Robert Scheer
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Thursday, August 9, 2007
DURING A week of mayhem in Iraq, in which terrorists have rightly been condemned for targeting schoolchildren, it is sobering to recall that this week is also the 62nd anniversary of U.S. attacks that deliberately took the lives of thousands of children on their way to school in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As noted in the Strategic Bombing Survey conducted at President Harry Truman's request, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, "nearly all the schoolchildren were at work in the open," to be exploded, irradiated or incinerated in the perfect firestorm that the planners back at the University of California-run Los Alamos lab had envisioned for the bomb's maximum psychological impact.
The terror plot worked all too well, as Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba recalled this week: "That fateful summer, 8:15 a.m. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast silence - hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies. Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead." Like most of the others killed by the two American bombs, neither the children nor the adults had any role in Japan's decision to go to war, but they were picked as the target instead of an isolated but fortified military base whose anti-aircraft fire posed a higher risk. The target preferred by U.S. atomic scientists - a patch in the ocean or unpopulated terrain - was rejected, because the effect of hundreds of thousands of civilians dying would be all the more dramatic.
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This article came from the SFGate news paper and it is truly shows that America has done some truly evil things in her history. You got to be honest with yourself that was the ulitimate act of terrorism what the americans did to Japan. At the time america dropped the bombs they knew Japan was on the verge of surrender but America wanted to send a message to the rest of the world "that there's new big dog on the block you either fall in line or you can get it next". If you would like to read the entire article click on the link below.
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