before I learned the awful truth about how the war ended.

What rained down on those two Japanese cities seventy-five years ago was destruction on a scale never seen before or since. People exposed within half a mile of the atomic fireball were seared to piles of smoking char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. The small black bundles stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands. A little boy was reaching up to catch a red dragonfly with his hand against the blue sky when there was a blinding flash and he disappeared. He turned into gas and left his shadow behind on the pavement, a haunting relic later moved to the Hiroshima Museum. A woman was running while holding her baby; she and the baby were turned into a charcoal statue.

In all, about 120,000 people were killed immediately by the two bombs, and tens of thousands more died later due to radiation exposure. In 1957, when I was eighteen, I read a book by Nevil Shute, an English novelist who ended up in Australia. On the Beach described how the city of Melbourne awaited a deadly cloud of radiation from a nuclear war that was triggered by an accident in the northern hemisphere, killing everything...

Read More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/lessons-we-still-havent-learned-hiroshima-and-nagasaki



- Seventy-five years ago, newly in full awareness of its newfound ability to destroy the human race, what did the world do next? It starting mass producing these nuclear weapons of mass destruction. (Photo: Getty)






Dr. Helen Caldicott is president of the Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear-Free Planet and the author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer

- Einstein wrote: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Robert Oppenheimer, watching the world’s first nuclear explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, muttered to himself, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. -

- Nuclear Attack On Germany Would Kill Half A Million People: Greenpeace Study, DW, Aug. 5, 2020
https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-attack-on-germany-would-kill-half-a-million-people-greenpeace-study/a-54440790