A-Bomb On Nagasaki Termed War Crime
“The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, once said, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” — which he labeled a war crime.
In his 2011 book Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell says, “If Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki shows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.” Mitchell notes that the US writer Dwight MacDonald cited in 1945 America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population. The New York Herald Tribune editorialized there was “no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind.”
Mitchell reports that the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in Slaughterhouse Five — said, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.”
On Aug. 17, 1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way: “Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. …we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. …we…did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. … Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”
If shame is the natural response to Hiroshima, how is one to respond to Nagasaki, especially in view of all the declassified government papers on the subject? According to Dr. Joseph Gerson’s With Hiroshima Eye, some 74,000 were killed instantly at Nagasaki, another 75,000 were injured and 120,000 were poisoned.
If Hiroshima was unnecessary, how to justify Nagasaki?
The saving of thousands of US lives is held up as the official justification for the two atomic bombings. Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering civilians to protect soldiers, what can be made of the Nagasaki bomb if Hiroshima’s incineration was not necessary?
The most amazingly under-reported statement in this context is that of Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes, quoted on the front page of the August 29, 1945 New York Times with the headline, “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.” Byrnes cited what he called “proof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”
On Sept. 20, 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the famous bombing commander, told a press conference, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
According to Robert Lifton’s and Greg Mitchel’s Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial (1995), only weeks after August 6 and 9, President Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb “did not win the war.”
The US Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted by Paul Nitze less than a year after the atom bombings, concluded that “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and ever if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
Likewise, the Intelligence Group of the US War Department’s Military Intelligence Division conducted a study from January to April 1946 and declared that the bombs had not been needed to end the war, according to reports Gar Alperovitz in his massive The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. The IG said it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.”
Russia did so, Aug. 8, 1945, and as Ward Wilson reports in his Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons, six hours after news of Russia’s invasion of Sakhalin Island reached Tokyo — and before Nagasaki was bombed — the Supreme Council met to discuss unconditional surrender.
Experiments with hell fire?
Nagasaki was attacked with a bomb made of plutonium, named after Pluto, god of the underworld earlier known as Hades, in what some believe to have been a ghastly trial. The most toxic substance known to science, developed for mass destruction, plutonium is so lethal it contaminates everything nearby forever, every isotope a little bit of hell fire.
According to Atomic Cover-Up, Hitoshi Motoshima, mayor of Nagasaki from 1979 to 1995, said, “The reason for Nagasaki was to experiment with the plutonium bomb.” Mitchell notes that “hard evidence to support this ‘experiment’ as the major reason for the bombing remains sketchy.” But according to a wire service report in Newsweek, Aug. 20, 1945, by a journalist traveling with the president aboard the USS Augusta, Truman reportedly announced to his shipmates, “The experiment has been an overwhelming success.”
US investigators visiting Hiroshima Sept. 8, 1945 met with Japan’s leading radiation expert, Professor Masao Tsuzuki. One was given a 1926 paper on Tsuzuki’s famous radiation experiments on rabbits. “Ah, but the Americans, they are wonderful,” Tsuzuki told the group. “It has remained for them to conduct the human experiment!”
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, edits its quarterly newsletter, and writes for PeaceVoice.
U.S. DU Toxic Legacy Continues
A new report from the Netherlands based on U.S. Air Force firing coordinates shows that our military fired its armor-piercing munitions ¾ made of waste uranium-238 which is called “depleted uranium” or DU ¾ into civilian areas of Iraq and at Iraqi troops during the 2003 invasion and occupation, defying the U.S. Air Force’s own legal advice that the toxic and radioactive ammunition be used only against hardened targets in compliance with the Laws of War.
The study, “Laid to Waste,” by the Dutch organization PAX (http://www.paxvoorvrede.nl/media/files/pax-rapport-iraq-final-lowres-spread.pdf) found that the lack of legal obligations on U.S.-led militaries in Iraq to help clean-up after using DU weapons has resulted in Iraqi civilians and workers continuing to be exposed to the highly toxic heavy metal years after the war.
The health risks posed by the inadequate management of Iraq’s DU contamination are unclear because neither U.S.-led forces nor the Iraqi government have supported health research into civilian DU exposures.
High-risk groups include people living near or working on dozens of Iraqi scrap metal sites where thousands of military vehicles ¾ destroyed in the 1991 and 2003 bombardments ¾ are stored or processed. Waste sites often lack official oversight and in places it has taken more than 10 years to decontaminate military wreckage from residential neighborhoods. Hundreds of locations that were hit by the weapons, many of which are in populated areas, remain undocumented, and concern among Iraqi civilians over potential health effects from exposure, ingestion and inhalation is widespread.
Report urges release of targeting details to aid clean-up
“To help clean-up we urgently need to know the location and quantities of DU fired,” says the report’s author Wim Zwijnenburg. “The Iraqi government is also in dire need of technical support to help manage the many scrap metal sites where contaminated vehicles are stored,” Zwijnenburg said. The ongoing refusal by the United States to release targeting information continues to hinder the assessment and management of DU in Iraq. The Dutch military contributed a few thousand troops to the Coalition Forces in Iraq, and peacekeepers in Kosovo, and raised alarms over contamination in 2001 and 2006. (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/09/world/1999-us-document-warned-of-depleted-uranium-in-kosovo.html; http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/dutch-military-in-iraq-delays-troop-transfer-from )
A handful of U.S. targeting coordinates held by the Dutch Ministry of Defense, and released after a Freedom of Information Act request, show that U.S. war planes used DU weapons against a far wider range of targets and sites than previously suspected, including Iraqi troops. The U.S. and British governments have long asserted that DU is only for use against armored vehicles. They have often been called “tank busters.”
Radiation exposure guidelines ignored
Depleted Uranium, a by-product of uranium enrichment for reactor fuel and H-bombs, is categorized as an intermediate-level radioactive waste; contaminated rubble and scrap metal are considered low-level radioactive waste. The Dutch study finds that international guidelines for dealing with both kinds of waste ¾ from the International Commission on Radiological Protection (http://www.icrp.org/) ¾ were ignored and that the Iraqi government did not have the technical capacity to safely manage such contamination.
Lack of clean-up obligations
Unlike anti-personnel landmines and other explosive remnants of war, no treaty currently obliges DU users to help clean-up after the war. However, civil radiation protection standards place the responsibility firmly at the foot of the polluters.
Low estimates suggest that at least 440,000 kilograms (488 tons) of DU was fired by the United States in both Gulf Wars in 1991 and 2003. Civilians living near contaminated sites, scrap yard workers, Iraqi doctors, and researchers have repeatedly voiced concerns over the effects of DU on health and the environment.
Hans von Sponeck, a former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told the Guardian last October, “There is definitive evidence of an alarming rise in birth defects, leukemia, cancer, and other carcinogenic diseases in Iraq after the war.” (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/oct/13/world-health-organisation-iraq-war-depleted-uranium)
“In 2001, I saw in Geneva how a World Health Organization mission to conduct on-spot assessments in Basra and southern Iraq, where DU had led to devastating environmental health problems, was aborted under U.S. political pressure,” Sponeck said.
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, edits its quarterly newsletter, and writes for PeaceVoice.
Public Not Warned Of Bomb Test Fallout
U.S. Warned Kodak, Not Steve O’Neil, About Bomb Test Fallout
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Atomic Energy Commission doused the entire United States with thyroid cancer-causing iodine-131 — and 300 other radio-isotopes — by exploding atomic and hydrogen bombs above ground. To protect the dirty, secretive, militarized bomb-building industry, the government chose to warn the photographic film industry about the radioactive fallout patterns, but not the general public.
In 1951, the Eastman Kodak Company had threatened a federal lawsuit over the nuclear fallout that was fogging its bulk film shipments. Film was not packed in bubble wrap then, but in corn stalks that were sometimes being fallout-contaminated. By agreeing to warn Kodak, etc., the AEC and the bomb program avoided the public uproar — and the bomb testing program’s possible cancellation — that a lawsuit would have precipitated. The settlement kept the deadliness of the fallout hidden from farmers and the public, even though the government well knew that fallout endangered all the people it was supposed to be defending.
This staggering revelation was heralded on Sept. 30, 1997 in the New York Times headline, “U.S. Warned Film Plants, Not Public, About Nuclear Fallout.” The article began, “[W]hile the Government reassured the public that there was no health threat from atmospheric nuclear tests…” The fallout’s radioactive iodine-131caused thyroid doses to virtually all 160 million people in the U.S. at the time.
According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland, which discovered the cover-up, children were especially affected and received higher doses because they generally consumed more milk than adults and since their thyroids are smaller and growing more rapidly. The “milk pathway” moves radio-iodine from grass, to cows, to milk with extreme efficiency — a fact known to the government as early as 1951. Ingested iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid gland where it can cause cancer. Average doses to children averaged between 6 and 14 rad, with some as high as 112 rad. Prior to 1997, the government claimed that thyroid doses to children were 15 to 70 times less.
Radioactive fallout spread to every corner of the U.S.
My friend Steve O’Neil of Duluth, Minnesota, who was born in 1951, has been a public spirited political activist all of his adult life, an advocate for the homeless and a campaigner against the causes of homelessness. As a St. Louis County Commissioner in his third term, Steve made headlines this month by announcing that he has been attacked by an aggressive form of thyroid cancer. Steve is not alone in his affliction — more than 60,000 thyroid cancers will be spotted this year in the U.S. Tens of thousands of them have been caused by our government’s nuclear weapons establishment.
The National Cancer Institute disclosed in 1997 that some 75,000 thyroid cancer cases can be expected in the U.S. from just 90 — out of a total of 235 — above-ground bomb tests and that 10 percent of them will be fatal. That year, the NCI said, about 70 percent of the thyroid cancers caused by iodine-131 fallout from those 90 tests had not yet been diagnosed but would appear years or decades later.
The 14-year NCI study also said the 90 bomb blasts produced more than 100 times the radioactive iodine-131 than the government had earlier claimed. The NCI estimated that they dispersed “about 150 million curies of iodine-131, mainly in the years 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1957.” The study reported that all 160 million people in the country at the time were exposed to the iodine-131 (the only isotope out of more than 300 that were dispersed by the bomb blasts that it studied). Children under 15, like Steve O’Neil and all the Baby Boomers, were particularly at risk.
High doses of fallout were spread nation-wide. Wind patterns and local rainfall caused “hot spots” from Montana and Idaho to South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri and beyond.
In 1962, according to IEER, officials in Utah and Minnesota diverted possibly contaminated milk from the market when iodine-131 levels exceeded radiation guidelines set by the Federal Radiation Council (FRC). The FRC reacted harshly and declared that it did “not recommend such actions.” The FRC also announced that its radiation guidelines should not be applied to bomb test fallout because “any possible health risk which may be associated with exposures even many times above the guide levels would not result in a detectable increase in the incidence of disease.” IEER’s scientists condemned this fabulously implausible assurance, writing: “Since thyroid cancers can develop many years after radiation exposure and are therefore not immediately detectable, this reassurance was highly misleading.”
Thyroid cancers are tip of Bomb test cancer iceberg
The NCI’s 1997 study said about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed in the U.S. annually, and that 1,230 would die from the disease. This estimate turned out to be a gross under-statement.
Today the NCI reports that 60,220 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, and that 1,850 of them will be fatal. The thyroid cancer “balloon” is with us because the nuclear weapons complex under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy attacked the very people it was said to be defending. Yet, it gets worse.
The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation says that iodine-131 doses comprise only two percent of the overall radiation dose from weapons testing. Ninety-eight percent of our fallout dose is from 300 other isotopes produced by the Bomb. It is not idle speculation to suggest that the cancer pandemic afflicting the people of the U.S. has been caused by our own government’s deliberately secret and viciously reckless weapons program. //
John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, edits its Quarterly newsletter, and is syndicated through PeaceVoice.
Massacre National Park, USA
In what looks like the establishment of a state religion, federal- and state-funded monuments to nuclear weapons are popping up all over the country.
Hoping perhaps to enshrine the myth that the god of the underworld, after which Plutonium was named, can be transformed from a vengeful, bloodthirsty self-destructive nightmare demon, into a benign peace-loving fairytale prince, government propagandists are establishing nuclear war theme parks — but without the uncomfortable taint of mass murder or Cold War hatreds.
Tours recently began being offered at the “B Reactor” on the Hanford Reservation in Washington State where for decades plutonium for the nuclear arsenal was extracted in a way that permanently threatens the Columbia River. At Rocky Flats, Colo., where the machining of plutonium poisoned tens of square miles, a National Wildlife Refuge has been established. Near Fargo, N.D., the State Historical Society now owns a deactivated intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch control center, has dubbed it “Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site” and opened it to tourism. In South Dakota, a disarmed ICBM launch center run by the National Park Service is called the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and you can go underground to personally simulate at attack that could murder multiple millions of people.
This summer, just in time for the 66th anniversary of the U.S. atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar recommended to Congress that a national historic park be established to honor the Manhattan Project — the secret World War II program that built the bombs that massacred 140,000 people at Hiroshima and another 70,000 at Nagasaki.
National Park Director Jonathan Jarvis said in a July 17 Park Service press release, “Once a tightly guarded secret, the story of the atomic bomb’s creation needs to be shared with this and future generations.” Jarvis feigns ignorance of the vast literature on the Manhattan Project available from any good library, and his acting the dunce insults both the conscience of the living and the memory of the dead.
Richard Rhodes’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and his 1995 sequel to it, “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” Robert Lifton’s “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial” (1995) or his 1982 study “Indefensible Weapons,” and Gar Alperovitz’s definitive 1995 history, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb”— the product of 30 years of research into the subject — are all gripping and devastating in their treatment of the Bomb’s development, its terroristic uses and its billion-year environmental consequences.
But the state wants us to forget this downside, and at least two agendas are at work. First, treating nuclear weapons nostalgically teaches the sham lesson that H-bombs are a thing of the past and not still in need of abolishing. South Dakota’s doomsday tour website says, “At Minuteman Missile NHS, it is possible to learn how the threat of nuclear war came to haunt the world” — as if 450 Minuteman ICBMs weren’t still set to launch on “alert” status and prepared to kill millions on 31 seconds notice.
Secondly, official memorials devoted to nuclear weapons self-consciously deny or rewrite the horrifying and persistent results of having brought the Nuclear Age upon the world. This “Columbus Day” style of American history — lionizing heroic efforts while ignoring the butchery and mass murder committed by the hero — is the sort that is being carved into stone at these government circuses.
Nobody will learn at these idol-worshiping places that the Bomb was borne of a will to death, used unnecessarily against Japanese civilians without warning, and tested in the atmosphere over 100 times in ways that caused at least 75,000 thyroid cancers among U.S. residents, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Students will have to look elsewhere to learn that the Bomb has been condemned by every major religion on earth and that in 1996 the International Court of Justice declared that the mere threat to use it in a sneak attack (like keeping Minuteman and submarine missiles on “alert” status) is a violation of International Humanitarian Law forbidding the planning and preparation of massacres.
Today’s string of H-bomb monuments never acknowledge the weapon’s legacy of uncontrollable and persistent radiation poisoning and nuclear industry’s resulting plague of radiation-induced genetic damage and cancers the world over. Nor will the memorials note that in the annals of war and war crimes, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more controversial than any other.
Official U.S. histories and wartime propaganda claim that the atomic attacks “ended the war” by preventing a land invasion, and this is repeated endlessly at these Bomb-loving churches. Yet historical facts unearthed since then show that in August 1945 Japan was already defeated, no invasion would ever have occurred even without the use of the Bomb, and, indeed, the mass murder at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not just unnecessary but “known in advance not to be necessary” ¾ as Alperovitz has found.
President Dwight Eisenhower wrote, “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
And Admiral William Leahy, wartime Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, wrote in his book “I Was There,” that “I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
With the Obama Administration working now to build three giant new Bomb-building facilities, we should confront official myth-making and take a lesson from arch-Cold Warrior and former right-wing Reagan administration national security advisor Paul Nitze.
Writing Oct. 28, 1999, in the New York Times, Nitze said, “I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them … adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us ….”
Such are the words to carve into an atom bomb theme park.
John LaForge works for Nukewatch, the nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin and edits its quarterly newsletter.
Rockets’ Red Glare And Bombs Bursting In Air
By John LaForge
A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.
With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. U.S. drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from supercarriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Saturday, June 24, when US bombs destroyed four houses.
Every child killed or maimed by U.S.-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013, in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”
Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass U.S. military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.
If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by U.S. drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017, directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.
U.S. offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]
In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a U.S. gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.
The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.
Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”
Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.
This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as U.S. drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.