Hiroshima Anniversary

On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima Japan remembered the only two occasions when a nuclear bomb was used in war. Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui asked world leaders to step up efforts toward making a nuclear-weapons-free world. Good luck with that! There is a maddened race among many want-to be nations ( like North Korea and Iran) to develop their own nuclear weapons. This has caused other wealthier ones, like Saudi Arabia, to seek to ":buy" the technology from renegade nations like Pakistan. The result, a much ore nuclear armed world than ever envisioned after the horrific bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

At the remembrance in Hiroshima, tens of thousands of people stood for a minute of silence at 8:15 a.m. at a ceremony in Hiroshima's peace park near the epicenter of the 1945 attack, marking the moment of the blast. Then dozens of doves were released as a symbol of peace. The U.S. bomb, "Little Boy," the first nuclear weapon used in war, killed 140,000 people. A second bomb, "Fat Man," dropped over Nagasaki three days later, killed another 70,000. After the second bomb was dropped Japan surrendered, ending the war. 

The U.S. dropped the bombs it has claimed, in order to avoid what would have been a bloody ground assault on the Japanese mainland, following the fierce battle for Japan's southernmost Okinawan islands, which took 12,520 American lives and an estimated 200,000 Japanese, about half civilians. In the view of the allies during the war, better to kill a larger number of Japanese civilians than to see even more soldiers killed in a long bloody man to man combat that most felt would had lasted from many months. The Japanese government at that point near the end of the war said it would never surrender.

So the dilemma remains , "Was it right to involve civilians by launching a civilian attack as a strategy to end that war." I agree with the mayor of Hiroshima who called nuclear weapons "the absolute evil and ultimate inhumanity" that must be abolished, and criticized nuclear powers for keeping them as threats to achieve their national interests. There are an estimated 15,000 nuclear weapons out there today.

With the average age of survivors now exceeding 80 for the first time this year, passing on their stories is considered an urgent task. It is almost a parallel situation the the German holocaust of the same war. As survivors of those two actions die, remembrance among the world population is faded or forgotten. I find it ironic that the U.S and the other largest nuclear powers  insist that other countries not have nuclear weapons, while maintaining their own stockpiles of the same thing. Why should a nation like Iran be denied nuclear weapons on "ethical grounds" if a nation like, France or Russia, is not asked to destroy its own stockpile? It seems to me to be a disingenuous assertion by the current nuclear have nations.

Anyway, from a practical standpoint there are two things of which I am sure. First, there is no going back on the creation of more nuclear weapons. The genie is out of the lamp. Secondly, where there are powerful weapons of death there is always someone determined to use them. And the will be used again. It's just a matter of wondering by whom.