Saturday, August 06, 2005

Hiroshima

On the 60th anniversary of the fateful explosion over Hiroshima, the insufferable Praful Bidwai calls America's decision The world's worst terrorist act.

We could not disagree more. Our views are more consonant with the Wall Street Journal:

.. when President Truman gave the go-ahead to deploy Fat Man and Little Boy, what those big bombs chiefly represented was salvation: salvation for young Lt. Fussell and all the GIs; salvation for the tens of thousands of Allied POWs the Japanese intended to execute in the event of an invasion; salvation for the grotesquely used Korean "comfort women"; salvation for millions of Asians enslaved by the Japanese.

Not least, and despite the terrible irony, the bombings were salvation for Japan, since they prompted Emperor Hirohito to intervene with his bitterly divided government to end the war, thus laying the groundwork for America's beneficent occupation and the country's subsequent prosperity. To understand the roots of modern Japan's pacifist mentality, so at variance with its old warrior culture, one need only visit Hiroshima's peace park.

And finally this balancing note:

In the hands of democracies, nuclear weapons safeguard liberty; in the hands of dictatorships, they safeguard despotism ... the threat nuclear weapons pose today is probably greater than ever before ... It's because nuclear know-how and technology have fallen into the hands of men such as A.Q. Khan and Kim Jong Il, and they, in turn, are but one degree of separation away from the jihadists who may someday detonate a bomb in Times or Trafalgar Square.

4 comments:

Vulturo said...

Linked on DesiPundit

Based on your post, I've written another post on my own blog which offers a ruthless and pragmatic justification for the bombings from an American viewpoint.

history_lover said...

From america's perspective,
dropping the bombs lead to a quick end to the war.It was morally indefensible.
However what about the civilians of Hiroshima & Nagasaki ?
It was a classic example of terrorism.After all "We call it terrorism, in view of its
typical motive, which is to strike terror into the hearts of those conceived to be guilty by committing atrocities against those of the innocent who resemble
the guilty closely enough, whether in race, citizenship, or social class, for the terror not to be
lost on the guilty."
You would just shrug the deaths of around one and half lakh civilians by calling it "collateral damage" ?
It is still a matter of debate how long the japanese would have continued without the bombs.
It amazes me how blindly pro-american you guys are ,whitewashing thier crimes ...

history_lover said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Pinkou said...

A thumb of a man on an aircraft, well and safely hidden behind clouds
pressed on a button that opened a door to drop destruction; like never seen before.

In an instant
that was just 43 seconds,
a city was gone, totally destroyed; and our world had been changed.
The gates of hell had been opened on earth for us, for the rest of our living history.

That aircraft had dropped a bomb, mere 5 tons of weight,
but packing the devastating power of 15 thousand tons of TNT.
It had been intentionally, brutally set to detonate before hitting ground
for maximum effect, so that no one and nothing could escape in hollows or trenches.

It exploded 580 meters
above the dome of the Industrial Promotion Hall of Hiroshima, Japan.

Raising a mushroom cloud, 8 miles high,
visible to the tailgunner of Enola Gay, the fleeing aircraft from 350 miles away.
Read more:Today, 62 years ago in Hiroshima

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