But the young, athletic girl who liked to run could not escape the grim reality of what it meant to live through an atomic blast. Nine years later Sadako would contract leukemia, dying a year later in a Hiroshima hospital at the age of 12. In death she joined the legions of the hibakusha, the Japanese term for the victims of radiation poisoning.
An estimated 140,000 people died as a result of the Hiroshima blast, tens of thousands of them instantly or within the next few months and almost all of them noncombatants and children. Three days later at Nagasaki, another bomb was dropped, killing thousands more. Eventually over 200,000 people would die as a result of the attacks, either during the bombings or later from illness. By any objective measure the nuclear attacks by the U.S. military constitute the largest acts of mass murder in the history of the world.
They also constitute acts shrouded in lies. At the time President Truman told Americans the targets were military sites. It was necessary to use the bombs to force Japan's surrender, he declared. The public was also told--falsely--that leaflets were dropped prior to the bombings warning people to leave. Later, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson claimed that the atom bomb saved the United States from an invasion of Japan that might have cost a million American casualties.
But U.S. official McGeorge Brundy came up with the million figure, based on nothing, as he later acknowledged. Consider only the assessment of Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1945, who years later wrote: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan." The admiral compared the use of the bombs to adoption of "an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
The Age of "Collateral Damage'"
Truman indeed knew Japan's surrender was imminent, according to now declassified records. But if nuclear weapons were unnecessary to end the war, they did send a forceful global message about which country would dominate the post-war era. Truman did not intend for it to be the Soviet Union. Thus, the dead and victimized of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only the last casualties of World War II, but also the first casualties of the Cold War.
Dark ages, indeed. In our world the deliberate slaughter of civilians in war is very much the norm. The atrocities of the Nazis and Japanese militarists are well-known, but less so was the intentional targeting by Britain's air force of the concentrated worker housing of Hamburg, Germany. Ignoring the factories and U-boat construction yards south of the Elbe, British bombers under the command of extreme reactionary Arthur Harris instead spent months dropping incendiaries and high explosives on Hamburg's civilians. Some British military leaders did not support this policy, but it prevailed and was driven not only by strategic war aims, but also by what science historian David Bodanis in "Electric Universe" (Crown, 2005) describes as Harris' acute hatred of the working classes.
More evidence. In the Errol Morris documentary, "Fog of War," former Secretary of State Robert McNamara admits a reasonable case could have been made to have tried as war criminals the group of Americans who organized the mass death firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. It's a significant admission since McNamara was part of that group. McNamara also acknowledges that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed by Congress, giving President Johnson the authority to unleash war in Vietnam, was based on a lie. The alleged torpedo attack by North Vietnam on the U.S.S. Maddox in 1964 never happened.
Fast forward 40 years. Other than the venerated thinkers at Fox News and their ilk, the whole world now knows the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on an equally fabricated justification: Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. They didn't exist. Nor does the shining "democracy" whose exportation became the fallback rationale to justify Iraq's ongoing occupation.
As the public policy group Just Foreign Policy reports, what does exist is as many as 1,366,350 Iraqis dead as a result of consequences directly tied to the 2003 U.S. military invasion, "A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi," said one member of the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, as reported to The Nation's investigative reporters Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in 2007. The GI was describing his impression of the general attitude among U.S. troops who operate the patrols and supply convoys, man checkpoints, and conduct raids and arrests.
"And Also Madness and Irony
What also exists is a Democratic president who declares he will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that support the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Formally, that's a change from his Republican predecessor. But like his Republican predecessor President Obama also insists on retaining the American threat to use nuclear weapons first. Nor in its recent arms talks with Russia would the administration explicitly adopt language threatening nuclear attack only against nuclear threats.
Meanwhile, the White House employs favorable rhetoric for the idea of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East--as long as Israel (and itself, for that matter) is exempted. Actually, at the moment "nuclear-weapons-free zone" just means no nukes for Iran. The latter remains a country within striking distance of U.S. nuclear-armed submarines.
Tellingly, during the 2008 primary race Obama briefly flirted with the notion of opposing use of nuclear weapons as a foreign policy option. Now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sharply criticized her then primary rival. "I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons," Clinton said.
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