Thought for today:
"Few of us ever consider the ultimate consequences of our actions upon the lives of innocent others. I have frequently wondered if the scientists who masterminded the construction of the 'A-bomb' and the 'H-bomb' which killed 200,000 innocent civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August, 1945 respectively and which brought Japan to surrender were able to live with themselves thereafter.
I am also disgusted by the somewhat innocuous and derisory names that are given to such weapons of mass destruction by supposedly civilised nations such as the United States of America. The uraniam fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th August was ironically code named, 'Little Boy', and then as if to rub salt into the wounds of war, the plutonium implosion-type fission bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th was code-named, 'Fat Man.'
Irony is defined as the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite; typically for humorous or emphatic effect. I know from my own ideep interest in history that many of the soldiers of Japan were capable of inflicting the harshest and cruelest and most barbaric treatment on their prisoners during the Second World War, but surely the Americans need not have stooped so low in the face of obvious victory!
Historians will continue to debate if these two bombs should have been dropped and how many more of the Allies would have lost their lives had they not. Of all the images that have haunted me throughout my life, the one with the running child whose skin is peeled from his back with radiation burns will never be dispelled from my mind. No war should ever be glorified or its dead forgotten." William Forde: August 9th, 2014.
"Few of us ever consider the ultimate consequences of our actions upon the lives of innocent others. I have frequently wondered if the scientists who masterminded the construction of the 'A-bomb' and the 'H-bomb' which killed 200,000 innocent civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August, 1945 respectively and which brought Japan to surrender were able to live with themselves thereafter.
I am also disgusted by the somewhat innocuous and derisory names that are given to such weapons of mass destruction by supposedly civilised nations such as the United States of America. The uraniam fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th August was ironically code named, 'Little Boy', and then as if to rub salt into the wounds of war, the plutonium implosion-type fission bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th was code-named, 'Fat Man.'
Irony is defined as the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite; typically for humorous or emphatic effect. I know from my own ideep interest in history that many of the soldiers of Japan were capable of inflicting the harshest and cruelest and most barbaric treatment on their prisoners during the Second World War, but surely the Americans need not have stooped so low in the face of obvious victory!
Historians will continue to debate if these two bombs should have been dropped and how many more of the Allies would have lost their lives had they not. Of all the images that have haunted me throughout my life, the one with the running child whose skin is peeled from his back with radiation burns will never be dispelled from my mind. No war should ever be glorified or its dead forgotten." William Forde: August 9th, 2014.
