Vision After Fission

On this anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, two of the biggest stories in the world concern control of Israel's nuclear arsenal, and control of the supply of uranium from Niger to France.

But consider that while the atom bomb has been used, nuclear weapons such as exist today never have been. By anyone. Yet look at the people who have had them, or who still do. It is all a bluff. Just get rid of these wretched abominations. We could pay the affected shipyard workers quite eye-watering sums in compensation, and still save amounts that there would scarcely be the adjectives to describe. Instead of Trident, give an extra £70 billion to each of the British Army, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force. Heaven knows that they need it.

"Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Surveys. That was early as 1946. Even the Japanese condition of keeping the Emperor was granted once the Manhattan Project's cost of $2.2 billion in 1945 had ostensibly been justified, and a meaningless signal sent to the Soviet Union, which had the Bomb within four years.

It gets some people's backs up when Hiroshima and Nagasaki are compared to the Holocaust. But beyond any crude numbers game, there was more than a touch of Josef Mengele to those bombings. No one knew what the effects of an atomic attack would be. So experiments were conducted on perceived racial inferiors, not to end the War, but just to see what would happen. "If we'd lost the War, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals," admitted even Curtis LeMay. He was right.