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and no lessons have been learned
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- The blast and subsequent fire devastated an area of five square miles (13 square kilometres).
- More than 60% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed.
- An estimated 80,000 people died immediately, but injuries and radiation took the final death toll to around 140,000 from Hiroshima's population of 350,000.
Below,
thousands of people were instantly carbonised in a blast that was
thousands of times hotter than the sun's surface; further from the
epicentre, birds ignited in mid-flight, eyeballs popped and internal
organs were sucked from bodies of victims.
By the end
of the day an estimated 160,000 were dead or injured and the bomb's
"ghosts" walked the city - thousands of initial survivors
who would die within days, often with the word mizu -water - on their
lips. Many more subsequently died - and are still dying - from
various cancers.
J Robert
Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientist who oversaw the building of the
bomb, was more ambiguous about his creation. He famously said after
the first test detonation: "Now I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds."
Truman's
successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, also had reservations. In a
1963 interview with Newsweek magazine, he said: "The
Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them
with that awful thing."
Joe Stiborik
remembered the crew sitting in stunned silence on the return flight.
The only words he recollected hearing were Lewis's "My
God, what have we done." He explained, "I was
dumbfounded. Remember, nobody had ever seen what an A-bomb could do
before. Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas, one
minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered
with fires and smoke. [...] There was almost no talk I can remember
on our trip back to the base. It was just too much to express in
words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the
foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to
bring an end to the war and we tried to look at it that way."
In 2005, Van
Kirk came as close as he ever got to regret. “I pray no man will
have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss
of life. We unleashed the first atomic bomb, and I hope there will
never be another. I pray that we have learned a lesson for
all time. But I'm not sure that we have.”
According to
Eisenhower's statements the Japanese were ready to surrender, but of
course, nothing could stop the testing of the new weapon.
Today, there
is no test to be made. Some lunatics seek a clear disaster, compared
to which Hiroshima and Nagasaki would look like a playground.
Unfortunately, it seems that things
are worse than in the period of the first cold war, and one
significant reason for that, is the schizophrenic belief of
Washington's neocons that Russia does not have the power to
respond in a nuclear attack. On the contrary, during the first
cold war period, there were "underground communication
channels" between the two superpowers which were assisting on
the mutual retreat, even in very crucial moments, like in the case
of the Cuba missile crisis, when the Soviets installed nuclear
missiles on the island, as a response to the installation of US
nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. It seems that for the
moment, there are no such communication channels between the US
and Russia and situation is getting more and more dangerous.
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“Regardless of the condition of
Russian nuclear forces, the success of Washington’s first strike
and degree of protection provided by Washington’s ABM shield
against retaliation, the article I posted by Steven Starr, 'The
Lethality of Nuclear Weapons,' makes clear that nuclear war has no
winners. Everyone dies.”
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