US Attends Hiroshima Memorial For First Time
http://newsmaxworld.com/asia/US_Hiroshima_memorial/2010/08/06/339373.html?s=al&promo_code=A722-1
Stephen Leeper is the chairperson of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation. He says no future use of atomic weapons should ever occur. "By any definition, they were a war crime, so I am down on those bombings,” Leeper said. “However, I am not going to make an issue of that with any American or ambassador or government official or anybody else because that is not the point. The point is how do we keep it from happening again." [Emphasis mine]
That's absolute and utter bullshit, as I'm sure Leeper himself knows. At the time the Bomb was deployed in Japan, all we knew about it was that it would make a bigger bang and take down more infrastructure than anything we'd ever used in the past. Not even the scientists who worked to develop the Bomb had a clue about what its radiation would do, let alone fallout from it -- if you doubt that, consider this: Metallurgists used to "test the melt," that is, check to see if molten metal was ready for cooling and processing into whatever forms by opening a small door at eyeball height (or even higher, so that they had to mount a ladder to do that) in the containment of the metal and seeing what color the melted metal was and what texture it seemed to have. From the time humans began smelting metal in job lots, that was the way it was done. Eventually, in the latter part of the 20th century, smelters were rigged with electronic detectors that could do that job without human supervision, displaying readouts to people in control-rooms well away from where the metal or ore itself was actually being smelted. But that didn't happen until after World War II. Up until then, whenever power-metals were being smelted, it was always under supervision of nuclear scientists, chemists, and physicists, at least one of them would have the job of testing the melt by eyeball in the old way. That went on until the 1950s. In the meantime, increasing numbers of those scientists came down with nasty cases of eye- and brain-cancer, and nobody knew why -- until after we looked over all the reports we got from what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were nuked at the end of World War II, and our scientists finally realized what deadly perils radiation and radioactive fallout presented to living creatures, including us. That made it clear that those scientists who'd been working with radioactive metals and who'd developed serious central nervous system cancers had sustained at least one too many doses of hard radiation as a result of testing the melt. A great many other scientists who'd worked with power-metals without enough protection also came down with other types of cancers and, in some cases, diseases of the blood, bone marrow, heart, and lungs. That's how we learned why the Bomb was so deadly. We'd known about its blast power and extreme high heat before we used it on Japan, but thought of it was just another type of big bomb on steroids. It wasn't until we put all the information we had together with what we received from observers in Japan that we finally realized what radiation from the Bomb and its fallout could do to people.
So what we did was not a war-crime unless, like too many idiots out there, you believe that our defending ourselves and our nation from the Axis during World War II was all by itself a war crime, regardless of how we did it. If you want to win a war, you seize the advantage any way you can, including technologically. Yes, if we had known beforehand what the Bomb would do to those living in the areas where it was deployed, and went ahead and used it anyway, you could make the case that we thereby committed a war crime. But we didn't. And even then, Truman made the decision to use it to end the war as quickly as possible, because, given the mind-set of the Japanese people, nothing short of it would have sufficed. To save both American and Japanese lives, he gave the go-head for the Bomb's use, and it turned out to be the convincer that led Japan to surrender to us unconditionally. Given the atrocities that the Japanese military inflicted on others during and even well before World War II (e.g., a little nothing called the the Rape of Nanking which took place on December 13, 1937), not letting them win that war was of paramount importance. And the only way we could do that was to use the best of what we had to defend ourselves and our allies. Which we did. Which wasn't a war crime by any sane standard. So Leeper is a damned liar.
Stephen Leeper is the chairperson of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation. He says no future use of atomic weapons should ever occur. "By any definition, they were a war crime, so I am down on those bombings,” Leeper said. “However, I am not going to make an issue of that with any American or ambassador or government official or anybody else because that is not the point. The point is how do we keep it from happening again." [Emphasis mine]
That's absolute and utter bullshit, as I'm sure Leeper himself knows. At the time the Bomb was deployed in Japan, all we knew about it was that it would make a bigger bang and take down more infrastructure than anything we'd ever used in the past. Not even the scientists who worked to develop the Bomb had a clue about what its radiation would do, let alone fallout from it -- if you doubt that, consider this: Metallurgists used to "test the melt," that is, check to see if molten metal was ready for cooling and processing into whatever forms by opening a small door at eyeball height (or even higher, so that they had to mount a ladder to do that) in the containment of the metal and seeing what color the melted metal was and what texture it seemed to have. From the time humans began smelting metal in job lots, that was the way it was done. Eventually, in the latter part of the 20th century, smelters were rigged with electronic detectors that could do that job without human supervision, displaying readouts to people in control-rooms well away from where the metal or ore itself was actually being smelted. But that didn't happen until after World War II. Up until then, whenever power-metals were being smelted, it was always under supervision of nuclear scientists, chemists, and physicists, at least one of them would have the job of testing the melt by eyeball in the old way. That went on until the 1950s. In the meantime, increasing numbers of those scientists came down with nasty cases of eye- and brain-cancer, and nobody knew why -- until after we looked over all the reports we got from what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were nuked at the end of World War II, and our scientists finally realized what deadly perils radiation and radioactive fallout presented to living creatures, including us. That made it clear that those scientists who'd been working with radioactive metals and who'd developed serious central nervous system cancers had sustained at least one too many doses of hard radiation as a result of testing the melt. A great many other scientists who'd worked with power-metals without enough protection also came down with other types of cancers and, in some cases, diseases of the blood, bone marrow, heart, and lungs. That's how we learned why the Bomb was so deadly. We'd known about its blast power and extreme high heat before we used it on Japan, but thought of it was just another type of big bomb on steroids. It wasn't until we put all the information we had together with what we received from observers in Japan that we finally realized what radiation from the Bomb and its fallout could do to people.
So what we did was not a war-crime unless, like too many idiots out there, you believe that our defending ourselves and our nation from the Axis during World War II was all by itself a war crime, regardless of how we did it. If you want to win a war, you seize the advantage any way you can, including technologically. Yes, if we had known beforehand what the Bomb would do to those living in the areas where it was deployed, and went ahead and used it anyway, you could make the case that we thereby committed a war crime. But we didn't. And even then, Truman made the decision to use it to end the war as quickly as possible, because, given the mind-set of the Japanese people, nothing short of it would have sufficed. To save both American and Japanese lives, he gave the go-head for the Bomb's use, and it turned out to be the convincer that led Japan to surrender to us unconditionally. Given the atrocities that the Japanese military inflicted on others during and even well before World War II (e.g., a little nothing called the the Rape of Nanking which took place on December 13, 1937), not letting them win that war was of paramount importance. And the only way we could do that was to use the best of what we had to defend ourselves and our allies. Which we did. Which wasn't a war crime by any sane standard. So Leeper is a damned liar.