US Government calls Hiroshima, Nagasaki ‘nuclear tests'
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The US bombed tens of thousands, killing them outright for 'nuclear tests', recent reports suggest.
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Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, Japan, after the second bomb to hit was dropped, on Aug. 9, 1945. (AP)
In a report by Anti War, Norman Solomon wrote, "When I approached the US Department of Energy's press office in 1980 for a list of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency sent me an official booklet titled "Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979," explaining that the Trinity test in New Mexico, was at the top of the list, Hiroshima was ranked second, and Nagasaki came in third place.
According to Anti War, 35 years after the atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, the Energy Department - the organization in charge of nuclear armament - classified them as "tests."
It adds that the classification was later changed, apparently in an effort to avert a potential PR problem. By 1994, a new edition of the same document explained that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were not ‘tests’ in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed...or to advance weapon design, to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety.”
According to the report, however, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually were tests, in more ways than one.
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How was the bomb tested?
The first reference is to the Manhattan Project’s director, Gen. Leslie Groves, who recalled that the first target must be "of such size that the damage be confined within it so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb."
Secondly, a physicist with the Manhattan Project, David H. Frisch, remembered that US military strategists were eager “to use the bomb first where its effects would not only be politically effective but also technically measurable.”
On that note, the US military was able in early August to test both a uranium-fueled bomb on Hiroshima and a second plutonium bomb on Nagasaki after the Trinity bomb test in the New Mexico desert used plutonium as its fission source on July 16, 1945.
'Hiroshima was not a military base'
The nuclear era began when President Harry Truman delivered a statement announcing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which he simply characterized as "an important Japanese Army base." It was an outright lie.
According to journalist Greg Mitchell, a renowned scholar of Japan's atomic bombings, "Hiroshima was not an 'army base,' but a city of 350,000." It did house an important military headquarters, but the bomb was dropped in the heart of a city, far from its industrial region."
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"Perhaps 10,000 military personnel died in the bomb," Mitchell remarked, "but the vast majority of the 125,000 dead in Hiroshima would be women and children." When an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, "it was officially described as a 'naval base,' yet less than 200 of the 90,000 dead were military personnel."
Since then, administrations have repeatedly used language to justify irresponsible nuclear policies that have resulted in global disasters, as per Anti War.
In modern times, the most insidious lies from Washington officials have come with silence - refusing to acknowledge the growing dangers of nuclear war with true diplomacy. These threats have pushed the hands of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock to an unprecedented 90 seconds before apocalyptic Midnight.
