Tomorrow Marks 70th Anniversary of Atomic Bomb Drop Over Hiroshima

Tomorrow, August 6, 2015, will mark the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan by the United States in its quest to quickly end World War II and avoid its remaining stated option of invading the island nation.  Such an invasion would doubtless have cost many, many more lives....not just of Americans, but also of the Japanese, both soldiers and civilians...and would have completely devastated that country.  Three months earlier, the Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of Germany after its leader, Adolf Hitler, had committed suicide and the country was already invaded and militarily conquered.  In early August of 1945, neither condition was applicable to Japan...its military rulers not only were still firmly entrenched in power with the nation essentially intact (although badly scarred from Allied bombing), but it still occupied the bulk of populated China and Indo-China (including Vietnam) at that time.  The Japanese did not practice surrender, instead fighting to the death even when their situation was hopeless and choosing suicide over surrendering in battle after battle on the Pacific Islands over which they fought the Americans.  With this scenario facing the United States, its leaders opted for the nuclear strike in hopes of convincing the Japanese militarists that their chances for remaining in power were fruitless.  But even after seeing the horrible effects of the atomic bomb on one of their cities, they still refused.  Three days later, Nagasaki was hit by the second, and hopefully last ever, atomic bomb dropped on a populated area.  Finally, they surrendered almost unconditionally: their emperor, who reportedly had pushed for the surrender in the end to save his people, was allowed to remain as such, at least in a titular, ceremonial role...

The development of the atomic bomb in the United States during World War II came after Albert Einstein, a Jewish emigre from Hitler's Germany and his anti-semitic policies, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning him that the Germans had already split the atom and were very possibly engaged in an effort of their own to develop such a weapon from this process.  The irony is that it was Japan that ultimately was hit, not Germany.  Another twist in all this was the gross underestimation of the devastating effects that the radiation from the bomb had on the population surviving the initial impact, especially that from the fallout that descended from the skies for days after the explosion.  Even after all this, the American military, when they dropped a demonstration A-bomb on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific the following year, did not realize that the ships they had placed in proximity to the bomb would be hopelessly contaminated with radiation...the Naval authorities in charge of this explosion had wanted to put sailors back on them and guide them back into American ports to show that ships could withstand nuclear attacks. It was very sobering to see the level of contamination the bomb had produced.

In spite of all the rhetoric these days about how countries like Iran want to get the "bomb" in order to attack others...like Israel...it is obvious to me that self-defense from invasion is the primary goal.  Ukraine had the atomic bomb, left in their control when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991...but they voluntarily gave it up...and now, they've had to suffer an invasion indirectly instigated by their neighbor, Russia.  Name me one country that, after developing nuclear warfare technology, has been invaded by another.  You can't, I bet.  Now look at a place like Iran, which was brutally invaded in 1980 by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  Then they watched as the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq in 1991 following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.  And then after 9/11, the invasion and long occupation on either side of Iran...Iraq on the west and Afghanistan on the east.  Speaking of the latter, of course the USSR was earlier engaged in a protracted, fruitless occupation and struggle in that country after invading it in 1980.  So if you're the Iranian leader and see all of this going on around you, wouldn't you, too, want to protect yourself and your people against invasion?  And that's the problem I see nowadays with nuclear proliferation.  We can rant and rave all we want about how evil the nuclear bomb is, but we are still creating conditions that motivate others to get it for themselves...