Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst single terror attacks in history

[ShamelessHussy]

Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

By Norm Dixon

August 6 and August 9 2009 mark the 64th anniversaries of the US atomic-bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second. Some 13 square kilometres of the city were obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries.

Three days after Hiroshima's destruction, the US dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out.
Since 1945, tens of thousands more residents of the two cities have continued to suffer and die from radiation-induced cancers, birth defects and still births.

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On July 21, 2005, the British New Scientist magazine undermined this chorus when it reported that two historians had uncovered further evidence revealing that “the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War”. Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University in Washington, stated that US President Harry Truman's decision to blast the cities “was not just a war crime, it was a crime against humanity”.

With Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York, Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was “looking for peace”. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war”, Selden told the New Scientist.

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I believe targeting civilians is always wrong, and how terrorist operate.

When I also take into account that Japan was a defeated nation militarily, and interested in negotiating a surrender it is hard to disagree with the headline, though it will always be debatable what was the worst single act of terror this certainly will always be on the short list, imho.

I hope that, as we examine the past, it will help us to not only understand it more deeply by going beyond the propaganda of it's time, but even more importantly, help us to ensure that evil acts like this are not repeated.