Hiroshima mayor lashes out at Bush on atomic bombing anniversary

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030806/wl_afp/japan_hiroshima_us_030806071816

<snip>


Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said the United States worshipped nuclear weapons as "God" and blamed it for jeopardising the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.

"The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the verge of collapse," Akiba said in an address to some 40,000 people.

"The chief cause is US nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research into mini-nukes and other so-called 'useable nuclear weapons,' appears to worship nuclear weapons as God," he said.

It was humbling.

Hiroshima/Nagasaki stand as examples of how we make excuses, how we rationalize bad decisions.

The Delusion we possess allows anger/denial which gives us license to do nasty things, Humans can be so good to each other......Instead we allow emotion to spoil things. Pity.

Atomic Maidens

war shall not be sanitized for your
protection nor blurred as through a pair
of borrowed glasses bending the blast
with sheets of light

the ghosts do not vanish.
their shadows remain on the stones:
indigo kimonos, moon faces white as ash
vomiting as they walk,
their silken sleeves tattered leaves
floating and flailing
in fire.

you are not beyond reach
of ragged ghosts such as these.

the flash of
a thousand paper cranes
incinerates your bones.

i came and registered TO post this sorrowful and powerful poem, and this very article, but could not start a thread yet. came to discussion board knowing DUers would be discussing Hiroshima and this mournful Event.

and here, lo! the poem and the article.

thank you all for being people i can be certain grasp in your deepest hearts the import.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

"visit Hiroshima and 'confront the reality of nuclear war'."
fall on your knees, madmen!!!

most people here are good people, and most feel your pain (there's a few here that LOVE the bomb and KILLING, but we try to either teach them, or ignore them, they are very sick people who need psychological help to get over their hate)...




:toast: :toast:
:toast: :toast:
:toast: :toast:
:toast:
:toast:

i was surprised by what you wrote of some people, amen and Generic Other... then i read down the thread.

more below

hang in there!

You are very welcome to DU!

:toast:

i am very relieved to be here.

it's so hard 'out there'!

sad and true. Welcome nofurylike, to DU.

180

hoping people will read and really feeeel Generic Other's poem. it is vivid. and so important. that poem makes me just sob!

for this stirring and necessarily disturbing poem, Generic Other

Something told me I should release my poem today like a small flame on a river of peace...

Your blood pressure will rise if you post on a Hiroshima thread. Even on DU there are those who must defend past horrific actions rather than look forward to prevent future and more terrible ones.

for your piercing "flame on a river of peace"

and thank you, too, for the 'heads up' about the boards

if you're still around, will you tell me of the word "Mori" in your subject line?

thank you.

park' is an unbelievably emotional experience.

non-military, civilian cities were attacked...it says a lot about the character of the Japanese people...

often I walk through the Mall and the huge war memorials, along with another one rising up for WWII....we honor WAR, we build memorials to WAR, we cheer for WAR....

I have a dream....that one day, a memorial will go up in Washington DC that is non-military.....maybe a memorial to PEACE or a memorial to a great American poet, or a great American artist....anything but the continuous military parades, military statues, military memorials, war presidents memorials...glorifying war and KILLING....

it would be nice to see a presidential memorial built BIG and glorious for a President who DIDN'T take America to war, but rather, is glorified for maintaining PEACE.....

Bush and his cabal of criminal buddies obviously have no clue about the implications of nuclear proliferation.

They condemn N. Korea, Pakistan, Iran and India, and then turn around to say that they(Rummy gang) want to make "workable smal-scale" or "battlefield nukes".

says a lot. I don't believe Japanese politicians typically speak so bluntly.

it would be the mayor of Hiroshima. When it comes to war and nuclear weapons, you can count on Hiroshima to speak out against them.

I was at the peace ceremony in 1990. Still have the program somewhere.

Humanity will never progress with this destruction!!

While I wouldn't agree to it now- with the threat of global nuclear war... the fact is that it ended WW2 and saved a buttload of American lives.

You got that right - on both counts.

Anyone who has not had the experience of speaking directly to a World War II veteran who was facing the prospect of invading Japan should do so ASAP before they're all dead. There's no substitute for a first-hand war story.

I especially recommend talking to members of the US Army and Marine Corps who were assigned to the duty of occupying Japan after its surrender. I guarantee you will be shocked and amazed what those people saw and heard.

This second-guessing of the decision to use the Bomb and the revised history needed to make such an argument happens every year. I always enjoy the controversy but in the 40+ years I've been aware of what happened in 1945 nobody has come close to convincing me the US was wrong. There was no right way out of the war available, only a choice among several unfortunate outcomes all of which involved hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Yes the effects of the bombings were horrible and yes we should do everything possible to make sure it never happens again. My condolences to the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and their descendents. May we all learn from your suffering.

It was the right thing to do to put an end to that war.

"visit Hiroshima and 'confront the reality of nuclear war'."
fall on your knees, madmen!!!

be Americans.

Ugh. The old 'ends justify the means' card. It is still distinctly a war crime to incinerate 200,000 civilians as a tactic. Makes 9/11 look like a fender-bender in comparison, doesn't it? I noticed that I couldn't find the usual commemoration stories in the mainstream papers. Guess it's not a good time to mention American use of WMD's on a scale not seen since.

and why do you support it now when our military leaders at the time recommended we accept their 1 condition in the spring of 45 TO SAVE LIVES.

your 'logic' doesn't add up...

peace

the right thing to do, as reccomended by OUR military leaders at the time to SAVE LIVES would have been to accept their 1 condition, as we finally did after we ran out of nukes.

peace

absolutely right about KILLING Japanese people...you said you were born in 1958 (in your post #15) and now you claim 40 + years of righteousness on KILLING and your entrallment with NUCLEAR KILLING...

so you were only 5 years old, and already filled with such hate...it is so sad....or perhaps there's a bush*-like exaggeration going on here...

At about age 5 I became aware that there was such a thing as an atomic bomb, that it could destroy a whole city, and that two of them were used to end the war that a lot of people still referred to as "The War".

Regardless of the depth of my understanding or lack thereof at age 5, I have been thinking about it for about 40 years. And I think your post shows a lot more hatred than I have in my little finger.

if we had accepted their surrender in the spring of 45 just think how many MORE lives would have been saved.

you have bought the BIG LIE

peace

have you been there to see?

to Hiroshima, the museum, the Peace park?

if not, i humbly offer to you that seeing it that close-up might make very much difference for you. humbly, because i will not debate this, but i badly need to see better in humans.

and the world had best see better in murkins
very soon

yesterday

about yesterday

...and see the puzzled look on the japanese tourists when they learn what happened there. then, take the boat ride out to the monument...read the names...feel the sadness and solitude...watch the oil bubble up from the fractured fuel tank....watch a morning or evening colors ceremony...it is a sad memorial as well...to some thousand plus men who never had a chance either, much like the citizens of hiroshima. and while you're lambasting your fellow country men for the differing opinion about hiroshima, why not throw in the fire bombing of tokyo and dresden as well. then you can counter balance those acts with the japanese rape of china, the seige of russia and the holocaust.....

i will agree that two wrongs don't make a right, i think we can all agree that war is hell and it propels humans to do things, unspeakable things, to his fellow man. like it or not, the country with the bigger toys wins the war. you can say what you will or think what you want of me, but those bombs put a definate end to the japanese will to wage war and stopped russians from ultimatly invading the japanese mainland and continuing the war. trumans decision, however tragic and mis-informed, made the entire world pause long enough to stop the killing machine that WW2 had ultimatly become.

some other casualty figures from WW2.....

USA-around 300,000 and a few thousand industrial related deaths...

france-250,000 troops, 360,000 civilians...

great britan-452,000 troops, 60,000 civilians...

hungary-120,000 soldiers,280,000 civilians

poland-120,000 soldiers, 5.3 million civilians...

romania-200,000 soldiers, 465,000 civilians....

italy-330,000 military, 85,000 civilians...

yugoslavia-300,000 troops, 1 million civilians killed...

russia-13.6 million military dead, 7.7 million civilians....

china-3.5 million troops, 10 million civilians...due to japanese invasion and occupation...

germany-3.6 million troops, 3.8 million civilians...

japan-2 million combined dead, 360,000 civilians

(that is, the four largest islands), they DID seize all Japanese islands north of Hokkaido, as per agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam. Their island grabbing started the day AFTER Hiroshima and ended several weeks after the Japanese surrender.

“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil they set out to destroy.” --

Christopher Dawson In the novel Hiroshima, author John Hershey presents a clear message to ban the use of nuclear proliferation

peace

and lose your soul

framed North Korea's justification, then.
and how many others'?

if we would have accepted japan's one conditon to surrender in the spring of 45, as OUR military leaders recommended 'to save lives' just think how many would not have perished.

peace

spend BILLIONS of dollars every year trying to figure out a way to clean-up the environmental disasters in the USA, caused directly from manufacturing nuclear weapons...many Americans have died horrible deaths from cancers, radiation burns, genetic birth defects...

from the Navajo Uranium Miners to the people living on radioactive Uranium tailings pilings in Grand Junction Colorado...to those living near Rocky Flats, Hanford, PanTex, Oak Ridge, Savannah River, the Mound Site, Paducah Kentucky...all over American, many have died and suffered horribly...even now, we have no where to put this environmental waste....the U.S. CREATED AN ELEMENT...played GOD and let a genie out of the bottle that can never be put back in....


Troops participating in exercises at "Camp Desert Rock" (the Nevada Test Site) observe the formation of a mushroom cloud following the detonation of the Dog test on November 1, 1951. This test involved a 21 kiloton device dropped from a B-50 bomber. The device exploded at a height of 1,417 feet (432 meters).

These soldiers suffered horribly from these exposures to radiation. This is OUR Government poisoning OUR soldiers.

What would you do?

Prevent the bombings in Japan? OK. The War would still have ended within months.

Would you have halted the Manhattan Project? Or just stopped development right there and never produced any more plutonium or mined any more uranium.

And let the Soviet Union pursue their own nuclear program...

No, thanks. If you want to revise history you have to deal with ALL of the consequences of your revision.

this is an interview of a scientist from the Manhattan Project...
Dr. Leo Szilard, an expert in this area, someone who KNOWS....

only small minded people follow the sheeple response of 'we had to do it'....NO, we didn't have to commit the biggest crime against humanity....of course, those who lust for KILLING people were very upset about this interview...sheeple cannot think in any other way than KILLING, never consider other options, just KILL KILL KILL...

----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html

-snips-

Q Do you feel that President Truman and those immediately below him gave full and conscientious study to all the alternatives to use of the atomic bomb?

A I do not think they did. They thought only in terms of our having to end the war by military means. I don't think Japan would have surrendered unconditionally without the use of force. But there was no need to demand the unconditional surrender of Japan. If we had offered Japan the kind of peace treaty which we actually gave her, we could have had a negotiated peace.

------------------

Q Did you think then that the Russians probably were working on the bomb?

A I had no idea of this. The question before us was: Should we think in terms of America's having a long-term monopoly of the bomb after the war, or will Russia have the bomb before long also? I had no doubt that we would start an atomic-arms race if we used the bomb.

----------------

Q How would the world of today have been different if we had not dropped the atomic bomb on Japan?

A I think, if we had not dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and instead demonstrated the bomb after the war, then, if we had really wanted to rid the world of atomic bombs, I think we could probably have done it. Now, whether this would have led to a better world or not, I don't know. But it certainly would have been a world very different from the one we have now.

thank you for the information you've given us, for the work of gathering and posting it.

I agree with Dr. Szilard that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not necessary. But they happened, and the nuclear Genie was let out of the bottle. Had the US not let it out someone else would have.

I ask again, would you prefer a history in which the Cold War happened with the Soviet Union as the preeminent nuclear power and the US unarmed?

NONE of the Japanese generals were ready to give up until we dropped the bomb. Even after all supply lines were cut and the island was being bombed back to the stone age, they wanted victory or honourable death in battle. The bomb was something they could not fight, and it gave the Emperor the means he needed to override his generals and order them to surrender.

'what if' thing, we'd have to go very far back.

we are reflecting on that past both in horrified grief for the innocents mass murdered, and the innocence shattered

and because if we do not state every moment that this was is and never ever will be acceptable

ever justifiable!!

it will happen again

while some knee-jerk defend, we are working desperately to make absolutely certain - against hope! - that this could not happen ever again.

how else do you say "do as i say and not as i do," unless you will say, "i was wrong to do it too"?

I'm with you all the way.

Peace!

radiation falling on us...killing us with genetic deformities, cancers, radiation burns...and more....the decision to create a NEW element...to play GOD...

WE POISONED OURSELVES with our hate...and now, we are paying the price....as our children are born defective, and our parents die from totally preventable cancers...indeed...with our hate...we poisoned ourselves....


Fallout Map -- Areas of the continental United States crossed by more than one nuclear cloud during the atmospheric atomic tests.
The atomic blasts of the 1950s and 1960s illuminated the Southwestern deserts, shattering windows in Las Vegas, and hurled billowing clouds of radioactive dust. For many years these clouds drifted across America poisoning animals and people in Utah and searing the boot soles of troops on maneuvers just yards from ground zero being used as "Atomic Guinea Pigs."

Trees that grew during the period of atmospheric testing have elevated levels of fallout in the wood that grew at that time. When it's used as firewood the ash is hotter than normal.

I was born in the thick of it - Kansas, 1958.

your own horrible suffering and death from radiation-induced cancers...

by the way, do not use radiation-impregnated firewood...those radionuclides do not change, and you are just poisoning others by blowing that radiation out your smokestack...

it saddens me that you are so enjoying of KILLING...and only born in 1958, yet so joyful at the bomb KILLING and maiming Japanese and OURSELVES...you didn't even serve in Vietnam, yet spew your WAR and KILLING and total justification....sad....maybe one day, you will have cancer...and that will teach you to think about your desire for Atomic Bombs and KILLING....

I've never said I "support" the bomb, and I do not appreciate you putting words into my mouth or thoughts into my head.

"by the way, do not use radiation-impregnated firewood..."

I don't, but a lot of people still do.

I refrain from second-guessing a difficult military and political decision that was made more than 13 years before I was born, and over which none of us have any possible control.

"it saddens me that you are so enjoying of KILLING..."

You really are clueless about my attitudes. You have extrapolated far too much from the little I've said here. Try to accept that there are other good people in the world besides yourself who do not see everything in exactly the same light you do. If you cannot do that you will never find any peace.

bomb mass murders...and in other posts, you have been enthralled with all this KILLING since the age of five...

your promulgation of HATE and military KILLING to solve issues between nations actually does encourage our current manufacture and USE of nuclear bombs...

if you read the Dr. Leo Szilard interview, you will find that he spoke about every one of your pro-Atomic Bomb arguments...

Dr. Szilard noted that America's use of the atomic bomb actually STARTED the arms race and created a world-wide rush for EVERYONE to get a nuclear bomb...of course, this is glorious for those like you who feel that KILLING is the solution since the age of 5....and the waste of our resources to build enough bombs to KILL and destroy everything in the whole wide world 100 times is truly obscene...the Military solution is always to KILL KILL KILL...that's what they do...that's all they do....

look at what bush* is doing now...simply encouraging others to get nuclear bombs...this is great for our military complex of KILLING...those who have nuclear bombs have not been attacked by bush*, those who didn't have nuclear bombs (Iraq and Afganistan) were decimated by bush*...so what better incentive, everyone wants a nuclear bomb now...and it is people like you, making your enthusiastic remarks about bombing whole cities that fuel this wasteful and destructive military approach...

"If I had known what they would do with my work, I would have become a peddler or a plumber" Albert Einstein, who did not help with the Manhatten Project or want his scientific work to be used to KILL people...

One of the seven greatest sins: Science without humanity.

It's apparently escaped your attention that nobody has used a nuclear weapon since 1945. Your intolerance of points of view that conflict with your own revisionist interpretation of World War II history apparently know no bounds. What do you want to do, go back and un-do the end of World War II? How would you have had it end? How would you have had the nuclear arms race play out? Would you be happier if the Soviet Union or the Nazis had developed the bomb first? They certainly wouldn't have used it now, would they?

1963....and below ground use of nuclear weapons continued for many years after that, even recently, shrub started underground use of nuclear weapons again....and there has been plenty of damage too, lives lost, property damage, ruined families....

-snips-

In 1988, Congress established a presumption of service connection for 13 different cancers in veterans exposed to ionizing radiation. Later changes brought the number to 16. Under provisions of the Radiation-Exposed Veterans Compensation Act (Pub. L. 100-321), veterans are presumed to be service connected if they participated in a radiation-risk activity and later developed one of the following diseases: leukemia (other than chronic lymphocytic leukemia), cancer of the thyroid, breast, pharynx, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas, gall bladder, bile ducts, salivary gland, or urinary tract, multiple myeloma, lymphomas (except Hodgkin's disease), primary cancer of the liver (except if cirrhosis or hepatitis B is indicated), or bronchiolo-aveolar carcinoma, many more diseases have been added recently.

Persons who qualify are: Atomic Veteran, Onsite Participant, Downwinder, Uranium Mine Employee, Ore Transporter, Uranium Mill Employee.
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/atomicveteran/index.html


just to show you some history on nuclear weapons use....
here's a photo:


SMOKY-OPERATION PLUMBBOB, was a weapons related tower shot 8/31/57 at the Nevada Test Site.


or this one, October 26, 1958, 13 years after YOU thought that everybody stopped using nuclear weapons...YOU were wrong...and many more continue to be used underground....




or here's more...and the USA even destroyed a WHOLE ISLAND...with radiation all over in the ocean, and on our troops...these are just a small number of the total nuclear weapons used by the USA AFTER 1945...















there is just no end to the military madness of the USA...KILL KILL KILL KILL...that's what our military does...that's all they do...and they waste plenty of taxpayers money on their KILLING too...leaving criminal environmental damage in their wake...stuff that never degrades and violates our children and many thousands of generations to come....

Before exploding the first bomb, many scientists theorized that the chain reaction might consume the entire atmosphere, killing everything on earth. They didn't know, and yet they TOOK THAT RISK ANYWAY.

In addition to repeatedly exposing our troops deliberately to deadly amounts of radiation, they also kept tinkering with the isotope combinations of the hydrogen bombs

During the operation Castle on the Bikini atoll, the US detonated the thermonuclear bomb Castle Bravo, Yield 15 Mgt. It became largest thermonuclear device ever detonated by US, with a fireball 4 miles in diameter. Bravo was the first Teller-Ulam design where Lithium deuteride was used as a fuel. Subsequently, that became a standard for all thermonuclear weapon designs, including USSR nuclear weapons. The projected yield of the Bravo was only 4-6 Mgt. However during the explosion unpredicted, large amounts of tritium were formed because of the fast neutron fission of Li7, which in turn increased the yield by some 250%. The Bravo explosion created significant radiological contamination around the testing area.

They have also lost warheads. The nuclear age has been one of spectacular irresponsibility, and dumb luck that many more have not died.

Since today is the anniversary of an atrocity, can we agree not to make this a debate thread about whether the bombing was justified? We've already had two in the last week or so. I know that there are a significant number of people who still support the bombings no matter what. Fine. But today is a day to remember innocent victims, and debating this stuff here is about as appropriate as debating US policies that aggravate terrorism at a 9-11 memorial.

Please, A-bomb supporters, just leave this thread alone, or at least try talking about how we can prevent this from ever happening again.

world in a logical way...they only want WAR and KILLING and more of the same...it is sad to again see them here...and many of them on this board are young people already enthralled with HATE, WAR, and KILLING....

there are several ways to keep this from ever happening again...here's TWO important first steps....

1. there must be another brave effort to STOP bush* from making MORE nuclear bombs...it has started, but sadly, there are no young people willing to take up that fight...us older fighters are worn out from all the years that it took to stop above ground testing, then stop all testing, then stop all manufacturing of nuclear bombs (which only happened during Clinton's administration....Rocky Flats was permanently closed around 1993)...if no young people will help, these efforts are doomed...

2. Force the government to reveal the COST of this madness...the closest anyone came was a book called 'Atomic Audit' published by the Brookings Institute...came up with a conservative cost of $ 5.5 TRILLION dollars (that's thousands of BILLIONS of dollars) in 1997.

http://www.brook.edu/fp/projects/nucwcost/photos.htm

This book was immediately condemned by OUR Military...stifled in every way...but many activists circulated it (I myself bought 7 books to distribute to other activists, one to the guy who closed Rocky Flats, to use in the Court testimony), last year, I was still able to purchase the book...and I gave it to some hard-working activists, here (and young people are doing little to help here)

http://prop1.org/


these costs have SKYrocketed since 1997, and nobody will do an update...the costs of simply environmental clean-ups, the cost of the WIPP site, and Nevada Test Site...the costs of our Nuclear Weapons Laboratories have all increased enormously since 1997..the human damage and costs for nuclear workers medical problems, uranium miners and more have increased...

so this project MUST be done to stop OUR proliferation of Nuclear Bombs...

Just the facts of war
On this day can we remember the attrocities by the Japanese
during the war, and how bad they were
For the people on Wake island, Truk, Guam,etc.....

We have Pearl Harbor Day and Memorial Day for that. This day does not belong to those soldiers. It belongs to the innocents who crawled from flames, and when they finally reached the river and took a sip of water, died instantly.

Please put your robotic justifications for that on some other thread.

How about you make your own thread? You can title it "How right we were in vaporizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki". You and the other supporters of the bombing can sit there and congratulate one another, and I will not intrude at all.

I ranted about how it was necessary to drop the bomb. Yes it was terrible what those people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki went through, but there really wasn't a better option period. Invasion was not a better option. Or soldiers would have been tortured and slaughtered and many civilians woudl have taken up arms too and been slaughtered. It woudl have been a blood bath worse than Europe. Pray for the victims but don't pretend we could have done better.

as our military leaders at the time reccomended to SAVE LIVES.

you must have missed that post.

peace

suffered horribly, since the water made the burns worse...at one point, the Japanese Navy went down the river shooting the suffering people, as a mercy killing, since they would die soon and suffer even more....

read John Hirshey's Hiroshima to fully understand the magnitude of this crime against all humanity...including the poisoning of ourselves forever with carcinogenic radionuclides...

the pro-Atomic Bomb people here must have very little education or interest in striving for peace...the pro-Atomic Bomb people show little understanding of what happened, and why it was done, and we may be close to repeating history simply because of these ignorant bully pro-Atomic Bomb people, and their Christian self-righteousness...

it seems that ignorance breeds HATE and KILLING....look at shrub for a good example....

There are no "A-bomb supporters" here AFAIK.

Please point me to the posts in case I missed them.

nuclear bombs and to USE nuclear bombs....if there were nobody in America with YOUR attitude, we wouldn't have any nuclear bombs...it is your attitude, your full support of TWO nuclear attacks against NON-Military totally civilian targets that fuels our current nuclear programs...yes, it's YOU ! like shrub, you're probably really proud of yourself too....

in any way should watch the movie "On The Beach" for a reality check. Made in the late 1950s.

We did NOT have to use them in Japan. We do not have to use them now and we certainly should not be advocating proliferation with wanton disregard for the horrific consequences that are CERTAIN to follow.

"There is still time...brother."

whew

someone above said that no one here is pro a-bomb, but to attempt to justify in any way, for any reason, for the u.s., is to grant that justification could ever even exist. many are feeling those same 'justifications' out in that world.

we must acknowledge to the world that it was insane to for the u.s. to do, and it is insane for anyone to do. ever.

- beyond the evidence available and excerpted above, and being ignored, that it was not ever militarily "necessary"

- and even if, in the heat of hatred, people cannot see the shocking inhumanity the unacceptable horror of what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

To drop the bomb.

But we developed it, we did drop it, and it exists; and to suggest an alternative history in which everyone was "sane" and NOBODY EVER developed nuclear weapons because everyone knew it would have been insane is beyond absurd.

I'm thankful that the US developed the bomb FIRST. Unfortunate as those bombings were I'm thankful that everyone in the world saw the results and apparently we've all grown enough "sanity" not to have used it since 1945. I'm truly sorry President Truman had to make the decision to choose among various solutions to the war, some of which involved the A-bomb and some of which did not, but Truman didn't start the war. He ended it.

in the lounge: "The Atomic Bar Is Closed Damn it." It is neither pro or con

it is just a little story about 'The Atomic Bar' and a girl I met in "The Atomic Bar".

Took place in Yokosuka Japan, 1952. I often think about the 'Atomic Bar' on "Bomb Day".

The story dropped like a rock.

Ed.

train ride ???

Were they still in total destruction ? How much rebuilding had occurred ? Did you take any photographs ?

>Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said the United States worshipped nuclear weapons as "God" <

the US didn't have an emperor.

Made me laugh! And although it's a minor point, I disagree with the mayor on that point. Bush and the PNAC treehouse gang may worship them as phallic objects, but most of America is complacent, doesn't know anything about it or DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK.

Again, good quip about the emperor. Rather have an emperor than the present dimwitted thug, though.

for a "quip".

n/t

In Japan, when Hirohito went for a ride, people were obliged to turn their backs on him, in order not to look upon his face, which would have been "disrespectful."
Hey, it's a start. :)

the quote is:

"The chief cause is US nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research into mini-nukes and other so-called 'useable nuclear weapons,' appears to worship nuclear weapons as God," he said.

He's talking about the current US policy. Hirohito is not in the picture.

I'm not as smart as you but I am trying.

And who's going to relieve them of those, China?

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

AGAIN...everybody wants a nuclear bomb, because bush* only attacks those without nuclear bombs (Afganistan, Iraq)...bush* is trying to prove that the ownership of nuclear bombs is a deterrant, which is truly insane...I have no doubt that bush* will give some of our nuclear bombs to our allies, and is using such enticements in bush* foreign policy....

if we only had a president with a BRAIN, who could think beyond the end of his nose...

They also want to re-arm Japan, and to participate in US military adventures. The vast majority of the populace disagrees.

Trad

Your rumor is bullshit

and that is the only way they would be allowed to with OUR permission.

peace

How do you contain worldwide nuclear proliferation when you issue bullying threats against nations like Iran and North Korea, and embark on new nuclear weapons programs yourself? Being the "good guys" is no excuse.