Unfinished thoughts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It has been 60 years since the government of the United States dropped not one but 2 Atomic bombs on Japanese civilians. It has been 35 years since I was a 16 year old catholic school girl reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima as a history class assignment. Even before I read the book, I did not think for one second that the bombings were justified. Why should civilians pay for the mistakes of their leaders? It was 1970 and Richard Nixon was president. I certainly did not want to have to pay for his.

What mystifies me today is not that pundits are still wailing that the bombing saved lives, “both Japanese and American,” but that anyone still publishes this nonsense and even more mystifying that anyone believes it.

Nuclear power knows no boundaries. The air, oceans and earth contain it deadly legacy. Our bones, our blood our genes carry it as well.

The atomic bomb did not appear and disappear over the days of August 6-8 1945. During its development American soldiers were sacrificed, not by an enemy outside our borders but to the craving for power and domination within. In his book,’ Atomic Soldiers American Victims of Nuclear Experiments,” published by Beacon Press in 1980, Howard L. Rosenberg writes about the American soldiers who were used as physical and psychological guinea pigs for the promoters of nuclear power. The legacy of human devastation these madmen left behind is the same as the one for the soldiers exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and the vaccines, depleted uranium and other toxins during the first and current Gulf Wars: Sounds like a personal problem to me soldier. Evidence, what evidence? At times the men who were victims of these experiments were not even believed by their own families. It wasn’t until after their deaths when some enterprising young journalist or lawyer came knocking at the families door that they realized the crazy man was telling the truth.

This is not to deny the fact that dropping this type of weapon on anyone-even people who are considered “the enemy” is anything less than a war crime. It is more than a war crime; it’s a crime against all life on the planet. We are living with the deadly legacy of those bombs. Our loved ones are dying from it; our planet is dying from it and still people wave the flag. Uncle Sam kicks them in the butt while like a reverse mechanical bank they open their mouths to dispense their hard earned cash so he can use the money to kill them, their loved ones and every good thing on this earth. What kind of a god would bless that kind of behavior?