I had hoped to write a follow-up to my previous post on "The Bomb"s today -- the anniversary of the detonation of the "Fat Man" bomb on Nagasaki. Unfortunately I ran out of time to work on a new post, so instead here are some links to articles I found on the web today:
Nagasaki Marks A-Bomb AnniversaryThe southern Japanese city of Nagasaki marked the 65th anniversary of the US atomic bomb attack on Monday, three days after Hiroshima held its biggest-ever memorial service. read more
August 9, 2010
Nagasaki, which lost over 70,000 civilians (and a few military personnel) to a new weapon sixty-five years ago today, has always been The Forgotten A-Bomb City. No one ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. Yet in some ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete. In fact, if it had not exploded off-target the death toll in the city would have easily topped the Hiroshima total.
Hiroshima has always drawn the vast majority of press, public and
historical interest, even though many who support the first atomic
bombing have expressed severe misgivings about number two because of the
failure of United States to give the Japanese at least a few more days
to consider surrender after the first blast (and the Soviets'
declaration of war). Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once said in an interview that
the "nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing
of Nagasaki."
But Nagasaki was "forgotten" from the very start, thanks to a blatant act of press censorship. read more
The Greatest Nuclear Danger
Today Is Not Countdown to Zero's Nuclear "Accident" or "Miscalculation"
or "Madness." The Greatest Nuclear Danger Today, Still, Like 65 Years
Ago, Is Nuclear War
by Tad Daley
Two weeks before the 65th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed just six days later by the end of the Second World War, Magnolia Pictures released a new film called "Countdown to Zero." It was made by some of the same people who made "An Inconvenient Truth," and the filmmakers unapologetically expressed the hope that it would change the game on nuclear disarmament much as their previous film did on climate change.
The film quite shrewdly bases its argument on a single sentence, uttered by President John F. Kennedy nearly half a century ago. In his first speech before the United Nations, on September 25, 1961, the president said, "Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness." read more
And here's an interesting one by Gary G. Kohls from 2009:
Duty to Warn: The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story64 years ago, on August 9th, 1945, the second of the only two atomic
bombs ever used as instruments of mass destruction was dropped on the
defenseless civilian city of Nagasaki, Japan, by an all-Christian bomb
crew who had been training for this mission for months. The crew was
only “doing it’s job,” and they did it with military efficiency and
precision.
It had been only 3 days since the first bomb, a uranium bomb, had
incinerated Hiroshima, with chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where Japan’s
fascist military government leaders and the Emperor Hirohito had been
searching for months for a way to an honorable end to the war, a war
which had exhausted Japan to virtually moribund defenseless state. read more
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