HIROSHIMA DAY LEAFLET
What was the world’s worst, most cold-blooded terrorist act, killing lakhs of innocent civilians and poisoning all the generations to come?
Who was responsible for it?
Not 9/11, not Osama Bin Laden…
8:15 a.m. at Hiroshima 62 years ago: the world witnessed an unparalleled act of mass murder.
The entire city of Hiroshima was flattened by a single bomb, made with just 60 kg of uranium, and dropped from a B-29 United States Air Force warplane.
Imagine the fate of the people – living in the city which within seconds became a furnace of fire – with temperatures soaring to 4,000 C, more than 2,500 higher than the melting point of iron. Hiroshima was ravaged by massive firestorms. At 9/11 we saw the terrible sight of two towers reduced to rubble. At Hiroshima, savage firestorms ripped through innumerable buildings, reducing them to rubble and burning those within. Giant shock-waves releasing blast energy ripped through the city, wreaking more destruction.
Within seconds, 80,000 people were killed. Within hours, over 100,000 died, most of them crushed under the impact of blast-waves and falling buildings, or severely burnt by firestorms.
And the horror did not end with one day of terror. Waves of radiation followed, invisible and intangible, – but taking a slow, lethal, cruel toll. Thousands died within days from radiation sickness produced by exposure to high doses of gamma-rays or poisonous radio-nuclides. Hiroshima’s death toll climbed to 140,000. Thousands more died over years from cancers and leukaemia – their suffering was excruciating and prolonged. Those who survived envied the dead.
If attacks on civilians is terrorism,
Three days after the Hiroshima’s bombing, USA dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki – and more than 70,000 people perished in agonising ways.
The USA claimed the nuke bombs were needed to end the Second World War. The world knows that is a lie.
Historians Peter Kuznick and Mark Selden, in an article in the British New Scientist magazine two years ago, disclosed that three days before Hiroshima, US President Harry S. Truman agreed Japan was “looking for peace”.
General Dwight Eisenhower said in a 1963 Newsweek interview that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, also said that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender”.
The real function of the two bombs was not military, but political. It was to establish USA’s unchallenged hegemony after World War II.
No US President was ever tried for the appalling war crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – surely a crime that was on par with Hitler’s murder of the Jews. No ‘War on Terror’ was ever launched against Harry Truman. The US never even had to apologise for this crime against humanity.
The same USA which is the ONLY country in the world to have perpetrated this nuclear attack now claims to be the nuclear policeman of the world….
Consider the following facts which expose US’ shameless hypocrisy:
• U.S. today has over 10,000 nuclear weapons
• US is the only nation with its nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil
• US keeps about 1,700 nuclear weapons ready to use at immediate notice, on 14 Trident submarines, patrolling the world’s oceans
• US pours billions of dollars into finding ways to make nuclear weapons more useable in ordinary warfare – i.e to prepare for more Hiroshimas
• US has threatened other countries with nuclear attack at least 30 times
• US has recently even threatened Iran with nuclear attack
• In the name of its ‘War on Terror’, USA has perpetrated even more terrorist attacks on civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq
Today, the Congress and UPA are celebrating the ‘123 Agreement’ with the US as a great victory. But this agreement is nothing but Clause 123 of the
Unfortunately, the CPI-CPI(M) are yet to come out with a demand to scrap the Indo-US Nuke Deal. Instead, following the Prime Minister’s speech in Parliament in August last year, they had declared that they are ‘satisfied’ with his ‘assurances’. In December 2006 the CPI(M) had asked the UPA Government to ‘walk away from the Nuke Deal’ – but now that the 123 Agreement is on the verge of being signed, why is the CPI(M) vacillating? Why is not pressing for the UPA Government to walk away from the Deal any more?
Today, in India, the poor tribals of Jadugoda in Jharkhand suffer little Hiroshimas daily due to the uranium mines that poison their lives. Even the so-called ‘civilian’ and ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear energy are deadly and devastating, causing cancers and birth defects for several lifetimes. The people of Koodankulam in Tamilnadu are protesting, demanding a CBI enquiry into nuclear power plants construction in their area that will endanger their lives. The only tribute to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be to resist US imperialism and wars, and say a resounding NO to nuclear energy in all its deadly forms.
On 6 August let us join millions across the world in raising the cry –
No Nukes! No Wars!
Let us demand to the UPA Government – NO to the Indo-US Nuke Deal!
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