Nuclear Bomb // Current TV

Panetta: Iran not building bombs yet

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says Iran is laying the groundwork for making nuclear... more

Vierotchka
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Occupy Wall Street and the History of Corporate Fascism

Humanity faces a daunting battle against corporate forces that have historically... more

madler28
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The Hiroshima Photographs: Ground Zero 1945

“Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945” is a new exhibition of once-classified images of atomic destruction at Hiroshima presently on display at New York City’s International Center of Photography. The collection of photographs both repels and fascinates the viewer, with its powerfully ugly portraits of an unpeopled and obliterated city. The photographs were originally part of a governmental analysis of the atomic bomb’s effect on concrete, wood and steel, and this catalog of devastation was meant to be seen only by postwar architects and engineers tasked with erecting the “bombproof” cities of the future.

The Hiroshima photos have a strange and contorted history. In the mid-1990s, the owner of a diner in Watertown, Massachusetts, was walking his dog when he spotted a beat-up suitcase sitting in a pile of trash. It turned out that the photographs inside had once belonged to Robert L. Corsbie, an engineer and expert on the effects of the bomb. Just how those photos wound up in his possession remains unclear. Corsbie belonged to a cadre of ordnance experts, engineers, photographers and draftsmen who were sent by President Truman to analyze the nuclear devastation.

The Hiroshima photographs are fundamentally different from the more familiar World War II pictures of European cities, such as Cologne, where the stones of the cathedral rise from the debris, and blown-out buildings loom like hollow-eyed zombies. Those ruins have a perverse but palpable grandeur, a gothic desolation that is missing from the scenes of Japan’s ravaged emptiness. In hauntingly stark contrast to the images of European destruction, the Hiroshima photographs are eerily mute. There are no people, only twisted metal, blistered walls and miles of rubble. Except for a few skeletal structures poking out of flattened wreckage, the city simply vanished. Hiroshima didn’t look like a bombed city; it looked instead as though a monstrous steamroller had passed over it and just squashed it out of existence. The Japanese city centers, constructed mostly of wood, simply went up in smoke when bombed.

Wary of the conquered people’s anger and grief, the US government imposed strict censorship in September 1945, confiscating pictures and ordering that no image be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility. It was not until 1952 that “Life Magazine” published a handful of photographs taken in the first days after the attack. Even now, such images are rarely displayed. That is why this cache of photographs is so important. Once part of a classified archive, then buried in a basement, thrown away and resurrected, it counteracts the universal tendency to aestheticise violence. There is nothing awe-inspiring here, or even poignant, just plain devastating facts.

This piece includes a number of photographs from the exhibition, a photo-gallery, a documentary short film and the acclaimed Japanese animated film, “Grave of the Fireflies.”

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/the-hiroshima-photographs-ground-zero-1945/“Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945” is a new exhibition of once-classified... more

disembedded
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Pakistan Nukes Safe? NO. « Ramani's blog

How can they be safe? http://ramanan50.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/pakistan-nukes-safe-no/

ramanan50
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Wikileaks:A Nuclear Bomb Hidden In Europe

Secret files have revealed that terrorists claim to be hiding a nuclear bomb in... more

fishermanny
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10 months ago
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Global Warming Solution Found!!! All We Need Nuclear War!

Even a regional nuclear war could spark "unprecedented" global cooling and... more

bundlebear
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12 months ago
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CIA Spy Captured Giving Nuclear Bomb To Terrorists

While all eyes in the West are currently trained on the ongoing revolution taking... more

WeAreChangeKy
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Breaking News Report: Iran Now Nuclear Self-Sufficient

- CNN Breaking News... Report: Iran now nuclear self-sufficient Report: Iran now... more

EthicalVegan
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Former U.S. Los Alamos Nuclear Scientist Indicted After Trying to Sell Nuclear Secrets to Venezuela

U.S.: Nuclear scientist tried to pass info to Venezuela... more

EthicalVegan
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Are Nuclear Weapons 'Realists' Afraid to Confront Reality?

By Russ Wellen It's notoriously difficult to win a debate with nuclear... more

myfastweb
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Jim Webb cancels Burma visit after report claims junta 'planning nuclear bomb'

US Sen. Jim Webb canceled his June 3 visit to Burma following a report on the claims... more

HowdyDo
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(VIDEO) Planning For War! Chossudovsky: US will start WW3 by attacking Iran…

A UN nuclear watchdog report suggests Iran could be developing a nuclear bomb,... more

ctpatriot1970
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'Iran can now produce nuclear bomb'

Iran now has the technical capability to build a nuclear bomb and the only thing... more

ibrake4rappers13
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Cold War Remnant: Cancer for Baby Boomers

Even with a half-century's hindsight, the U.S. government's willingness to risk the health of the nation's children seems somewhere between unfathomable and unconscionable.

Between 1951 and 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated more than 100 nuclear bombs in the atmosphere over its Nevada Test Site, just 65 miles from Las Vegas. The radioactive fallout menaced not only the ranchers and the miners unlucky enough to live in that remote area of southern Nevada, but -- as a new study unveiled Tuesday demonstrated -- untold millions of unsuspecting Americans as well.

The winds carried Strontium-90, Iodine-129 and other lethal particles across a broad swath of the country. Infants who were bottle-fed, which was then considered the modern approach, were particularly vulnerable to the Strontium-90 that ended up in cows' milk.

In 1961, as John Kennedy was poised to resume atmospheric testing after a two-year moratorium, he met with White House science adviser Jerome Wiesner in the Oval Office one rainy day. The president wondered how fallout reached the earth. Wiesner explained that it was washed out of the clouds by rain. "You mean," Kennedy asked, "it's in the rain out there?" As Wiesner tells it, the president then "looked out the window, looked very sad and didn't say a word for several minutes." Nonetheless JFK, fearful that the Soviet Union might score a nuclear breakthrough, authorized a new round of above-ground testing before negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.

With Nov. 9, 2009 marking the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, Cold War retrospectives are again in season. But the grim legacy of nuclear testing is apt to be lost amid the memories of Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, the Berlin airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Ronald Reagan's famed exhortation at the Brandenburg Gate. The mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert seem so long ago, so devoid of any real-world consequences.

But a study released Tuesday documents the enhanced cancer risk that Baby Boomers face because of these long-ago atmospheric tests. Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano analyzed the lingering radiation in infant teeth (donated long ago by the parents of baby boys born in the St. Louis area between 1959 and 1961) and compared the results to contemporary cancer data from the subjects. "What we found out was shocking," Mangano said. "Persons who had died of cancer had more than double the Strontium-90 in their (baby) teeth than did healthy persons." The original variance in Strontium-90 levels among individuals, he explained, was caused by seemingly small factors such as how much milk expectant mothers drank, diet and the source of the municipal water supply.

more at link...Even with a half-century's hindsight, the U.S. government's willingness to... more

WakeUpPeople
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The Deal to Disarm Iran

Tomorrow the U.S. will meet with Iran to seal the deal that could take the... more

atomiclegion
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FAREED ZAKARIA: 'WE MUST STOP EXAGGERATING THE IRANIAN THREAT'

t is time to clarify the debate over Iran and its nuclear program. It's easy to... more

atomiclegion
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2 years ago
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Iran, the World, and the Bomb

Iranian nuclear challenge becomes clearer; people look to Obama

ryan8566
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Nuclear Weapon Effects-Federation of American Scientist [FAS]

Nuclear Weapon Effects Nuclear detonations are the most devastating of the... more

kingfugazi
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Rising Sun: 64th anniversary of nuclear warfare

Today is the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Once a year, we have the opportunity to pause and reflect on the devastation dropped upon Japan in 1945. 260,000 dead. A city burnt to the ground by firestorms. A nation's pride and psyche damaged in a way firebombs couldn't.

War is, and always will be, "politics by other means." Or more accurately, politics is war by other means. Japan was already economically ravaged, and Japan was already militarily defeated. But Japan was an ethnically homogeneous island, whose religious and political leaders wielded all the power of the society. There were two options with Japan: unconditional surrender, or months of limited peace negotiations. The later was politically nonviable.

What could the US hope to accomplish from Okinawa in terms of negotiations? A communist Manchuria and Korea? Claim on thousands of sparsely inhabited Pacific Islands? Returning Taiwan to the Kuomintang? This was an imperialist power that could and would rebuild like Germany had after World War 1, except that no Allied troops were ever going to breach the mainland Japanese defenses. There would be no conquering Japan - not without causing the US so many casualties that public support for the war would end.

There's a reason Operation Sealion (Hitler's invasion of Great Britain) never occurred - an amphibious invasion of such a well prepared defender would have devastating losses if you have both naval and air superiority. The invasion of Normandy was 3:1 attackers to defenders, the Allied attackers were liberating home soil in France, and they were only 130 km from the home logistical base, their home airbases, and their home naval bases. Naha to Kagoshima is 660 km, more than five times longer journey undefended against air and naval attacks. Okinawa was cordial to the Allies, but not as friendly as Portsmouth, England. Manila, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and Darwin were all pretty damn far from Kyushu. The command and control would have been terrible. Japan was staking its peace negotiations on the fact that it could decisively defeat the US when they invaded Kyushu. No good would have come to America from invading Japan.

A single atomic bomb had the destructive power of 2000 bomb loads from B-29's. The US had been relentlessly firebombing Japan's cities since February. For example, on March 9th, 1945, the US firebombed Tokyo, burning down 16 square miles of the city, and killing 100,000, and destroying around 300,000 buildings where around 1.5 million people lived. The atomic bombs were merely more efficient at a task the US was doing by other means.

"Strategic bombing" and "area bombing" and "precision bombing" were very intentional euphemisms for what was called "terror bombing" when it was done to Great Britain. These bombing attacks rarely hit within a mile of the declared target, which itself was rarely hit even by an armada of bombers. The real strategic reason is to be a "counter value" strike - to make staying in the war as painful as possible for the civilians and politicians, who then would see surrender as a more viable option. It is inherently an act of brutality, of psychological warfare, of doing what no one wants to ever see done.

As Mr. Kozak as published in the Journal before, Curtis LeMay could be considered a war criminal today for ordering the mass executions of so many civilians from the air. But war is a strange world where killing a hundred thousand people may save two hundred thousand lives. Of course, we'll never know LeMay himself said, long after the war: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal."

Today, we have nukes. Nuclear weapons aren't so much more powerful than conventional weapons, though the mystique remains a powerful psychological force. Most nukes are relatively tiny compared to popular imagination, but at least they symbolize correctly the horror of mass destruction.Today is the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Once a year, we have... more

HardPower
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2 years ago
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GOOD: Nuclear Weapons

Who's got 'em? How many? What would one do to New York City? An original... more

hueypriest
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2 years ago
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