Nuclear Proliferation On the Anniversary of Hiroshima
We’ve all heard the adage that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Well, I’m starting to wonder if a tactic of the Bush Administration is to play the squeaky wheel in order to get the attention (whether that intention be good or bad) and to keep it focused on them. Well, this tactic worked this past week.
With the 58th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima (August 6th, 8:15 AM) and Nagasaki (August 9th), the Bush Administration released news that they would be holding a top secret meeting at US Strategic Command to discuss expanding the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
You know, if Japan held a similar meeting on the day of the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Bushies would take it more than personally; they’d be talking war. Nonetheless, this administration has dropped one tactless bombshell after another on our Allies, whether they be insults, name-calling, or dropping our responsibilities in world affairs promoting cleaner air, peace, economic stability, and basic human rights. In the case of nuclear weapons, this responsibility would be to honor the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In a Democracy Now interview with the head of the Los Alamos group protesting this top secret meeting, Greg Mello, Greg mentioned that this meeting would bring together "many senior decision makers in the executive branch and their contractors."
Greg learned that a few congressional staff members and committee staff members attempted to attend the meeting just as observers and were "barred from the meeting."
On the docket for the meeting, Greg said they would "how to frame the discussion in congress. What kind of authority do we need to begin small production runs of special weapons. Is the production complex agile enough to make these special weapons at short notice. What kind of nuclear testing do we need. And of course what are the weapons we want...most likely to be used."
More precisely, Greg cited that the weapons discussed will be "high yield weapons.... There are going to be earth penetrating weapons. So called agent defeat weapons which are optimized to attempt the crazy mission of trying to incinerate biological weapons or chemical weapons. They're going to be enhanced radiation weapons. You remember that neutron bombs, there may even be some microwave weapon ideas brought to the table."
The visionary behind this meeting, Greg surmised, is Keith Payne and his co-authors of a 1980 article titled "Why not victory."
[In the article, Payne] suggested that the United States might be able to absorb losses of 20 million dead in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Which as you may remember is not too different than what Buck Turgidson said in "Dr. Strangelove" he has been very active in think tank circles that are close to the Bush administration. The national institute for public policy(NIP), I think he is or was the president, I haven't kept up whether he is in government, in Mr. Rumsfeld's shop at this moment or gone back to NIP. In any case our best information is he is going to be there. Whether that's true or not, it's not too important because his coauthors of that 1980 article in are the Bush administration as well. People that were on the margins at one time are now very central in policy making.
Of course, the news of this meeting was not met kindly in Hiroshima. In an AFP news release on the 6th, the mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba commented that, "by openly declaring the possibility of a pre_emptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research into mini_nukes and other so_called 'useable nuclear weapons,' [the US nuclear policy] appears to worship nuclear weapons as God."
Akiba also mourned the fact that this policy does great danger to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: "The Nuclear Non_Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the verge of collapse."
During a 45-minute ceremony honoring the victims of the bombing at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told the 40,000 plus attendees that "Japan would stick by its pacifist constitution and its non-nuclear principles because the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘can never be repeated.’"
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based non-governmental research organization, commented in an article by Katrin Dauenhauer of IPS on the 7th that this meeting could result in another arms race:
In my view, proposals for new nuclear weapons provide no military value for the United States and would result in enormous political, diplomatic and proliferation costs....To pursue the development of new types of nuclear weapons would make the task of banning the spread of nuclear weapons even more difficult. There is a 'do as I say, not as I do' philosophy implied. In order to develop and produce them, testing would be required that by itself could trigger a global reaction cycle that would harm international security. China might resume testing, or Russia.
Also on the 7th, Powell made a statement to the press (reported by AP Diplomatic Writer, Barry Schweid) that the US would not resume nuclear testing.
In response to this, Daryl Kimball stated: "It's useful that the secretary is reinforcing the current commitment to the test ban. [However,] that commitment is not solid, given the view of others in the administration that nuclear testing might be needed to develop and produce new types of nuclear weapons."
Meanwhile, the Guardian published an incredible article about scientists attempts to reconstruct the events in Hiroshima that fateful day in order to determine the safe limits of exposure to radiation. Titled "The Day the Sky Exploded," by David Adam, he reveals that a Japanese census in 1950 reports that "some 280,000 people said they had been exposed to radiation from one of the two atomic bombs."
The crucial question was: how much? Human exposure to dangerous levels of radiation is extremely rare, so the atomic bomb survivors provide the best evidence of what the effects are. By comparing the radiation doses the survivors received with the illnesses they later developed, scientists try to work out how lower exposures to radiation may trigger cancer. Every time you have an x-ray, for example, the safety data used to set your dose of radiation can be directly traced back to the events at Hiroshima. Likewise for patients receiving radiotherapy and for those people working in nuclear power stations.
The importance of this article, I feel, is that because of this reconstruction effort, these scientists have been able to better formulate what occurred at ground zero that morning in Hiroshima.
Adam writes that "The scientists developing the new reconstruction have also been able to follow the angle and direction of the radiation striking buildings and the ground back to their point of origin: the bomb. In this way they have worked out that the Hiroshima device was more powerful than believed: 16 rather than 15 kilotons (a 1kt blast is equivalent to 1,000 tons of conventional TNT exploding). They have also revised the exact point of the explosion over the area of the city where a memorial park now stands _ saying it was 15m further west and 20m higher at 600m. Such details may seem irrelevant next to the human tragedy that unfolded below, but the researchers say it is important that all uncertainties are ironed out."
The account of that morning in Hiroshima, in Adam’s words:
Hiroshima, August 6 1945: They sounded the all clear. What harm could three planes do?
It should have been a beautiful day in Hiroshima. There was hardly a cloud in the sky when the American planes appeared high overhead; they were clearly visible to those watching from the ground.
The attack sirens had sounded at around 7am when the planes were first spotted approaching the Japanese coast, but at around 8am the all-clear had been given. The Hiroshima radar operator had said there were no more than three in coming planes. What damage could three planes do? It was probably a reconnaissance mission. Many of the victims were still emerging from air raid shelters when the bomb was released.
The bomb doors of the Enola Gay overhead opened at 8.15am and about 40 seconds later the bomb exploded, around 600m above the city. The Americans knew this was the way to cause the most devastation. If the bomb exploded any lower then energy from the blast would be wasted, merely gouging a crater into the ground.
Not that there was a shortage of energy. This was E=mc2 in all its terrible simplicity -- where the energy released is equal to the mass of material multiplied by the speed of light squared (a very, very big number). As the nuclear chain reaction quickly ran out of control, uranium packed into the bomb was converted in a split second into a destructive holy trinity of heat, light and sound.
The explosion in the sky was as hot and bright as the sun, and to those on the ground it will have appeared hundreds of times bigger in the sky. It flung its energy out in all directions, instantly killing those at close range and severely burning people further away. Within a minute the city was engulfed in a fireball several hundred metres wide and as much as a mile high. This wall of flame would have quickly burned out into a gigantic pall of dense smoke, already beginning to form the characteristic mushroom shape that is the signature of an atomic explosion. The incredible heat caused fires to break out spontaneously across Hiroshima. Whipped by winds, the city quickly became engulfed in a devastating firestorm. Again, this was part of the American plan. Hiroshima's flat, ordered geography had been specifically targeted as it would allow fire to spread rapidly.
The city was helpless to respond. Firefighting and rescue units were fatally short of men and equipment. Only a handful of out-of-date fire engines were available, and no rescue parties could be mobilised until well into the following afternoon.
Most of the initial damage was caused by a crushing shock wave that rushed away from the atomic explosion, flattening almost everything in its path. Windows as far as nine miles away were broken, while closer to the centre of the blast, concrete buildings had their ceilings crushed and doors and windows blown off. The force uprooted trees and many people were trapped and burned beneath fallen structures. Most of the radiation released during the blast was made up of gamma rays, which came directly from the heart of the uranium as it split open during the chain reaction.
Japan could not understand what had happened. Following confused reports of a massive explosion, believed to be exaggerated, the military sent a single aircraft to survey the situation. Still a hundred miles from Hiroshima, the crew reported a great cloud of smoke where the city had been. But how? There had been no major enemy raid, and there was no sizable store of explosives there. The answer came 16 hours after the explosion, when the White House announced that Hiroshima had been hit by an atomic bomb.
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