It is seventy years since the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan and this was instrumental in ending the second world war. Today there are recriminations. Some people think Japan was about to surrender and the bombing was unnecessary, but while it killed a lot of people an enormous additional death toll would have resulted from a invasion of the Japanese home islands.
It is true that Japan's leaders knew that the war was lost, but they were trying to arrange an armistice similar to the ending of the first world war that would not have involved the Allies putting an occupation force into Japan or any form of punishment for the emperor or the nation's war leaders. That was unacceptable to the Americans - and similar to the events that followed WW1 in Europe - probably meant that we would be fighting a third world war in twenty years time.
There is a degree of horror that most of those that died at Hiroshima were civilians. That should be judged in context with the numbers who died when the Nazi's bombed Warsaw, Rotterdam, London - and Coventry, and our air fleet battered the cities of Germany into rubble. War now is not a battle between conventional armies on a distant battlefield. Total war is what we are seeing in Iraq and Syria and a whole lot of other places on planet Earth - and now there is no distinction between those in uniform - and what were once quaintly termed "civilians " !
It took a while to sink in following the heady days of victory celebrations, but the bombing of Hiroshima made many thoughtful people realise that we had just demonstrated our ability to extinguish human life on this planet. A would nuclear war would be a catastrophe that sent humankind back to the stone age - but there was no way to uninvent the knowledge of how to split the uranium atom.
Quickly, five dominant countries armed themselves with nuclear weapons and world leaders formed the United Nations as a means of trying to hold the peace. Those five gained elevated status by holding the power of "Veto " - the ability to remove both discussion and action on any matter that displeased them. The world settled into two nuclear armed camps for what was termed the "cold war " !
Today - that nuclear club has been joined by India and Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, and there may be a few more harbouring weapons that have not been tested by actual explosions. A treaty seems to have been successfully negotiated to keep Iran nuclear free for at least the next ten years.
It is almost a miracle that seventy years have elapsed without nuclear weapons being used as a weapon of war - and there have been plenty of wars over that period. Several times tensions have come to the brink, and each time wise heads have held back, because the destruction would be too terrible to contemplate. Submarines roam the world's oceans equipped with ICBM's with multiple war heads capable of annihilating world cities and vast nuclear stockpiles stand ready in shore based arsenals. The nuclear clock stands at a minute to midnight !
The long shadow cast by the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima has done us a favour by demonstrating just what sort of horror a nuclear war would deliver. That could not have been conveyed by a test somewhere in a desert and the publicity on this seventieth anniversary is reinforcing in human minds just what faces us if the nuclear dragon slips it's leash.
Hopefully, world leaders will retain their sanity and continue to hold back when tensions rise, but the big danger is the sheer irrationality of those who subvert religion and embrace terrorism as a cause to deliver death to all who fail to convert to their view. Should they get their hands on one of these portable nuclear devices there seems no doubt that they would deploy it without hesitation.
Let us hope our luck holds in the coming seventy years !
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