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HIROSHIMA'S NUCLEAR LESSON bill clinton is no Harry Truman by Mia T, 8.06.05 [T]he threat nuclear weapons pose today is probably greater than ever before. That's not because they're more plentiful--thanks to the 2002 Moscow Treaty (negotiated by John Bolton), U.S. and Russian arsenals are being cut to levels not seen in 40 years. It's because nuclear know-how and technology have fallen into the hands of men such as A.Q. Khan and Kim Jong Il, and they, in turn, are but one degree of separation away from the jihadists who may someday detonate a bomb in Times or Trafalgar Square....

Sixty years ago today, Hiroshima, Japan, became the first target of an atomic bomb, with Nagasaki the second target three days later. Thus, a war that lasted four years was ended in four days. To those who decry the devastation caused by President Truman's decision to develop and detonate this awesome weapon, I remind them of the lives saved, not lost. I'm very proud of the fact that my uncle was not only a member of the Enola Gay that dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, the first atomic bomb in history, but he was actually the bombardier. The bottom line,...

SIXTY years ago today, humanity stole the thunder of the gods by instantaneously wiping life from the face of the earth in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, a single US Air Force bomber unleashed an apocalypse on the people of Hiroshima. About 70,000 died quickly from the blast or fire or more slowly as their bodies rotted from burns and radiation sickness. Three days later Nagasaki was incinerated, with similar casualties. The two bombings completed the sufferings of World War II. But the introduction of atomic weapons did more than give humans the power to enact...

REMEMBERING HIROSHIMA : AUGUST 6, 1945 All over the world today, people are coming together to tell us how awful it was we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have their memories – and I have mine. Sixty years ago, I was with my Dad and my brothers : haying in the hot August sun. We had a portable radio with us, and we stopped work to listen to the broadcaster – who spoke of a bomb – hotter than the sun – that had been dropped on, and that had utterly destroyed the entire city of Hiroshima....

WHEN people ask my thoughts on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I always feel uncomfortable. As a Japanese, I know how I'm supposed to respond: with sadness, regret and perhaps anger. But invariably I try to dodge the issue, or to reply as neutrally as possible. That's because, at bottom, the bombings don't really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are...

On Aug. 6, 1945, an estimated 80,000 Japanese were killed instantly in Hiroshima. Three days later, on Aug. 9, more than 100,000 Japanese in Nagasaki joined them. It was a tragic end to the bloodiest conflict in human history. The irony is that it would have been even worse had President Truman decided against using atomic weapons and instead authorized an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Estimates vary, but on the American side alone there would like have been between 200,000 and 1 million U.S. casualties. The Japanese toll would have been in the millions. And, as recent evidence reveals,...

They insist they were ordinary men serving their country. But when the crew members of the Enola Gay arrived on the flight line on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, they knew instantly it wasn’t an ordinary mission... Van Kirk: No one was officially telling anybody else anything about it. And if you figured it out for yourself, you better well keep it quiet... ... When the bomb left the airplane, you’ve got the surge of course of releasing 9,400 pounds right away. Tibbets went into the turn 150 degrees to the right, pushed the nose down, lost about 2,000...

No, it was dropped on tens of thousands of civilians instead of a military target 34.63% (3094) No 32.08% (2866) No, it unleashed a costly, deadly arms race that may end up giving weapons of mass destruction to terrorists 21.48% (1919) Yes, the bomb brought the war to a rapid end without an invasion costing a million U.S. lives 9.59% (857) Yes 0.76% (68) Yes, Tokyo's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor justified any U.S. response 0.57% (51) Yes, war is about hurting people and breaking things we just did it better than they did 0.40% (36) No, the U.S. could...

According to the tinfoiler numerologists, today is the day our peace-loving muslim friends of Al Qaeda, plan to unleash the fury of hidden Russian nukes in US cities. I for one, plan to enjoy time with my family, mow the lawn, imbibe in brew and "Q", and go about my life without a worry. What are you going to do, now that we teeter on the verge of an apocalyptic precipice?

Sixty years ago, US President Harry Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was a weapon of unprecedented power, and one that changed the face of warfare and international politics forever. On August 6, 1945, lessons begin at the National Technical University on the outskirts of downtown Hiroshima, as always, at 8 a.m. Math is first up in the lesson-plan for the day, and Keijiro Matsushima is gazing out the window, bored. The lanky, fatherless 16 year-old is the only member of his family still in Hiroshima: His brothers are off with the Imperial Navy fighting...

"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark. Anyway we think we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling -- to put it mildly. This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the secretary of war, Mr. (Henry) Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers are the target and not women and children....

AMERICANS WILL be reminded today of the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Most likely, we will miss once again the true impact of this event, not just for the Japanese who experienced it, but also on us. It's not, of course, that we don't know that Americans flew the planes that killed at least 60,000 Japanese, most of them civilians, in Hiroshima, and, three days later, 40,000 more in Nagasaki (figures from the Avalon Project at Yale law School). It's not that Americans don't know that the United States remains the only nation ever...

Saturday August 6, the Sundance Cable Channel will be showing "Original Child Bomb". This hour long film is from the top secret compilation of the US Government filmed aftermath of Hiroshima, which was kept out of the public's viewing for decades. "The young soldiers who shot the film in Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month after the dawn of the atomic age were unprepared for what they found." " 'It was to me the most horrendous, terrifying thing that I had ever seen,'camera operator Herbert Sussan, who's now deceased, said in a 1983 interview with the British Broadcasting Corp."...

It's not, of course, that we don't know that Americans flew the planes that killed at least 60,000 Japanese, most of them civilians, in Hiroshima, and, three days later, 40,000 more in Nagasaki (figures from the Avalon Project at Yale law School). It's not that Americans don't know that the United States remains the only nation ever to have used atomic weapons against civilian populations. It's that the events, unlike D-Day, say, or the liberation of the concentration camps, place Americans in ambiguous, unpleasant, or even guilty roles.

The mind of the pilot whose B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb often seems more prisoner than resident of his bantamweight body wracked by injury, ailments and 90 years of living. In the months before today’s 60 th anniversary of his mission to Hiroshima, Paul Tibbets was hobbled by a pair of spills that fractured two vertebrae. For a while, his appetite disappeared, his weight dropped alarmingly, and he railed against the fates torturing him in his waning years. "I’ve never been incapacitated a damned day of my life," he groused two months ago, daily downing enough OxyContin to make...

Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? Let's face it. He shouldn't be hard to find, especially from a Predator, an aerial reconnaissance vehicle that can read the minute hand of a wristwatch from an altitude of 26,000 feet. Bin Laden is very tall – slightly over 6'6" – and incredibly thin, less than 150 pounds. He wears shalwart kameez – the loose-fitting tunics and baggy pants of al-Qaida and Taliban soldiers – and, when the weather is cold, he dons a camouflage jacket. Although he was born in 1957 and far from retirement age, the al-Qaida chieftain appears...

Reuters reports: “As the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the 1st atomic bomb on Saturday, some American media experts see uncomfortable echoes between the suppression of images of death and destruction then, and coverage of the war in Iraq today.” Reuters cites an article in Editor & Publisher by Greg Mitchell, claiming American officials seized film after the “atomic attacks” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prevent us from seeing the devastation. Mitchell compares this to Iraq: “The chief similarity is that Americans are still being kept at a distance from images of death, whether...

CHANTILLY, Va. and a loaded weight of 140,000 pounds (63,500 kilograms) dominates a hangar filled with historic military and civil aircraft, ranging from a Japanese kamikaze plane to the first passenger jet to the supersonic Concorde. Air Force veteran Greg Culpepper, 55, a tourist from North Carolina, said he had no doubt that President Harry Truman did the right thing 60 years ago. "If it hadn't been for Truman dropping that bomb, just think of how many Americans would have been killed if we had had to invade," he said. "We're a peace-loving people and we don't want war, but...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version August 05, 2005, 7:14 a.m. 60 Years Later Considering Hiroshima. For 60 years the United States has agonized over its unleashing of the world’s first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima on August 6, 2005. President Harry Truman’s decision to explode an atomic bomb over an ostensible military target — the headquarters of the crack Japanese 2nd Army — led to well over 100,000 fatalities, the vast majority of them civilians. Critics immediately argued that we should have first targeted the bomb on an uninhabited area as a warning for the Japanese...

Today--or August 6 in Japan--is the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed outright an estimated 80,000 Japanese and hastened World War II to its conclusion on August 15. Those of us who belong to the postwar generations tend to regard the occasion as a somber, even shameful, one. But that's not how the generation of Americans who actually fought the war saw it. And if we're going to reflect seriously about the bomb, we ought first to think about it as they did. ...No surprise, then, that when news of the bomb reached...