Dear CCI Followers,
The 75th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is upon us — August 6th and 9th. Regardless of how our nation has tried to gloss over this greatest horror ever perpetrated on fellow human beings … the facts remain, they happened.
The most devastating writing and photojournal I’ve seen about these bombings arrived yesterday from Consortium News. It is a patchwork of print media and actual photos (banned at the time) of the two cities in the wake of being hit by the two A Bombs. At the time, our leaders tried to minimize the horrific numbers of deaths and suffering unleashed on ordinary Japanese people.
It behooves us to ponder deeply the magnitude of this crime. It is our history. In ensuing years it has been rumored that the Japanese knew they had lost the war, that WW2 was all but over, and that the Japanese emperor was preparing treaties to end the war. If you know that these claims are untrue or true, please let us know. If true, the issue needs to be cleared up once and for all times.
PLEASE, take the time to scan this piece—click on the following:
It is particularly timely since our leaders today are marching us straight up to the edge of a Nuclear War by refusing to sign treaties and forgoing diplomacy to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war.
Join us at CCI in pushing our newspapers, journalists, local politicians, our physicians, our current President … to lead by signing agreements, treaties, or whatever is necessary.
Who knows what might happen if an accidental U.S. or Russian nuclear bomb is detonated from one of the hundreds of submarines or bombers in flight patterns at any given time? You might ask: Why are nuclear bombs in these submarines and planes? To get the edge on a “first strike”, we are told.
We owe it to ourselves to be informed about what one small nuclear weapon can do to a major city. Would we want to see Washington DC, New York, or San Francisco obliterated … or St. Petersburg, Moscow or Yalta?
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 75: Hiroshima Cover-up — How Timesman Won a Pulitzer While on War Dept. Payroll
August 4, 2020
By Amy Goodman and David Goodman
At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.
Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of Gen. MacArthur’s orders.
Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation sickness.
Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began:
“In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”