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PRESSING ISSUES: The Hiroshima Tile
http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-hiroshima-tile.html
The Hiroshima Tile
Sixty-nine years ago this week, atomic scientist Leo Szilard wrote a petition that served as the final real effort to halt the momentum for the use of horrible new weapons against Japanese cities. It would fail, of course. A month later, the U.S. would drop two atomic bombs over two large Japanese cities, killing about 200,000 civilians (mainly women and children) and a few thousand troops.
Every year at this time, I begin a "Hiroshima Countdown," re-tracing the fateful steps in the weeks leading up to the first use of atomic weapons against people and the immediately aftermath.
After I visited Hiroshima for more than two weeks in 1984 (and also Nagasaki) on a journalism grant I returned home with enough material, and inspiration, to write dozens of articles, and two books, over the following decades. I also came home with a very tangible, haunting, artifact, given to me by one of my hosts: a piece of a stone tile that once lined one of several branches of the Ota River that cuts through Hiroshima. It had been in place there on August 6, 1945, and survived the atomic bombing--but was burned black on most of one side (indeed, the other side is unmarked).
That's a photo of it, still in my possession, at left. Imagine the level of heat required to burn stone in this way. Then imagine deliberately exploding a new weapon, which also emitted deadly rays of radiation, directly over the center of a large city populated largely by women and children.
<>
Greg Mitchell's book Atomic Cover-up on the U.S. probes the suppression for decades film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by our military film crew.
Posted by Greg Mitchell at 8:00 AM
The Hiroshima Tile
Sixty-nine years ago this week, atomic scientist Leo Szilard wrote a petition that served as the final real effort to halt the momentum for the use of horrible new weapons against Japanese cities. It would fail, of course. A month later, the U.S. would drop two atomic bombs over two large Japanese cities, killing about 200,000 civilians (mainly women and children) and a few thousand troops.
Every year at this time, I begin a "Hiroshima Countdown," re-tracing the fateful steps in the weeks leading up to the first use of atomic weapons against people and the immediately aftermath.
After I visited Hiroshima for more than two weeks in 1984 (and also Nagasaki) on a journalism grant I returned home with enough material, and inspiration, to write dozens of articles, and two books, over the following decades. I also came home with a very tangible, haunting, artifact, given to me by one of my hosts: a piece of a stone tile that once lined one of several branches of the Ota River that cuts through Hiroshima. It had been in place there on August 6, 1945, and survived the atomic bombing--but was burned black on most of one side (indeed, the other side is unmarked).
That's a photo of it, still in my possession, at left. Imagine the level of heat required to burn stone in this way. Then imagine deliberately exploding a new weapon, which also emitted deadly rays of radiation, directly over the center of a large city populated largely by women and children.
<>
Greg Mitchell's book Atomic Cover-up on the U.S. probes the suppression for decades film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by our military film crew.
Posted by Greg Mitchell at 8:00 AM
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CKK9IG
Robert Jay Lifton, author of "Death in Life" (winner of the National Book Award) and numerous other acclaimed books, writes: "Greg Mitchell has been a leading chronicler for many years of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and American behavior toward them. Now he has written the first book devoted to the suppression of historic film footage shot by Japanese and Americans in the atomic cities in 1945 and 1946. He makes use of key interviews and documents to record an extremely important part of atomic bomb history that deserves far more attention today."
Robert Jay Lifton, author of "Death in Life" (winner of the National Book Award) and numerous other acclaimed books, writes: "Greg Mitchell has been a leading chronicler for many years of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and American behavior toward them. Now he has written the first book devoted to the suppression of historic film footage shot by Japanese and Americans in the atomic cities in 1945 and 1946. He makes use of key interviews and documents to record an extremely important part of atomic bomb history that deserves far more attention today."
