The Last Train From Hiroshima


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Excerpt

‘The Last Train From Hiroshima’

By CHARLES PELLEGRINO Published: January 19, 2010 Chapter 1: The Killing Star

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'The Last Train From Hiroshima,' by Charles Pellegrino: After Atom Bombs’ Shock, the Real Horrors Began Unfolding (January 20, 2010)

Had Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe been born into the mid-twentieth century, they would never have had to invent horror.

For the Japanese scientists who first ventured into the still-radioactive hypocenters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki trying to understand what had occurred, the most fearsome deaths were the quickest. On a bridge located in central Hiroshima, a man could still be seen leading a horse, though he had utterly ceased to exist. His footsteps, the horse's footsteps, and the last footsteps of the people who had been crossing the bridge with him toward the heart of the city were preserved on the instantly bleached road surface, as if by an accidental new method of flash photography.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/books/excerpt-last-train-from-hiroshima.htmlI have heard about 6-8 hours of this author being interviewed over the last two (2) weeks.

Some of the amazing stories is that Roosevelt ordered the minting of 400,000 purple hearts which we were certain would be a minimal casualty rate.

Those Purple Hearts were never used then. They are still being given out today and they were minted in 1945.

The Japanese school children at Hiroshima were assembling weapons for the anticipated invasion. The boys were making guns from scrap metal. The girls were making spears.

The children were programed that our troops would brutalize them. Rape them, kill them and even eat them.

I can't wait to read this book.

The story of the Shadow People is enough to turn you into a pacifist if you do not think it all the way through.

Adam

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The Japanese school children at Hiroshima were assembling weapons for the anticipated invasion. The boys were making guns from scrap metal. The girls were making spears.

The children were programed that our troops would brutalize them. Rape them, kill them and even eat them.

I can't wait to read this book.

The story of the Shadow People is enough to turn you into a pacifist if you do not think it all the way through.

Adam

Demonization 101. And our troops would never have eating the Japanese children. It would be useless. Two hours later and they would be hungry again.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Ba'al:

Wow, that was hilarious, nothing like sick black humor.

Adam

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and then, perhaps it is all a fabrication...

http://www.nytimes.c...iroshima&st=cse

Anonrobt:

Nice try.

He already produced the interviews that he had with the entire family. The author's conclusion is that the individual became convinced that he was on the scientific data plane.

Thankfully, the record has been corrected.

Baby and the bathwater.

Adam

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  • 4 years later...

. . .

The following is an excerpt from my 1985 essay “Is Nuclear War Inevitable?” published in Nomos.

“Peace becomes the sturdy child of terror.” A few years before penning that metaphor, Winston Churchill had gotten first-hand experience in the deadly game of terror-bombing. Hitler had been deterred from bombing cities by fear of retaliation in kind, but he did bomb powerless Rotterdam. After that bit of savagery, Churchill began bombing in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s great industrial complex. So Hitler bombed the London perimeter airfields, and a lost bomber unloaded in the heart of London. In return, Churchill bombed Berlin. Believing that retaliation in kind was the only way to get the enemy to desist from terror-bombing of German cities, Hitler ordered the blitz of London. But that was a level of bombing that London could endure for a while.

Similarly, Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, survived more than 130 raids, until the summer of 1943, when the Allies perfected their bombing techniques and destroyed it. The great concentration of incendiary bombs created a fire-storm. “Thousands of individual fires merged into one great all-consuming blaze. The wind drew fleeing people irresistibly into the fire. In the air raid shelters all the oxygen was sucked out and the occupants suffocated, or were baked alive by the heat of the fires raging overhead. Thousands of people simply disappeared” (Stokesbury 1980, 285).

During the first half of 1945, General Curtis Lemay demonstrated the “strategic” powers of his Air Force by burning down Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka—the five major cities of Japan. On August 6 President Truman dropped his atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Within one second 80,000 people died. Stalin was impressed.

The most important thing to understand about nuclear weapons is the great economy of their destructive power and the consequent impossibility of effective defense.

[i should stress that when I wrote "defense" in this essay, I meant that literally, not in some larger sense that includes deterrence. The latter is a “defense” that has succeeded so far with nuclear weapons. I should add also my answer today to the essay question: I think deterrence, defense, and disarmament will ultimately fail, and human kind will be ended by nuclear war. That is no excuse for failing to protect, for failing in nuclear wisdom, so far as we can reach into the future.]

By the 1960’s the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were spinning their wheels in MUD, Mutual Unacceptable Damage. After the stunning success of Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. went to work on rocketry in a big way and was soon ready to post solid-fueled Polaris ballistic missiles under the cover of the sea and land-based Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM’s) in underground silos hardened to withstand a blast overpressure of up to 100 psi. The Soviets continued to show off in outer space (first man in space, first rocket to the moon), but in the development of ICBM’s they fell behind.

Sergei Korolev’s design for the Soviet’s first operational ICBM, the SS-6, was suspiciously similar to his designs for space rockets. As a weapon for sobering the American imperialists, it had its drawbacks It was so large that it had to be transported by rail and based near a railroad line. Filling it with its highly volatile liquid fuel required 20 hours before launch. It received its guiding radio signals from ground stations that could be easily jammed or destroyed. It could only reach the northeastern corner of the United States.

Nonetheless, the U.S. could be deterred by even a very marginal Soviet nuclear capability for retaliation upon the American homeland. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, the Kennedy administration “instituted a top-secret high-level study of a possible ‘counterforce’ strike against Soviet military targets. The [study] group revealed that conditions were ideal for such an attack. The United States would, at a stroke, be able to knock out almost all of Russia’s nuclear-war-making potential. Soviet retaliation would be extremely limited, killing probably no more than 3 million Americans—at worst no more than 15 million” (Cockburn 1983, 303–4). The Kennedy team was aghast; this option was no option at all as far as they were concerned. We had already gotten stuck in the nuclear MUD.

. . .

We have made plans for using nuclear weapons to achieve levels of destruction less than our full capability. . . . By going nuclear at a low level we hope to demonstrate our resolve in the conflict. We hope to persuade the Soviets that we are willing to step up to higher levels of nuclear destruction if necessary to get results favorable to us. Since the enemy might still reasonably think we are bluffing about stepping up to the higher nuclear levels, how does entering the lower nuclear levels make our higher-level threats more credible?

The solution was first seen with crystal clarity by the brilliant strategist Thomas Schelling. The crucial role of the threat that leaves something to chance is perhaps his greatest insight. “The key to these threats is that, though one may oar may not carry them out if the threatened party fails to comply, the final decision is not altogether under the threatener’s control. . . . Where does the uncertain element in the decision come from? It must come from somewhere outside the threatener’s control. Whether we call it ‘chance’, accident, third-party influence, imperfection in the machinery of decision, or just processes that we do not entirely understand, it is an ingredient in the situation that neither we nor the other party understand, it is an ingredient in the situation that neither we nor the party we threaten can entirely control. An example is the threat of inadvertent war” (Schelling 1960, 188).

In essence, then, the plans of players stuck in MUD contain low-level nuclear strike options because such strikes . . . can show the enemy that one’s resolve in the conflict extends to the limit of the ex ante risk of continued escalation multiplied by the destruction of thermonuclear war. . . .

We must bear in mind that when it comes to biting, as opposed to barking, threshold nuclear war-fighting plans that could actually generate no risks of nuclear escalation are pointless. One of the limited nuclear options presented to Dr. Henry Kissinger (no nuclear greenhorn) for countering a postulated Soviet invasion of Iran called for exploding an atomic demolition mine on one of the two main roads leading from Russia to Iran and for firing two nuclear weapons at the other main road. “What kind of nuclear attack is this?” asked the Professor. He said that if he were Brezhnev pondering this attack, he would conclude that the American President was “chicken.” Earlier, Kissinger had been presented with a plan for dropping nearly two hundred nuclear bombs on Russian military targets near the Iranian border. Kissinger: “Are you out of your minds? This is a limited option?” (Jervis 1984, 36–37). Without the risk of unspeakable destruction, limited nuclear options are useless, and a limited use had better be worth the risk.

. . .

The theory known as Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, says that what is needed on both sides for stable nuclear deterrence is a force of invulnerable offensive nuclear weapons capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on the society of the enemy. This theory of deterrence by threat of retaliatory strike was declared U.S. policy for many years for the sake of public relations. The difference between the myth of MAD and the reality of MUD is danger. . . . In a crisis there are and always have been real advantages to striking first . . . .

. . .

Between ourselves and the Soviets, we can cultivate a relation of stable deterrence, or we can let things get out of hand and fly away. . . .

(Sorry about the link on the name Yokohama. It appears automatically. I am unable to eliminate it.)

. . .

When it comes to the great negatives in life, I have some reservations concerning Rand’s idea that negatives are unworthy as whole subjects of a work of art. Sometimes there is widespread common background of the beholders, who know the subject is from a larger story with its road to a positive; such would be a painting showing only that the dead Jesus is being taken down from the cross. War scenes as subjects of artworks, containing no positive aspects in the subject, may have viewers who know some history from which the scene is taken and some evaluation of that history, possibly positive. On the other hand, a war scene—say, a massacre—as subject of a painting, might be effective in inducing the horribleness of such an event to a viewer and nothing more than that horror. I would not want to contemplate it so much that I put it on the living room wall opposite me just now, in place of the triptych of Monet’s water lilies spanning that wall. However, the well-executed massacre painting might be worth my contemplation in a memorial museum of the event or in an art museum, where one passes from one feeling of life to another.

. . .

Hiroshima Survivors' Art to Go on Show

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Excerpt

‘The Last Train From Hiroshima’

By CHARLES PELLEGRINO Published: January 19, 2010 Chapter 1: The Killing Star

Skip to next paragraph

Related

'The Last Train From Hiroshima,' by Charles Pellegrino: After Atom Bombs’ Shock, the Real Horrors Began Unfolding (January 20, 2010)

Had Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe been born into the mid-twentieth century, they would never have had to invent horror.

For the Japanese scientists who first ventured into the still-radioactive hypocenters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki trying to understand what had occurred, the most fearsome deaths were the quickest. On a bridge located in central Hiroshima, a man could still be seen leading a horse, though he had utterly ceased to exist. His footsteps, the horse's footsteps, and the last footsteps of the people who had been crossing the bridge with him toward the heart of the city were preserved on the instantly bleached road surface, as if by an accidental new method of flash photography.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/books/excerpt-last-train-from-hiroshima.htmlI have heard about 6-8 hours of this author being interviewed over the last two (2) weeks.

Some of the amazing stories is that Roosevelt ordered the minting of 400,000 purple hearts which we were certain would be a minimal casualty rate.

Those Purple Hearts were never used then. They are still being given out today and they were minted in 1945.

The Japanese school children at Hiroshima were assembling weapons for the anticipated invasion. The boys were making guns from scrap metal. The girls were making spears.

The children were programed that our troops would brutalize them. Rape them, kill them and even eat them.

I can't wait to read this book.

The story of the Shadow People is enough to turn you into a pacifist if you do not think it all the way through.

Adam

Not at all. We build Good Weapons in the Fatherland, nicht wahr?

I was turned down three times trying to enlist in the military. So I became, for part of my life a weapon smith to produce implements for the Real Warriors to use. One of my brain children was a ground tracking algorithm and guidance system for cruise missiles (pre-GPS). Some of my babies killed enemy people. And I will tell you what. I have blood on my hands up to my armpits and I do not regret or feel guilty about a single drop of blood I helped to shed. My rules: Love and Cherish your Friends. Kill Your Enemies. Be polite to the Neutrals.

My face does not have a single turned cheek.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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My 20 month Army tour was spent just 22 yrs after the 2 bombings. I worked in a U.S. printing plant with some 200 Japanese. Many spoke English and were quite sociable. There was never any animosity toward the GI's...they actually enjoyed speaking with us & sharing their sake & homemade lunches.They were polite & generally curious about "Americans". Keep in mind that most of these Japanese were children & young adults during the war's conclusion. They surely had fresh, horrific memories. It never showed. Now the college students were another story. They protested frequently on the streets of Yokohama & Tokyo. Yankee Go Home.

-J

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Yankee Go Home.

-J

Now the Yankee gets their best home run king in Matsui and their best pitcher in Tanaka!!

Spoils of war...

lol

A...

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Yankee Go Home.

-J

Now the Yankee gets their best home run king in Matsui and their best pitcher in Tanaka!!

Spoils of war...

lol

A...

But the Yankees suk. My brother is pissed.

Now my Angels...ah

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Yankee Go Home.

-J

Now the Yankee gets their best home run king in Matsui and their best pitcher in Tanaka!!

Spoils of war...

lol

A...

But the Yankees suk. My brother is pissed.

Now my Angels...ah

Yep, the greatest sports franchise in history and the winner of 27 World Series, more than any other

team sucks.

Got it.

Your Angels are a better team than the Yankees this year.

A...

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Yep, the greatest sports franchise in history and the winner of 27 World Series, more than any other

team sucks.

Got it.

Your Angels are a better team than the Yankees this year.

A...

They suk this year. I'm waiting for my childhood team to resurrect (Yogi, the M & M boys, Billy, Moose, Andy, Gil & Whitey)

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Yep, the greatest sports franchise in history and the winner of 27 World Series, more than any other

team sucks.

Got it.

Your Angels are a better team than the Yankees this year.

A...

They suk this year. I'm waiting for my childhood team to resurrect (Yogi, the M & M boys, Billy, Moose, Andy, Gil & Whitey)

Mike Francesca, of WFAN, and, frankly, one of the most knowledgeable radio sports persons out there.

Full disclosure, he is a Yankee fan.

He knows his numbers and he came out with a slew of them on Thursday.

DiMaggio appeared in 10 World Series and NY won 9 of them!!

Yogi appeared in 14 and won 10 {only player to have 10 rings]! He was 3-0 as a coach and 0-2 as a

manager. Over all he appeared in 19 World Series and won 13!!

Mantle appeared in 12 and won 7.

Jeter appeared in 7 and won 5.

Astounding numbers.

A...

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The Yankees used Kansas City as their own "minors."

--Brant

Yes they did...

later, in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh.

The Yankees won a record five World Series in a row ending in 1953, but they lost the pennant in 1954 to Cleveland. Their dominance of baseball was threatened.

However, the Yankees were the richest and most resourceful club in baseball, then as now, and they found a way to ensure a continuous supply of good players. They managed to turn one of their American League rivals, the Kansas City Athletics, into a virtual farm team.

How did this happen? Connie Mack's family sold the Philadelphia Athletics in 1954, and Yankee principal owner Dan Topping arranged for one of his business friends, Arnold Johnson, to buy the A's and move the team to Kansas City. It's still unclear how much influence the Yankee ownership held over the A's, but the two teams then embarked on a six-year series of trades. These trades, as we shall see, almost always favored the Yankees.

The author does an exceptional job illustrating each trade between the clubs from 1953 to 1961. He

evaluates each trade and gives its advantages to one of the clubs or calls it even.

He concludes with:

In all, from 1953 to 1961 the two teams made 18 deals in which the Athletics sent 34 players and four hunks of cash to the Yankees and received 42 players and two hunks of cash in return. However, the Yankees got a whole raft of good players - Maris, Boyer, Terry, Cerv, etc. - while the A's got the Yankees' problem children (Martin), old guys at the end of the line (Bauer, Sain, Blackwell), and players who couldn't get out of Casey Stengel's doghouse (Siebern, Carey). It seemed that any time the Yankees needed to fill a hole, they'd find someone in KC to fill it, and the A's would be satisfied with peanuts in return.

The real outcome of this series of trades can be measured by the standings. From 1955 to 1960, the Yankees won five pennants and finished third the other time, while the A's never finished higher than sixth in an eight team league. The A's 73-81 record in 1958 was their best record in the six-year period, but after they traded Cerv, Maris, and Terry they dropped to last place again in 1960.

Many people call the 1961 Yankees the greatest team of all time. Ten of their players came directly from the Athletics. In return, the A's were left so decimated that their 1961 team finished tied for the cellar of the American League, behind the Los Angeles Angels expansion team and tied with the expansion Washington Senators.

The solid core of the Yankees, provided in large part by these lopsided trades, stayed intact for several more years, and the Yankees won four more pennants in a row from 1961 to 1964 while the A's floundered some more.

A...

http://www.wcnet.org/~dlfleitz/kca.htm

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My step-grandmother hated the Yankees and their announcer Red Barber. She watched their baseball in 1960 on in NJ on a black and white tv equipped with a hard-wired mute she called her "Blab Off Switch." She constantly hit that thing whenever she heard Yankee gush or that they were doing well.

I enjoyed the Maris-Mantle home-run derby of 1961. Otherwise I didn't think much of them. I loved it when George Steinbrenner sold off "Mr. October" and replaced him with "Mr. May."

The Yankees deserved--if they did--their Babe Ruth dominance and maybe the 1950s. That was that.

As a school bus driver I took a bunch of high school students to the old House that Ruth built in 1973 and watched a game. I also saw the old POLO grounds a decade earlier when the New England Patriots--or what they were then called--played the New York Titans. A bunch of lunks with no seeming passion going up and down the field. Part of the problem was young, ignorant me; I didn't really understand what I was looking at. All the sporting events I've ever went to bored the hell out of me. I saw Ted Williams at the end of his career in Boston; he didn't get a hit. The one I enjoyed the most was in 1963 in San Francisco with the Giants playing I don't remember who and the aircraft carrier Oriskany glided by. I think Willie McCovey was playing. What I now enjoy I watch on TV. It ain't much. I went to bed and missed Arizona's Hail Mary against CAL that beat CAL last night.

--Brant

me the chump

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