Atomic what plugs?
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This is a very interesting thought – one that resonates with me for personal reasons.
I was born six hours and five minutes away from the exact moment of the tenth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima. For my entire life – particularly as a child – every birthday was accompanied by images of mushroom clouds … in newspapers, on television … and now, something I pass on the web, as a kind of sickening foreshadowing.
I was astonished to learn (too late to take advantage of the opportunity) that Donald Hornig, president of Brown University when I was a student there in the ’70s, was the last man to physically see the Gadget at Los Alamos before it detonated.
If I had only known while I was a student, I would have found some way to meet with him for lunch or breakfast … just to preserve the historical word-to-ear chain of experience. I don’t know what I would have asked him … but I would likely have just wanted to listen. Whatever he had to say, however difficult it would have been to hear … it would have been part of the living record for another generation.
The idea of walking from Hiroshima to Nagasaki … I think that’s something I need to do. You’ve planted a seed, and I thank you for that.
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feel super super depressed.
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“Green means go”? “Green means safe”? I want “go” to turn into “kablewy”, what color do I pick?
I kid you not - the struggle’s real in the more explodey-side of experimentation…
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It’ll go to the national archives soon enough, once we close our little museum. It was ours first - and I think our dudes brought it back from Tinian. Finders Keepers and all of that.
Then again, I think the relevant classified bits are kept here in Los Alamos, so that is kind of the National Archive.
Rest assured, it’s not ending up on Ebay.
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What a cracking lyric.
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I can just see the Auschwitz Visitors’ Book, “This sucks - Donald J Trump”
Exactly. This was US national property; individual Air Force officers had no right to keep the plugs or give them away. Even if one accepted it as okay to keep souvenirs, selling them is definitely not okay.
Couldn’t the government simply seize them?
Nah; in terms of radioactivity, it’s fine. In terms of emotions, less so.
Definitely. We visited as a daytrip from Osaka a couple of years ago, but we’re going again in the autumn (not summer!), and staying over.
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Let’s not forget shall we:
Japan was the aggressor here, not the victim; Hiroshima was an effect, not a cause.
See also: “Rape of Nanking”
And: “POW’s, treatment of”.
And 7 December 1941
The only plausible reason they might have stopped fighting is Russians might have gotten involved.
I’m surprised they’re not in the Hiroshima peace memorial museum to be quite honest. I know that’s macabre but honestly it fits what the museum is about.
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What? We’re BOTH red-green colour-blind? What are the odds of that?
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I don’t think any of those things provide a moral basis for dropping two nuclear weapons on Japan. I happen to believe that they were horrible acts that one could plausibly argue were war crimes, but I also believe that they were the least horrible options at the time to end the war, given the alternatives of blockade & starvation and/or continued strategic bombing and/or invasion. But revenge for Pearl Harbor or Nanking don’t factor in.
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People generally tend to underestimate how horrific those options were. Especially the blockade/starvation one. Ending the war by August 1945 saved millions of lives who would have perished by famine and prevented Hokkaido from being a Communist North Japan.
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Who are you attempting to lecture here? Why do you believe that we don’t know about these events? Do you believe that a recognition of Japan’s past is incompatible with appreciation of its present?
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We should probably be careful, because we’re setting ourselves up for the oh-so-enjoyable “but Japan was trying to surrender and they just wanted to keep the Emperor” that David Irving and his cohort of revisionist “historians” at IHR have helpfully put out there for people to read and accept at face value because it ranks highly in a Google search.
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Except the Survivors don’t seem to want revenge or even dismiss the US as evil.
What I see is they present themselves as the result of nuclear weapons, and don’t want an atomic bomb used ever again.
Every time anyone thinks about using an atomic bomb, they need to keep the Survivors in mind, remember that it’s not just a big bomb. That puts a limit on any use, and the results in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible enough that the bomb hasn’t been used ever again. It’s wiill be 75 years come August, a blip in time but at least so far there has been restraint.
When we walked to New York City in 1982, we carried photos of the survivors. Once in NYC, a lot of Japanese people showed up, not spouting off against the US, but certainly very pleased that we walked for nuclear disarmament. I still have a strand of paper cranes given to me from someone from Japan on June 7th 1982.
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If you told me these were plugs used by Fat Man and Little Boy, without the reference to the atomic bombs, I’d be suspicious.
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Any mention of David Irving gets a simple response:
A reference to the website where he got eviscerated in a public setting for being such a lying sack of crap
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