Binoy, good try, but too easy to offer such a piece in hindsight.

How about writing a piece on the role of nuclear weapons today. Good or Bad?

I know much harder than your news stories, but you should give such pieces a go.

Atrociously naïve and idealistic story from the author. Sadly, he is the result of decades of leftist propaganda that has led many in the West to believe they are guilty and depraved.

In reality, its is the atrocities of the swarms of revolutionary terrorists who have delivered in cumulative terms far more horror, death and mental damage than the two nuclear bombs.

The "bombs" (tragic as they were) have illustrated the need NOT to use such bombs again. Terrorism and economic warfare will continue to haunt human life, far more than nuclear bombs. But then naïve ideologs like the author want it that way, it would seem.

What a mealy mouthed examination of Allied intentions from Binoy Kampmark, who appears to be another foreigner who despises the society he or his parents chose to immigrate into.

It was estimated that the invasion of Japan would have cost 1,000,000 million allies lives, and if Binoy had been an allied soldier in 1945 who had miraculously survived the war so far, one suspects that Binoy would have been overjoyed to have learned that a US Superfortress (it was nearly an RAF Lancaster) had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. So too, Binoy would have had a very different attitude is he had been one of the 100,000 Allied POW's of Japan who were all told that the second an Allied military force landed in Japan, they were all going to be executed.

Germany and Japan invented the use of terror bombing of undefended cities as a means of waging war. So they can hardly complain when the tide turns and the people they bombed returned the complement.

If you hate Australia and the western alliance, Binoy, it is a free country and you are free to leave. But one suspects that Binoy realises that his future economic well being rests live living in the western world he despises but prefers to live in. He has discovered that slagging off against western society can pay dividends among the spoiled, rich, tertiary educated class that he associates with. These specimens despise their own civilisational as some sort of class identifying fashion statement.

I'm no expert but I would guess that contemporary sources are less critical of the decision to drop the atomic bombs. The closer it was to those two awful dates in August 1945 the more supportive the commentary is likely to be. In fact I was a Sydney schoolkid who celebrated at the time and don't recall anything other than relief and joy that the war was ending. The front pages of the SMH during those days confirm my recollections. However those pages also make it clear that amongst responsible adults there was deep concern about the force that the bombs had unleashed. Binoy should read "Mr Tuman's historic announcement", SMH, Wed 8 August 1945 and try to project himself back to those awful times. The sense of a feeling of heavy responsibility shines through. Moral judgements will always be equivocal. We don't have the luxury of making those judgements had different decisions been made.

What a typical bit of bumph from someone who is in a position that they are very unlikely to ever be asked to pick up a rifle & go defend the society in some god forgotten desert, jungle or city.

Yes send in the marines is the cry from one safe back in some office, thousands of miles from personal danger. Don't kill too many of the enemy who started the whole thing with a sneak bombing attack on a peaceful harbor.

This is your most disgusting bit of fluff so far Binoy.

M.A.D. Or mutually assured destruction. As you worry how many lives a single nuclear missile could cost? Consider, even as we stand by as around, hyperventilating over hypotheticals The reality is, 2,000,000+ lives lost to curable cancer every year? Mostly curable with alpha particle, bismuth 213, in conventional western ontological radiology medicine!

The real villains and killers are, the multinationals protecting profit curves at any cost, including millions of unnecessarily sacrificed human lives.

If you're not grist in the mill? And tossed on the garbage pile when you've reached your use by date?

Then the grunt sent forth to kill on command like an automated AI and programed device!

All to make a pretty penny for the parasites, who profit from all of this, including, deliberately contrived, postcode, generational poverty?

A nuclear weapon will be used somewhere before sanity prevails and we burn these things,i.e., weapons-grade plutonium and the entire stockpile of growing nuclear waste, in safe, clean, almost free, carbon-free, MSR's to power our world for thousands of years!

And use this cheapest possible power ever, to desalinate water and turn all the arid regions and deserts of the world into ultra-productive gardens/recycle everything, in (free-market, private-enterprise) co-ops that earn a quid!

As the national/median, prosperity improves, we also bring down and reverse population growth! And by the only means wth a proven outcome!

This is what a sane world led by sane leaders would do! And in one fowl swoop end all poverty, population growth, climate change and the threat of M.A.D!
Alan B.