Lest We Forget

by pessimist

Today is a sad day in the history of the world - It was the day that Little Boy roared.

The Hiroshima bomb, known as "Little Boy" - a reference to former President Roosevelt, devastated an area of five square miles (13 square kilometres). More than 60% of the buildings in the city were destroyed.

Official Japanese figures at the time put the death toll at 118,661 civilians. But later estimates suggest the final toll was about 140,000, of Hiroshima's 350,000 population, including military personnel and those who died later from radiation. Many have also suffered long-term sickness and disability.

Keep this in mind when George Warmonger Bu$h talks about tactical nukes - they will have a similar yield in firepower and in casualties. You know someone else will.

[It was] once suggested on national television that the Emperor accompany Prime Minister Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, not to honor the war dead as is the custom but to apologize to them. His reasoning was since more Japanese soldiers died from lack of food and medicine than enemy bullets they were not receiving support from the Imperial system they had sworn to defend.

Does this not sound much like our troops in Iraq today?

This historical materialism can work as some small palliative in the face of the irresolvable moral or epistemological questions that come to the fore during this period of atomic remembrance:

"Why did they die?" The answer is easy: an atomic bomb was dropped;

"Why was it dropped?" Because there was a war, and modern warfare includes nuclear weaponry.

Then we must ask: "Why was there a war?" This most complex of questions refuses an answer accepted by everyone, but Nosaka can at least answer directly why there was still war on August, 6, 1945:

Because Japan's political leaders dithered away the opportunity to respond
actively to the Potsdam Accords and surrender in late July.

So much for the Revenge of Pearl Harbor being the last straw - some in Japan knew that it was over. There could have been another way to end the war.

But some today don't know that they can help prevent it from starting up again!

U.S. to ship plutonium to France without armed escort

The U.S. government plans to ship weapons-grade plutonium from disassembled Russian nuclear arms from the United States to France for reprocessing, but the vessels will not be escorted by warships, according to U.S. Energy Department documents obtained by Kyodo News on Thursday.

Anti-nuclear groups have expressed opposition and concern that the two vessels transporting 140 kilograms of high-purity plutonium across the Atlantic Ocean could be targeted by terrorists, even though they are armed.

Remember - the USS Cole was armed - to the teeth!

Flotilla to protest plutonium convoy

The shipment is the first in a long-range plan to neutralize 34 metric tons of plutonium and make it useless for nuclear weapons by converting it into fuel for commercial reactors.

The plutonium powder, which critics say could make 50 dirty bombs, will be shipped to France for processing and returned for use in a commercial reactor test run next year. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a preliminary finding in favor of allowing Duke Power to test the new fuel at its Catawba Nuclear Station on Lake Wylie.

Duke Power - do the words 'California Energy Crisis' come to mind?

The plutonium will be shipped from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, loaded on a ship for France and then transported by truck to a reactor in the south of France.

The federal government has said in filings that while "the likelihood of an attempted act of sabotage or terrorism occurring is not precisely knowable ... the chance of success of any such attempt was judged to be very low."

Uh-huh. Terrorism isn't what bothers me. The idiots on the road do! Of course, if there were to be somekind of a spill within 50 miles of Crawford, ...

Such an accident is on someone's mind!

Plutonium from Bikini tests collecting in sea near Japan

Plutonium particles scattered by a series of nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll in the 1950s have been accumulating in seas close to Japan, a research team said Saturday. Plutonium pollution from the Bikini tests had never been confirmed in seas around Japan. The particles are believed to have been carried by ocean currents even after 50 years, and some of the plutonium sank into the sea and attached to dead planktons, according to the team. "If we could figure out how such plutonium particles are flowing around the world, it would be useful at a time of a nuclear accident," said Masatoshi Yamada, the research team's leader.

And at the rate things are going, that time may come sooner rather than later.

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