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The Forum > Article Comments > Hiroshima 70 years on > Comments

Hiroshima 70 years on : Comments

By Linley Grant, published 6/8/2015

Should we, as educated Australians, tolerate, or refuse to think clearly about the massive global problems the use of uranium has caused?

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Hindsight is a wonderful thing but this article needs some historical perspective.
First of all while Germany had all but surrendered by the beginning of 1945 the Japanese were putting up a ferocious fight. This was first demonstrated at the battle of Iwo Jima which began on 19 February and finished on 26 March. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, over 20,000 were killed and only 1,083 taken prisoner. American casualties were 26,000 including 6.800 dead.
Roosevelt died April 15, 1945. The battle of Okinawa has just started and lasted till mid-June. The battle resulted in the highest number of casualties in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. Japan lost over 100,000 soldiers, who were either killed, captured or committed suicide, and the Allies suffered more than 65,000 casualties of all kinds.
After these two clear demonstrations of military fanaticism, estimates of Allied casualties for an invasion of Japan ran as high as 2 million. Ask any person serving in the military at the time (my father was one) and the last posting they wanted was to be part of the invasion force of Japan. If you were a military leader and you had a weapon at your disposal that could prevent the probable death of 2 million of your men you would be neglectful not to use it. Indeed you should be a subject of a class action by the deceased's survivors. Also remember that World War II was a total war and Roosevelt had declared at Casablanca that the objective of the war against the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan was unconditional surrender.
What we do know was that the dropping of the two Atomic bombs on Japan on the 6th and 8th August was followed one week later by Emperor Hirohito’s announcement of the surrender of the Empire of Japan to the Allies. The tactic had succeeded brilliantly. And every Allied military man thanked his lucky stars that he did have to participate in an invasion of Japan.
Posted by EQ, Thursday, 6 August 2015 7:50:41 AM
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Linley, take a bex and have a lie down.
Hard to know where to start with this sort of hysterical nonsense. I am well and truly over it. Just have a look at the real world, Hiroshima 2015. Big bustling modern metropolis, oh that would get you going too I suppose.
Put that against the whole of Tasmania with horrendous unemployment and disadvantage due to the Greens misrule of the last twenty years or so. You would prefer a nation of serfs eating grass seeds and living in caves ruled over by the greens. At last, sense in Tasmania, although if they were dopey enough to vote you in once, well look out next time.
Posted by JBowyer, Thursday, 6 August 2015 7:53:06 AM
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"we could all feel that we, who are living now, had done something worthwhile in our time on earth to rid it of the fear which was created seventy years ago"

To say that fear is only seventy years old is similar to saying that the universe is only 5775 years old. Fear has always been man's close companion, following us like a shadow. I for example would much more fear dying slowly of Parkinson disease than of a nuclear bomb.

Death of the body is inevitable. The only way to conquer fear is to realise (in practice, not just in theory) that we are not that body which will perish.
Posted by Yuyutsu, Thursday, 6 August 2015 8:58:01 AM
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The Chinese should stage protests on "Hiroshima Day".

With a far higher death and injury count, where are the protests over the Rape of Nanking (between 20,000 and 80,000 women were sexually assaulted) and a probable hundreds of thousands murdered.

Nucs are minor in the scheme of things.
Posted by McCackie, Thursday, 6 August 2015 9:00:52 AM
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Using Hiroshima as an objection to all things nuclear is merely opportunism. There is no connection between a terrible, but necessary end to a war which would would have dragged on to kill many more and the peaceful use of uranium. After all, the Japanese themselves have been using nuclear power for many years. They have no options.
Posted by ttbn, Thursday, 6 August 2015 9:08:32 AM
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Meanwhile, this essay confirms and extends the content and intentions of Linley's essay:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176031
Posted by Daffy Duck, Thursday, 6 August 2015 9:17:20 AM
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Have to agree with EQ and add, has the world ever considered the damage done by the use of coal; not even a weapon, yet has taken more lives than the peaceful use of uranium!

When measured against the casualty count that's the record of the peaceful use of uranium?

Linley needs to stop and smell the Co2 in the morning, which is at unprecedented levels.

And we have technologies which hold the promise of no more meltdowns ever!

The real worry should be allowing or causing these weapons to be ever used again as might well be the case as climate change increases competition for water and arable land.

Seriously we confront an annihilation event; and these folk try with all means possible, and rank fearmongering and massive misinformation?

To effectively prevent the use of practically the one universally affordable thing that will allow us to reduce the Co2 in the atmosphere!

This is exactly what you can expect from a group, which has allowed logic and rational thinking to be replaced by dogma and ideology; and want to return to the future, with the dawn to dark gut bust that was an integral part of it!

And only actually possible if the population is reduced by a full two thirds; the real goal of these soulless monsters?
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Thursday, 6 August 2015 11:30:00 AM
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Yes. As every Japanese school book tells us it was America that:

- Forced Japan to invade Korea

- Forced Japan to invade Manchuria

- Forced Japan to invade Southeast Asia

- Forced Japan to advance south within 30 kms of Port Moresby

- Forced Japan to bomb Darwin

- Forced Japan to kill 20 million Asians

- Forced Japan to enslave and murder thousands of Australian POWs.

Japan came to Justice.

On a lighter note enjoy this https://youtu.be/VNTQSbvlutg
Posted by plantagenet, Thursday, 6 August 2015 12:25:20 PM
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The yanks may appear as naughty children to drop the first atomic bombs in military action but not many care to know that Hitler and his henchmen were working towards nuclear weapons in WW2 as well.

In the great scheme of things, I'm glad the yanks got it first and actually were not afraid to use it to end the horrors of years of global war.

Imagine the world today IF Hitler and his cronies got and used it first! and yes it is a bit like using a sledgehammer to kill some flies but at least they, and the rest of the world get the message...
The crap stops here and NOW!

More on the background of this can be found here > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapon_project
Posted by Rojama, Thursday, 6 August 2015 2:31:11 PM
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Hiroshima could be viewed as tragedy, but Nagasaki was worse. Even after Hiroshima there were some in the Japanese government and military who wanted to fight on. There was suffering in both cities. Hiroshima was angry, Nagasaki was prayerful. Because, maybe they at least realised the consequences of an invasion by the allies. Read the book, or watch the film "the bells of Nagasaki".

If the allies had invaded the home islands, the death toll would have been absolutely horrendous on both sides. I doubt the allies could have stood the loss of life, and as for the Japanese!

Note; I deliberately use the term "allies", because it was not "just" the "Americans" involved. Everything is today apparently America's fault. (according to the leftists) America, a country who at the time, had both a Secretary of State and a Secretary of the Treasury who were both Soviet agents! Uncle Joe at the helm!
Posted by Jon R, Thursday, 6 August 2015 3:28:31 PM
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A ludicrous conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. We know how to deal with nuclear 'waste' and have done for decades, for crying out loud stop repeating the lie that we don't.
Posted by Mark Duffett, Thursday, 6 August 2015 11:02:12 PM
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What bollocks.

Only two weapons have been used in warfare, and the casualties were far lower than there would have been if the alternative of an invasion of mainland Japan had occurred.

Secondly nuclear power is still by far the safest, and comparing fatalities is twice as safe per kWhr than wind power.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Sunday, 9 August 2015 11:00:40 AM
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Building out a climate-friendly, SAFE, CLEAN, HEALTHY fleet of modern breeder reactors will not only save thousands of lives in Australia from choking to death on coal each year, but will create a market for burning up old nuclear waste and especially warheads. Old nuclear warheads are expensive to maintain. We should open a program offering to buy them, and then burn them for energy. America burned 16,000 bombs worth of weapons grade material in their reactors, powering 10% of America the last few decades. That's like powering the whole of Australia for 20 years on old Soviet bombs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

I am more convinced than ever that breeder reactors like the IFR and LFTR are the future, and that we can convert a 250,000 year storage problem into 500 years of clean energy for the planet! Nuclear waste and warheads, they're not the problem, they're the solution! (If we burn them in breeder reactors). GE have the PRISM ready to build in the first nation that will let it. I say let's offer to store some of the world's waste, as just America's nuclear waste is now a resource WORTH $30 TRILLION!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(reactor)
Posted by Max Green, Monday, 10 August 2015 4:09:57 PM
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Bravo Max Green, bravo! You do realise the absolute storm from the greens that would cause though? Poor old Helen Caldicott would get a new lease of life though. Whirling round like a demented dervish lol.
I am surprised Rhosty has not suggested Thorium?
I would love to see the world embrace some real technology but politics always gets in the way of the BEST idea. Good luck anyway to Max and Rhosty and I will remind people if these technologies get up you were the ones I heard touting them.
Posted by JBowyer, Monday, 10 August 2015 4:51:50 PM
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Hi JBowyer,
thanks for that. I was anti-nuclear for years, having inherited (without knowing how, exactly) Caldicott's screeching banshee hysteria against nuclear power. To be honest, the word still scares me. But why? *Why*? It's 1980's Cold War hysteria from movies like "The Day After" etc. It's ignorance, conflating NUKULAR BOMBS with the safest large scale reliable source of power known to the human race!

Honestly, the horse has bolted. The majority of large CO2 emitters already *have* nuclear bombs. Maybe if they belonged to an international fuel club run by the IAEA, there might be more pressure to use non-weaponisable safe fission, which itself might one day create a market incentive to fission the warhead away? They can make money burning it rather than booming it!
Posted by Max Green, Tuesday, 11 August 2015 10:38:10 AM
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Given that the Guardian has a story about combined coal, oil & gas air pollution in China kills about 4000 people (or a Chernobyl per DAY!) in China alone, I wonder if anyone has counted how many lives this 'deadly' nuclear power stuff has already saved in countries that use it?

"A new paper from NASA’s Goddard Institute authored by Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen in the journal Environmental Science and Technology purports to do just that. Hansen is well known as one of the founders of modern global warming science. The authors come up with the striking figure of 1.8 million as the number of lives saved by replacing fossil fuel sources with nuclear. They also estimate the saving of up to 7 million lives in the next four decades, along with substantial reductions in carbon emissions, were nuclear power to replace fossil fuel usage on a large scale.....

The conclusions of the study are quite unambiguous. Even assuming uncertainties, nuclear power has saved at least hundreds of thousands of lives in the past forty years, and possibly millions. This is in stark contrast to the small number of lives lost in only one catastrophic nuclear accident. There are many more millions that would be lost if countries were to embark on a nuclear-free future replaced by fossil fuels.

....

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/nuclear-power-may-have-saved-1-8-million-lives-otherwise-lost-to-fossil-fuels-may-save-up-to-7-million-more/
Posted by Max Green, Thursday, 20 August 2015 10:00:33 PM
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