Atomic Bomb Investigation

I had intended to keep this blog a bit more upbeat in 2010, but I just wanted to get this rather unpleasant subject off my chest... again. Sorry.

I just watched a rather shocking programme on the English-language Japanese channel NHK World. The programme was about investigations carried about by the Japanese into the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More specifically though, they investigated the effects of the nuclear bombs on the victims.

Even before World War 2 ended, the Japanese had started examining victims and survivors to try to discover what the atomic bomb had done to them. When US forces occupied Japan after the end of the war and started carrying out their own investigations into the effects, the Japanese handed over these reports to them as a "good will" gesture.

In total, in the years following the end of WW2, over 180 volumes of reports prepared by the Japanese were handed over to the US forces and translated into English. When the reports were prepared and handed over, the Japanese had hoped that they would be used to reveal to the World the horrors that nuclear weapons cause. Instead, they were classified and many of their findings were not revealed to the public.

One of the reports contained a "mortality graph" that showed how distance from the hypo-centre of the blast affected the chances of death. The graph was created from data based on 17000 child victims of the Hiroshima bomb. Rather than being shocked or disturbed by this data and instantly deeming nuclear weapons too horrific to ever use again, the US military used the graph to determine how many nuclear weapons would have to be used on various cities in the USSR in order to obtain the death-rate that they wanted. They concluded that 6 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons would need to be used on Moscow in order to achieve their desired results.

There's been lots said by major governments about the global banning of landmines and cluster bombs because they are indiscriminate in their killing and can still cause deaths long after the conflict has ended. So, why aren't the same arguments being applied to an instant banning of nuclear weapons?

Some people who entered parts of Hiroshima five days after the bomb was dropped suffered radiation sickness similar to the victims who were there on the day and many developed cancer and other terminal illnesses in later life because of it. Even some medical professionals who went there in an attempt to help the victims became victims themselves. I'm not really up-to-date on the rules of war, but I'm pretty sure that targeting medical teams with your weapons is frowned upon.

More than half a century after the atomic blast itself, people are still dying from it. Some of them weren't even born when the war ended, but, due to either being exposed to radiation in their mother's womb or through genetic deformities passed down from an irradiated relative, they are still being killed by it.

So, how can politicians still claim that there's any case at all for keeping a single nuclear weapon in their arsenal "just in case"? If you want to ban landmines and cluster bombs, but you still have nuclear weapons then I'm sorry, but you're just being a hypocrite.

Okay, there's the old argument that nuclear weapons are being kept as a deterrent, but what are you actually going to do with them? If a crazy dictator or a terrorist group detonates a nuclear device in your country, are you then going to retaliate and kill maybe a million or more innocent civilians in their country, who had absolutely no control over the actions of the guilty parties, as a form of payback? The whole situation is just ludicrous and impossible to defend.

A single nuclear warhead of the type still held by the US has the equivalent destructive power of around 25 Hiroshima bombs, and remember that the US military's own simulation concluded that only 6 Hiroshima bombs would be required to wipe out Moscow. Well, the US still has over 1000 of these warheads, "just in case". This means that they still hold a nuclear arsenal with enough combined destructive power to kill the populations of 4000 cities the size of Moscow. I'd hardly say that you could defend those numbers by calling them a deterrent.

"Little Boy" - The Hiroshima bomb. Imagine 25 of these exploding simultaneously over your city.

Somebody needs to stand up, be the big man, and lead by example here by getting rid of all their nuclear weapons. This isn't some sort of action movie. The "you put your gun down first", "no, you put your gun down first" stand-off is a dangerous game to play, and often somebody ends up being shot.

Sorry for the reality check. Enjoy your day.

Jason