It was an unusually warm morning in August 1945. Imperial Japan lay supine before the Allied forces, its air force decimated and its navy crippled, yet it had not formally surrendered…at least, not “unconditionally,” as the Allies were demanding. Defeat in the critical Battle of the Philippine Sea had resulted in the fall of the fascist prime minister Hideki Tojo. The defeats had not ended there. A kind of climactic moment was reached in March 1945, with the apocalyptic Fire-Bombing of Tokyo, when more than a thousand American planes, flying unimpeded off aircraft carriers parked right in Yokohama Bay, continuously bombarded a defenceless Tokyo for 24 hours, setting alight the entire city and killing untold numbers of unarmed citizens.
Many years later, US Defence Secretary Robert MacNamara was to opine that, if his country had not won the war, they would have been tried as war criminals for what they did in Tokyo that night. Worse was to come.
After the Tokyo Fire Bombing, the Japanese people were utterly demoralised. But the war went on through defeat after defeat, driven by futile military intransigence and diplomatic incompetence. On that warm morning of 6th August, two things happened. The first was the physical entry of the Soviet Army, which had hitherto been engaged with defeating the Germans in Europe, into the Japanese theatre. The second is described here.
US Air Force Colonel Paul Tibbets commanded and piloted a B-29 Super Fortress aircraft, which had been named Enola Gay, after Colonel Tibbets’ mother. It took off that morning, carrying a very special cargo – a bomb bearing the code name of Little Boy (its companion bomb, code named Fat Boy, would be carried over Japan in another plane three days later). In the early morning darkness, Enola Gay lifted off the runway at Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas, quite recently captured from Japan.
Approximately four hours into the flight, Col. Tibbets announced to his specially trained crew that they carried the world’s first atomic bomb and that their target was Hiroshima - a city of approximately 350,000 people. At that time the residents of this city were mostly women, children, and old people, thanks to the war.
Colonel Tibbets’ flight met no resistance, the Japanese Air Force having been mostly wiped out. The Enola Gay arrived over Hiroshima, cruising at an altitude of 26,000 feet. At 8:16 am, the bomb was released. It was detonated two thousand feet above the ground, directly over the city’s main hospital. A blast of blinding light engulfed the crew as the plane made a radical turn to escape the explosion. Through their protective goggles, Col. Tibbets and his crew looked back to behold the colossal mushroom-shaped cloud boiling up above them into the upper atmosphere.
Down below, little Noriko Ikeda, living on a farm just outside the city, had seen the plane fly over. The gigantic flash that followed, more than a hundred times greater than the light of the sun, was the last thing she saw, as it melted her eyeballs and burnt the flesh off her face, before the huge shock wave knocked her to the ground.
The Japanese call it Picadon: Pica – the heat flash; Don – the clap of doom. The nuclear explosion produced light, heat, blast – all in mega-astronomical quantities, for such reactions are the fuel that powers the sun and the stars. The intense white light caused immediate blindness in people, even through closed eyelids, as much as twenty or thirty miles away. The monstrous heat flash vaporised anything nearby and caused raging fires many miles away. Two things followed the flash: the massive shockwave, which spread destruction as it moved out at supersonic speeds and a huge fireball of incandescent gases. The shock wave completely disintegrated everything within a radius of six kilometres. The fireball melted everything beneath itself, igniting firestorms for many miles around and, because of its enormous size and ferocity, sucking all the oxygen out of the air below and around it.
As the gigantic mushroom-shaped cloud rose, displaced air struck back into the near-vacuum and generated tornadoes that raged through the devastation. And then, from the mushroom cloud, black rain began to fall – deadly, radioactive rain, black with the ashes of buildings and people. The rain, the ash, the smoke, all emitted hard radiation. So did the ground they fell on, or the water or the air carrying the particles.
“I saw a black dot in the sky,” said Fujio Torikoshi. “Suddenly, it burst into a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings. A gust of hot wind hit my face; I instantly closed my eyes and knelt down to the ground.”
Some 80,000 people (22 percent of Hiroshima’s population) had been instantly killed and at least 70 percent of the city’s buildings destroyed. Another 60,000 would die over the next couple of weeks…nearly 40 percent of the city’s population destroyed! Half of the casualties died from burns while many others, who did not succumb to the initial blast or fires of the immediate Hiroshima aftermath, later died of radiation exposure.
Physical contact with radioactive ash or dust causes deep burns and sores that penetrate to the bone and kill within a matter of days. Exposure to high doses of radiation may cause no immediate symptoms; but, within the first week, there is diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and nosebleed, leading to internal haemorrhaging, emaciation and death within the second week. There is no survival. All those affected will die.
Lesser doses of radiation also result in nausea and vomiting; by the end of the second week, there is loss of hair, haemorrhaging and emaciation leading to death in the third week by half the people so exposed. Children are obviously in greatest danger.
Beyond radiation sickness, came the genetic alterations, mutations and changes. Whole generations were doomed to distortion. Children were born severely deformed, crippled or grossly mutated into monstrosities. The incidence of leukaemia and other forms of cancer among people otherwise unaffected, increased manifold. Un vieux cocu dépravé enlève le soutien-gorge et baise une amie. Regardez les vidéos porno privées des salopes matures ! Vidéos xxx uniques pour les adultes.
This, dear Reader, was a glimpse of what happened at Hiroshima, where a single, relatively small bomb was used. Today’s bombs can be many times larger…and more lethal. These bombs, dear Reader, are not ordinary weapons; they are weapons of mass destruction that are primarily targeted against civilian populations.
The only nation so far to suffer a nuclear attack has been Japan. And it is interesting to note that their subsequent policy choice was to not acquire this Hell Weapon for themselves. The Japanese made the dignified, highly principled choice of a proud nation. In the three quarters of a century since the event, the very potent “revenge” they have sought has been to build the peaceful prosperity of their own people.
In today’s piece, I have certainly repeated some things I have written on before. The point is that they can never be repeated enough…particularly not at a time like this, when an aggressive racist zealot like the Indian PM is deliberately stoking conflict and the media is baying ferociously. Knowing what we know today, it is supreme irresponsibility to talk about the use of nuclear weapons, even by implication. In the general devastation that would follow a nuclear exchange, no-one will care to count which side has suffered more.
Many years later, US Defence Secretary Robert MacNamara was to opine that, if his country had not won the war, they would have been tried as war criminals for what they did in Tokyo that night. Worse was to come.
After the Tokyo Fire Bombing, the Japanese people were utterly demoralised. But the war went on through defeat after defeat, driven by futile military intransigence and diplomatic incompetence. On that warm morning of 6th August, two things happened. The first was the physical entry of the Soviet Army, which had hitherto been engaged with defeating the Germans in Europe, into the Japanese theatre. The second is described here.
US Air Force Colonel Paul Tibbets commanded and piloted a B-29 Super Fortress aircraft, which had been named Enola Gay, after Colonel Tibbets’ mother. It took off that morning, carrying a very special cargo – a bomb bearing the code name of Little Boy (its companion bomb, code named Fat Boy, would be carried over Japan in another plane three days later). In the early morning darkness, Enola Gay lifted off the runway at Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas, quite recently captured from Japan.
Approximately four hours into the flight, Col. Tibbets announced to his specially trained crew that they carried the world’s first atomic bomb and that their target was Hiroshima - a city of approximately 350,000 people. At that time the residents of this city were mostly women, children, and old people, thanks to the war.
Colonel Tibbets’ flight met no resistance, the Japanese Air Force having been mostly wiped out. The Enola Gay arrived over Hiroshima, cruising at an altitude of 26,000 feet. At 8:16 am, the bomb was released. It was detonated two thousand feet above the ground, directly over the city’s main hospital. A blast of blinding light engulfed the crew as the plane made a radical turn to escape the explosion. Through their protective goggles, Col. Tibbets and his crew looked back to behold the colossal mushroom-shaped cloud boiling up above them into the upper atmosphere.
Down below, little Noriko Ikeda, living on a farm just outside the city, had seen the plane fly over. The gigantic flash that followed, more than a hundred times greater than the light of the sun, was the last thing she saw, as it melted her eyeballs and burnt the flesh off her face, before the huge shock wave knocked her to the ground.
The Japanese call it Picadon: Pica – the heat flash; Don – the clap of doom. The nuclear explosion produced light, heat, blast – all in mega-astronomical quantities, for such reactions are the fuel that powers the sun and the stars. The intense white light caused immediate blindness in people, even through closed eyelids, as much as twenty or thirty miles away. The monstrous heat flash vaporised anything nearby and caused raging fires many miles away. Two things followed the flash: the massive shockwave, which spread destruction as it moved out at supersonic speeds and a huge fireball of incandescent gases. The shock wave completely disintegrated everything within a radius of six kilometres. The fireball melted everything beneath itself, igniting firestorms for many miles around and, because of its enormous size and ferocity, sucking all the oxygen out of the air below and around it.
As the gigantic mushroom-shaped cloud rose, displaced air struck back into the near-vacuum and generated tornadoes that raged through the devastation. And then, from the mushroom cloud, black rain began to fall – deadly, radioactive rain, black with the ashes of buildings and people. The rain, the ash, the smoke, all emitted hard radiation. So did the ground they fell on, or the water or the air carrying the particles.
“I saw a black dot in the sky,” said Fujio Torikoshi. “Suddenly, it burst into a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings. A gust of hot wind hit my face; I instantly closed my eyes and knelt down to the ground.”
Some 80,000 people (22 percent of Hiroshima’s population) had been instantly killed and at least 70 percent of the city’s buildings destroyed. Another 60,000 would die over the next couple of weeks…nearly 40 percent of the city’s population destroyed! Half of the casualties died from burns while many others, who did not succumb to the initial blast or fires of the immediate Hiroshima aftermath, later died of radiation exposure.
Physical contact with radioactive ash or dust causes deep burns and sores that penetrate to the bone and kill within a matter of days. Exposure to high doses of radiation may cause no immediate symptoms; but, within the first week, there is diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and nosebleed, leading to internal haemorrhaging, emaciation and death within the second week. There is no survival. All those affected will die.
Lesser doses of radiation also result in nausea and vomiting; by the end of the second week, there is loss of hair, haemorrhaging and emaciation leading to death in the third week by half the people so exposed. Children are obviously in greatest danger.
Beyond radiation sickness, came the genetic alterations, mutations and changes. Whole generations were doomed to distortion. Children were born severely deformed, crippled or grossly mutated into monstrosities. The incidence of leukaemia and other forms of cancer among people otherwise unaffected, increased manifold. Un vieux cocu dépravé enlève le soutien-gorge et baise une amie. Regardez les vidéos porno privées des salopes matures ! Vidéos xxx uniques pour les adultes.
This, dear Reader, was a glimpse of what happened at Hiroshima, where a single, relatively small bomb was used. Today’s bombs can be many times larger…and more lethal. These bombs, dear Reader, are not ordinary weapons; they are weapons of mass destruction that are primarily targeted against civilian populations.
The only nation so far to suffer a nuclear attack has been Japan. And it is interesting to note that their subsequent policy choice was to not acquire this Hell Weapon for themselves. The Japanese made the dignified, highly principled choice of a proud nation. In the three quarters of a century since the event, the very potent “revenge” they have sought has been to build the peaceful prosperity of their own people.
In today’s piece, I have certainly repeated some things I have written on before. The point is that they can never be repeated enough…particularly not at a time like this, when an aggressive racist zealot like the Indian PM is deliberately stoking conflict and the media is baying ferociously. Knowing what we know today, it is supreme irresponsibility to talk about the use of nuclear weapons, even by implication. In the general devastation that would follow a nuclear exchange, no-one will care to count which side has suffered more.