Dilip Simeon's blog

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has polarised opinion for nearly 70 years.  For some it is an unforgivable stain on human history, the moment when the world fell to scientific horror.  For others it was a necessary evil to bring an end to the Second World War - a conflict which had brought countries around the globe to their knees.  What is without doubt is the world was inextricably changed when the Allies decided to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. On August 6, 1945, the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb - known as ‘Little Boy’ - on Hiroshima. It flattened a five mile area with a mushroom cloud rising thousands of feet into the air. Official estimates put the death toll at 140,000 people from the blast and resulting radiation poisoning.  Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki leaving a further 74,000 people dead. A week passed, and the Japanese surrendered to the Allied forces. Now an exhibition of the event and its reper...

No other weapon, doctrine or ideology has spawned so much self-righteous hypocrisy as the atomic bomb Japan marks 70 years of Hiroshima bombing On this day, seventy years ago, Hiroshima was turned into an abattoir. It was chosen because, built around rivers, and therefore not a good target for the firebombing which the US unleashed on Japan from 1944, it was unscathed at a time when most Japanese cities had been reduced to ashes. Since the US wanted to measure the damage nuclear weapons would cause, it needed targets that were pristine. Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the three other cities chosen for attack by nuclear weapons were spared carpet-bombing, preserved like sacrificial victims for ritual slaughter. That slaughter was immense, though only 1% of the uranium in the bomb over Hiroshima went through fission.  An inefficient bomb killed over 50,000 people in the twinkling of an eye. They were the lucky ones. Another 100,000 died horrible deaths from their wounds over the...

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known. I recently published a  social history  of US censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, which this piece is based on. The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in archives around the US. I found that military and civilian officials in the US sought to contain information about the effects of radiation from the blasts, which helps explain the persistent gaps in the public’s understanding of radiation from the bombings. Heavy handed:  Although everything related to the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was defined at the time as a military secret, US officials treated the three main effects – blast, fire, and radiation – very differently. They publicized and celebrated the powerful blast but worked to suppress information about the bombs’ rad...

"If  we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said  Curtis LeMay  after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who had directed the assault over Japan in the final days of the Second World War, he believed in the use of nuclear weapons and thought any action acceptable in the pursuit of victory. Two decades later, he would say of Vietnam that America should “bomb them back into the stone ages”. But he was also honest enough to recognise that the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not regarded as a war crime only because America had won the war. Last week marked the  75th anniversary  of the world’s first nuclear attacks. And while Hiroshima has become a byword for existential horror, the moral implications of the bombings have increasingly faded into the background. Seventy-five years ago, LeMay was not alone...

As they mark 75 years since their cities were destroyed in an instant, the ageing men and women who bore witness to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are struggling to remind the world of the horror of  nuclear weapons . Keiko Ogura was eight years old when the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a 16-kilotonne nuclear bomb on  Hiroshima  at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945. An estimated 80,000 of the city’s 350,000 people were killed instantly; by the end of the year, the death toll would rise to 140,000 as survivors succumbed to injuries or illnesses connected to their exposure to radiation. Ogura, who was playing outside her home when the force of the blast swept her off her feet and knocked her unconscious, is one of a  dwindling number of survivors  who have made it their life’s work to tell their story. They hope, with  increasing desperation , for a world without nuclear weapons. “My father had said that something didn’t feel right that mo...

The following is the full text of the Peace Declaration read Sunday by Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui at a ceremony to mark the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city. -- Friends, 72 years ago today, on August 6, at 8:15 a.m., absolute evil was unleashed in the sky over Hiroshima. Let's imagine for a moment what happened under that roiling mushroom cloud. Pika -- the penetrating flash, extreme radiation and heat. Don -- the earth-shattering roar and blast. As the blackness lifts, the scenes emerging into view reveal countless scattered corpses charred beyond recognition even as man or woman. Stepping between the corpses, badly burned, nearly naked figures with blackened faces, singed hair, and tattered, dangling skin wander through spreading flames, looking for water. The rivers in front of you are filled with bodies; the riverbanks so crowded with burnt, half-naked victims you have no place to step. This is truly hell. Under that mushroom cloud, the absolutely evil...

Jacques Pauwels: Mythmaking and the Atomic Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki     Truman and his advisors thus fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence”. They convinced themselves that the new weapon would enable them to force their will on the Soviet Union. The atomic bomb was “a hammer”, as Truman himself put it, that he would wave over the heads of “those boys in the Kremlin”...  More Henry Giroux: Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Age of Normalized Violence What remains particularly ghastly about the rationale for dropping two atomic bombs was the attempt on the part of its defenders to construct a redemptive narrative through a perversion of humanistic commitment, of mass slaughter justified in the name of saving lives and winning the war...  More Abolish War - Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction Capitalism and war: The money behi...

"In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them. " Max Born Percy W. Bridgman Albert Einstein Leopold Infeld Frederic Joliot-Curie Herman J. Muller Linus Pauling Cecil F. Powell Joseph Rotblat Bertrand Russell Hideki Yukawa IN the tragic situation which confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution in the spirit of the appended draft. We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but a...