Friend and fellow journalist Jim Taylor has an interesting and challenging piece on remembering of the use of the first thermonuclear weapon. That, of course, was at Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. His comments can be found on his blog, amongst other places.
For me, two points were of particular interest.
1. Once you let the genie — any genie — out of the bottle, it's very tough to get it back in.
2. Hiroshima legitimizes international terrorism, by primarily targeting civilians.
It is not a horrific read, but neither is it comfortable.
I encourage you to take some time to consider it.
5 comments:
I know from whence you base your feelings. Indeed, the photos at that time of burned children running screaming down the road were worldwide photo-fodder for the masses.
Selective amnesia has long been a human trait. The argument went that Hiroshima killed 200000 but saved maybe a million American lives. That relief sentiment created long lasting guilt.
Nowadays, a human being pushes a button thousands of miles from a target he knows nothing about and will never know wether his button or that of anotaher comrade did the killing...if any.
On the old firing squads one gun was loaded with blanks, the men firing did not know which one but they all saw the victim die.
Sorry, RB but civilians have been targeted since the beginning of time. Cities destroyed stone from stone and the entire populace massacred. It took longer and was up close and personal but "WMD" are not new. They were called armies.
Also if you look at numbers killed, Dresden and Hamburg firestorms killed as many. Firebombing of Tokyo killed twice as many.
The difference is that now one bomb can wipe out a city in a flash. And leave behind a legacy of radiation that we really don't comprehend as yet. It is the radiation that has scared people off using them again, I think.
One person, 200,000 people or a million...all the same...not good...
Thanks for your comments, friends.
® Dana: Some images are really hard to watch, aren't they.
® Paul: "Selective amnesia" is a good term.
® Blog Fodder: Civilians have always been subject of the post-conquest "rape, murder, and pillage" of warfare, or the by-product of warfare. But the increasing use of indiscriminate attacks (which I first realized were being used by both sides in Viet Nam, then later, in reflection, London and Dresden during WW2) is simply growing all the time. That I find particularly frightening. Everybody is the primary target — the goal being social destabilization.
®afcg: Yes, very sadly.
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