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I didn’t know about that
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I don’t believe you
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Everybody did it
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OK maybe that was bad
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that was a long time ago now
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And anyway, we had to do it, because reasons.
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That was one of the more refreshing things about living in Germany. The Nazi years are not a taboo subject there, and their mainstream position is “that was a catastrophic fuck-up by our nation”.
I’d also lived in Canada and Australia, where people quickly change the topic when you talk about how the indigenous people were treated.
Living in a place that’s facing and learning from its own past is good.
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Rape of Nanjing, River Kwai and so on, we haven’t discussed in depth. You can appreciate that dissecting aspects of WW2 is tough for an Anglo-Japanese couple. Early August is always a difficult time.
She thinks the comfort women have complained and been compensated enough. There have been multiple apologies and reparations from the Japanese government, ratified by treaty and so on.
My view is that the Korean and PRo Chinese governments continue to facilitate these issues in order to foster national cohesion by reference to an external villain. That’s not to deny the horror of the original crimes.
Really good point. Not only was Canada the second country to have a working nuclear reactor - the ZEEP beat the UK’s AERE by two whole years; but it went down a much safer route of reactor design with heavy water.
The UK was determined to get the bomb after being thrown out of cooperation with the US following the McMahon Energy Act, that it went the quickest and dirtiest route to stockpiling plutonium - air-cooled, graphite reactors - which went about as well as you could expect. The follow-up carbon-dioxide cooled Magnox reactors were a significant improvement in safety, although not efficient - but they made lots of plutonium; and the final generation advanced gas reactors were until recently, the most efficient reactors in the world, although mortifyingly expensive. Charlie Stross has a great elegy to them here:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-like-this-will-be-buil.html
I was always surprised that Canada didn’t seriously propose the CANDU designs for our current generation of new reactor builds. Instead the UK has gone for the EDF designed EPR - a financial disaster, and is still hmming and hahing about the Hualong One from China General Nuclear - which comes with any number of political problems. Things would have been much simpler if a previous government hadn’t sold off Westinghouse nuclear and all of its PWR designs to Toshiba.
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His follow up book ‘Dark Sun’ about how the Soviet Union stole the design of Fat Man from Los Alamos; and how this pushed the US towards the hydrogen bomb (and the consequent rupture between Oppenheimer and Teller) is well worth a read.
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I can think of 3 American made Vietnam War films that tried to show the Vietnamese side:
Siege of Firebase Gloria
The Iron Triangle (which is told from the POV of a Vietcong soldier)
Heaven and Earth
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Here is an assist from The Mary Sue
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Good news there, it is happening to some degree. Publicly the politicians are leaning pretty hard into SMRs now, which to be honest I’m slightly skeptical of. Considering how many proven and reliable designs we already have that we can build today, I’m not sure wasting precious climate time researching a new idea is the best thing.
That said, we’re officially now adding a third reactor to Big Bruce in Ontario, and that will be a CANDU. Sometimes the action on the ground is more pragmatic than the political rhetoric, which is usually a good thing. SMRs are sexy and new, but CANDU will work and get the job done, and clearly the adults in charge on the ground know that.
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“So I see they found another mass grave under a Residential School…”
“Awful stuff but anyway Canadians are so nice now and are we ever gonna win another Stanley Cup do you think?”
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One of the biggest issues with the whole Manhattan Project is how often the idea that “we had to nuke” Japan is something taken at face value. In reality, the Japanese were willing to commit to a conditional surrender. I’m not a fan of such things but making excuses to use a WMD to murder civilians so you can get an unconditional surrender is just gross and awful.
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And besides, they learned useful trades that benefitted them.
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To be fair, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan would still be part of Japan with a conditional surrender.
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We don’t know that. Certainly that was their starting position, but for instance some thought that they could be negotiated down to simply keeping the emperor, especially after Russia attacked. Nobody ever tested so it’s all speculation now.
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At the time, Korea and Taiwan had been part of Japan for decades and the Japanese leadership considered them to be integral parts of Japan. I don’t think that sacrificing those territories would have been on the table until a point where Japanese defeat seemed imminent, and many more people would have died by that point. 120,000 people died fighting in Okinawa, so we can only speculate about what would have happened after Russia attacked. The Japanese were training retirees and children to fight off invading American soldiers with spears (though that might not have ever come to pass as well).
As I said above in this thread, there was never going to be a happy end to the war one way or another. The atomic bombs were neither the best way to do it nor the worst way to do it.
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But they left out the French!
(Probably. Just a guess on my part.)
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Pierre Schoendoerffer made a few films from the French POV. I’ve seen two of them: “317 Platoon” and “Dien Bien Phu”. Before becoming a director he was a journalist who was captured by the Viet Minh.
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There also appears to be some attention to trying to avoid(definitely not always successfully) cases where misunderstandings are likely or violations are easy and tempting.
Something like forbidding tear gas isn’t so much about tear gas being particularly gruesome by weapon standards; but the fact that going from “no war gasses” to “well, mostly no war gasses except for the safe* ones whose initial symptoms may or may not resemble those of much more dangerous and forbidden ones; so just be sure that your panicked front line has their mass spectrometers and good judgement on at all times before concluding that you’ve suffered a chemical attack…” rule would not be an improvement.
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This; a million times, this.
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