Three seconds later, the temperature at the ground level beneath the expanding may have reached 7.200 degrees Fahrenheit, instantly burning to cinders, every human, animal, tree, and shrub.
The blazing heat melted iron and other metals, scorched bricks and concrete buildings, ignited clothing, disintegrated vegetation, and caused severe and fatal flash burns on people’s exposed faces and bodies. A mile from the detonation, the blast force caused nine-inch brick walls to crack, and glass fragments bulleted into people’s arms, legs, backs, and faces, often puncturing their muscles and organs. Two miles away, thousands of people suffering flesh burns from the extreme heat lay trapped beneath partially demolished buildings.
At distances up to five miles, wood and glass splinters pierced through people’s clothing and ripped into their flesh. Windows shattered as far as eleven miles away. Larger doses of radiation than any human had ever received penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals. The ascending fireball suctioned massive amounts of thick dust and debris into its churning stem. A deafening roar erupted as buildings throughout the city shuddered and crashed to the ground.
“The Light Was Indescribable”
“It all happened in an instant,” Yoshida remembered. He had barely seen the blinding light half a mile away before a powerful force hit him on his right side and hurled him into the air. “The heat was so intense that I curled up like surume [dried grilled squid]."http://www.salon.com/2015/08/06/most_of_nagasakis_residents_had_no_warning_the_day_we_dropped_the_bomb_partnerLike a grilled squid. Underneath the bomb, the tremendous heat and shock wave from the blast burned the skin right off humans' bodies, leaving burnt heaps behind.
Buildings exploded, and more radiation than ever unleashed on earth before, fell upon the inhabitants of Nagasaki--normal people like you and me despite the racism published in the US warning of the yellow menace of the Japanese which promoted fear based on skin pigmentation. It becomes psychologically easier to slaughter great numbers of people if you define them as subhuman and barbaric--people who had received no warnings, no dropped leaflets, no radio broadcasts warning them to flee the city before nearly utter destruction.
The use of the second atomic bomb on people came after a campaign of firebombing of German and Japanese cities, cities unimportant as military targets. Firebombing them mostly killed civilians under the new theory of war as utter destruction of an enemy populace, bringing Old Testament biblical destruction upon other human beings, in violation of all the rules of civilized war.
World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. [1] The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.
What is the logic and what have been the consequences—for its victims, for subsequent global patterns of warfare and for international law—of new technologies of mass destruction and their application associated with the rise of air power and bombing technology in World War II and after? Above all, how have these experiences shaped the American way of war over six decades in which the United States has been a major actor in important wars? The issues have particular salience in an epoch whose central international discourse centers on terror and the War on Terror, one in which the terror inflicted on noncombatants by the major powers is frequently neglected. (emphasis added) From A Forgotten Holocaust: http://japanfocus.org/site/view/2414So failing to face facts of "moral atrocitie"s committed in the name of the American people in service of the Global War on Terror (sic) today causes misuse of US military power, which engenders and foments the terror we seek to stop.
"As I have observed, those who plow evil
and those who sow trouble reap it."
Job 4:8
1 comment:
You start a war by shamming negotiations as a cover for a sneak attack, you have little to complain about what happens.
In the city of Nanking, Japanese soldiers slaughtered as many civilians as died in the atomic bombings, both of them. But they did it the old fashioned-way: Machine-gunning, beheading, and burying alive. Two Japanese officers had a contest to see who could behead the most people in a single day, a contest that was reported in an army newspaper as though it was a sporting event.
They have little to complain about and their victims would agree with that. I doubt if you can find more than a handful of Chinese or Korean citizens who think that nuking Japan was wrong.
Post a Comment