Awaght- The international community and especially the people of Japan are today in a somber mood marking the 70th anniversary of the deadly atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima and later Nagasaki by the United States, an act termed by many as a crime against humanity.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took part in a ceremony at the Peace Memorial Park in downtown Hiroshima, which was also attended by some 40,000 survivors and foreign delegates representing about 100 countries.
The Japanese premier also said Tokyo would submit a new resolution to the United Nations General Assembly later this year to abolish nuclear weapons.
The crowd observed a minute’s silence to mark the anniversary of the bombing at 8:15 am local time, when an American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped a 4-thousand kilogram uranium bomb on Hiroshima, on August 6th, 1945.
Days later on August 9, the Japanese port city of Nagasaki was also attacked by an atomic bomb, which left another 70,000 people dead.
The bombs reduced Hiroshima, population 350,000, and Nagasaki, 210,000, to smears of ash and vaporized at least 200,000 civilians. Upwards of another 250,000 were to die from radiation poisoning in later years.
In a radio broadcast within hours of Hiroshima, an arrogant and defiant US President Harry Truman told Americans: “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have standing above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories and their communications. Let there be no doubt.” (Docks, factories, communications. . . People didn’t rate a mention.)
Days later, of course, Truman made good on his threat. One of the first doctors to arrive in Hiroshima after the blast said: “Tremendous numbers of unidentified corpses were piled up and cremated on the spot. The injured and irradiated continued to die. Day and night in every corner of the city, corpses are piled upon the corpses and burned.”
A front page report in the New York Times carried the headline: “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin.” The atomic episode was all over and the war had ended a result.
It wasn’t until the Australian Wilfred Burchett arrived as the first journalist to make it to Hiroshima that the aftermath of the explosion was described to a western audience: “I write this as warning to the world,” was his intro on page one of the Daily Express. He described in detail how he had walked through a hospital ward packed with people with their skin hanging in flaps from their bodies, eyes opaque, dying, but with no visible marks. There being no word for it yet, he wrote of “an atomic plague.”
In retaliation for telling it as he had seen it, his press accreditation was famously withdrawn. He was vilified for years. In some circles he still is.
Eamonn McCann in an opinion piece published recently by the Iris Times says the justification for the bombing offered then and since continues to be that it brought the war to a speedy end and so actually saved lives. He notes that, the moral basis for this proposition is, at best, shaky – as is the calculation on which it is based. True, the Japanese surrendered within a week of Nagasaki.
But there is strong evidence that they had been ready for surrender before the Enola Gay emerged from the clouds above Hiroshima and unloaded “Little Boy” – a cuddly, anthropomorphic name for a device designed to kill on a scale unknown in all prior history. The Nagasaki bomb was nicknamed “Fat Man”.
The US strategic bombing survey, commissioned by Truman, compiled by a civilian team including John K Galbraith and based on interviews with more than 400 US officers and on access to the complete Japanese military logs, reported in July 1946: “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.”
The Soviet Union joined the war in Asia two days after Hiroshima, a day before Nagasaki, delivering in the nick of time on a promise made by Stalin in Yalta – and also with a view to qualifying as a combatant entitled to a share of the spoils.
The US will meanwhile have wanted to impress on the world and especially on Stalin that it possessed weapons capable of reducing any rival to rubble.
Thus, there were geopolitical reasons for killing everybody in the two Japanese cities that may have been more persuasive with US leaders than urgency to end the war.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no moral or military justification. It was a crime against humanity.
The United States has gained notoriety as the first country to develop nuclear weapons and the only country to have used them in war. It spends more on its nuclear arsenal than all other countries combined.
Washington’s policy of nuclear terror remains intact. The US refuses to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. Its latest Nuclear Posture Review envisages the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear “rogue states” and it is developing a new generation of ‘battlefield” nuclear weapons.