Wednesday, August 6, 2003

Atom Bomb - Gift From Heaven? QUOTES ON THE ATOM BOMB "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." - - Albert Einstein "We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon of the Mount...The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living..." - - General Omar N. Bradley; Chief of Staff; United States Army; 1948 "Having invented a new Holocaust And been the first with it to win a war, How they make haste to cry with fingers crossed, King's X--no fair to use it any more!" - - Robert Frost "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be the splendor of the Mighty One" - - Bhagavad-Gita KNOW YOUR HISTORY - AUGUST 6th 1945 -- US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. 140,000 civilians die from immediate effects of the bombing; tens of thousands more in subsequent decades from radiation induced illnesses, including descendents. Nagasaki, home to almost 400,000 people, gets the same 2 days later. The bomb explodes in the air & destroys more than two-thirds of the city's buildings. About half the population is buried in ruins, burned to death by the explosion's heat, or consumed by fire. Thousands of survivors develop radiation sickness. One month after the blast, a typhoon hits causing makeshift hospitals & other weakened buildings to crumble & hundreds more people die. http://www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/ 1955 -- Japan: First World Conference Against Atomic & Hydrogen Bombs held on 10th anniversary of the bombing. 1985 -- USSR begins unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. US responds by conducting more underground nuclear tests. In 1998 the US expresses moral outrage at India & Pakistan for similar tests. RHINO HERE: In yesterday's NY Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed making a case that the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki was a necessary evil. He quotes several Japanese sources as follows: "We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war," Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, said later. The atomic bombings ...were thus described by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from heaven." "The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945, said later. A gift from heaven? So says some Hirohito Government officials who apparently lived through the disaster, probably in a government bunker. ;A gift from heaven? Rhino thinks not! Below is an excerpt of, & link to, Kristof's Op-Ed . Below that, RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE is a thoughtful reply to Kristof' written by peace activist David Crockett Williams whose bio is available at: http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/dcwbio.html Blood on Our Hands? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, NY Times, 8/5/03 Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there's an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands. There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a speech on Jan. 31, "Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?" The traditional American position, that our intention in dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki was to end the war early and save lives, has been poked full of holes. Revisionist historians like Gar Alperovitz argue persuasively that Washington believed the bombing militarily unnecessary (except to establish American primacy in the postwar order) because, as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey put it in 1946, "in all probability" Japan would have surrendered even without the atomic bombs. Yet this emerging consensus is, I think, profoundly mistaken... READ IT ALL AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/05KRIS.html 7:44:35 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - Blood on Our Hands? From:   "David Crockett Williams" < gear2000@lightspeed.net > Date:  Tue Aug 5, 2003  6:13 pm Subject:  A reply to the NYTimes Op-Ed: "Blood on Our Hands?" Dear Mr. Kristof, Thanks for your thought provoking OpEd piece in today's New York Times, but your conclusion is a bit weak in light of the underlying the real reason for the timing of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was to break the secret agreement among the WWII allies that the Soviet Union would invade Japan which would thereafter have become a Soviet satellite state. As several recent US television documentaries have clearly shown, the Soviets had already moved troops and their invasion of Japan was imminent, in accord with that agreement reached shortly before the defeat of Germany. This reason for the timing of these atomic bomb tests on human beings (it was the first human testing by design, US damage assessment teams went in ASAP but rendered no medical aid) was, in character with how the US has treated the native American peoples since its beginning, to break this international agreement with the Soviet Union and initiate the first strike nuclear threat posture that the United States still holds to this day. Is it any wonder that other nations of the world have responded in kind to this ongoing first strike nuclear threat from the US, countries like Korea today? This is moral and ethical hypocrisy at its most blatant and serious level... ...This US aggressive posture promising the first use of these diabolical weapons of mass destruction is the real ongoing tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that all of your cited "ending the war sooner and saving lives" arguments simply obscure and obfuscate... READ IT ALL AT: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tehachapi-peace-center/message/176 "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. 6:22:08 AM    comment

© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.