Hiroshima

Yesterday marked the 65th anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. 140,000 people were killed or died within months of the bomb being dropped. Representatives from USA,UK and France were making their first appearances at a Hiroshima commemoration.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said: "The only way to ensure that such weapons will never again be used is to eliminate them all.There must be no place in our world for such indiscriminate weapons."

Hillary Clinton said the US was committed to ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
"This president, President Obama, is very committed to working toward a world without nuclear weapons. He has said many times he recognises this is a long-term goal."

Some Japanese have called on the US to apologise for the atomic bombings, but this is very unlikely to happen. In the Second World War, the generals and the politicians made a tactical decision with chilling implications: they switched from striking at military targets to the deliberate, premeditated mass murder of civilian populations. The generals and the politicians had become so blunted to the emotional impact of directing a process of mass murder that the human implications of this. In ancient times, generals and politicians practising the "art" of war had had first-hand experience of its impact; turning the human imagination to inventing better weapons, evil though it was, at least registered a direct, emotional sense of awareness. With the Second World War, however, the separation between warmakers and civilians showed that ruling classes had finally lost the ability to relate to the effects of their own efforts. Since almost no wars in history have ever been decided on by the people who were called on to fight them, the élites could no longer relate humanly and emotionally to their targets. The capitalist class of today, corrupted as they are by this emotional sickness, have acquired an absolute and terrible decision-making power that autocrats and emperors could once only have dreamed of.

It is generally accepted that using the bombs probably shortened the war even if only by a few weeks and in the grim reality of war the life of a single comrade saved is worth a thousand enemy slain. Yet “bringing our boys back as soon as possible”, was not actually the first order of business. The fact that two bombs were dropped, however – without warning – on specifically targeted and crowded locations which had been spared aerial bombardment; the fact that each bomb had different technology (one uranium-explosion; one plutonium-implosion), each with different yields, dropped at different heights but both resulting in prolonged and deadly after-effects of which little was understood, suggests the conclusion that the primary motives might have been the seldom mentioned (almost unmentionable) one of “scientific” experimentation. The answer is provided by the proposals of the Target Committee, 27 April 1945:
“To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids...so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb” . Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population.