nuclear-news

Without any reconsideration, the United States dropped a second bomb 68 years ago today — this one plutonium — on Nagasaki, killing 70,000 citizens outright.

On Friday at 7 p.m. in Northampton, an event commemorating the victims of nuclear weapons and nuclear power will take place at McConnell Hall at Smith College.

After the bombing, the American military censored all documentation and photo images of the two bombs’ unparalleled human devastation, sheltering Americans from the horrors of what our government perpetrated on Japanese civilians: women, men, and children instantly reduced to ash.

Likewise, the post-war U.S. occupying authority forbade Japanese citizens, under penalty of law, to own pictures of the atomic bomb destruction of both cities. American military leaders from all branches of the armed forces, among them Generals Eisenhower, Arnold, Marshall and MacArthur and Admirals Leahy, Nimitz, and Halsey, strongly dissented from the decision to use the bombs — some prior to August 1945, some in retrospect — for both military and moral reasons. Japan was already defeated and in peace negotiations with the Soviet Union; surrender was imminent. Moreover, the Soviet Union was willing to enter the war against Japan, if necessary.

Bombing dense human settlements was barbarous and would shock world opinion. A demonstration bombing away from residential areas (also suggested by some atomic bomb scientists) could have been used instead to force immediate surrender. The top military commanders concurred that the decision to use the atomic bomb was political, not military.

Dropping the atomic bombs in World War II launched an arms race in nuclear weapons, now spread to nine countries, with the ever-present specter of their use or their theft by terrorists. In the May 2012 Vienna meeting on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the nuclear-armed countries stated their intention to maintain a nuclear arsenal for security. The same month, NATO countries convening in Chicago pronounced, “Nuclear weapons are … essential … for defense and dissuasion.”

And yet, paradoxically, the threat of nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran brings some nuclear-armed countries, namely the U.S. and Israel, to the brink of war — as if the existential threat is not the weapons themselves but the hands they are in……….

The mayors of Easthampton, Holyoke and Northampton co-sponsored this resolution for a nuclear weapons-free world and are members of Mayors for Peace, the leading international organization with 5,600 member cities in 156 countries devoted to protecting cities from the scourge of war and mass destruction.

We honor their public commitment to a genuinely secure world…….. http://www.gazettenet.com/home/7988105-95/doug-renick-pat-hynes-years-after-nuclear-dawn-world-lacks-true-security-that