On Tuesday I sat in the cafe of the Nagasaki Nuclear Bomb museum pondering what sort of person takes human ingenuity and turns it into a weapon which on initial fission and for around a micro-second afterwards, was the size of a football and yet twice as hot as the surface of the sun. Within a second the searing heat had vapourised all carbon based materials with a 500 metre radius on the ground, caused bricks and clay tiles to melt and cermacise, bottles, crokery and pans to melt or deform while even melting and blistering the soild rock on which many of the houses stood. Here and there bits and pieces of a household's possesions survived relatively unscathed, only blackened: a cracked rice bowl, half a teapot, an earthenware container, spectacles in a case, a pair of eletrician's pincers - one handle melted away the other relatively intact.
In the same layer of fused together ceramacised bric-a-braq, nearly a metre thick, there was a belt buckle and tiny white glass spheres collected in a pile which could well have been the remains of a fuse box - with bits of what looked like wire sticking out like some modern work of art. Maybe the pincers and belt buckle are all that was left of the electrician who had been fixing a fuse on the fuse box, we will never know because the only evidence of carbon based materials, whether wood or human, is a thin layer of charcol dust at the bottom of the pile.
Five seconds later the blast compression wave landed from on high and sped off on its five kilometer dash to Nagasaki Harbour at twice the speed of sound and with a destructive force of twice that of the worst Typhoon ever recorded hitting Japan, the shape of the Urikame river valley acting to contain and focus the blast. The blast wave saw steel panel railway bridges bent and ripped apart with whole panels thrown 100 metres, the metal structures of factory buildings bent as if merely a child's toy, ferro-concrete walls and buildings pounded into dust, the air was sucked out of the chests of any animal in its path which had survived the intial flash of 3000 C plus heat. Then to add insult to injury, as nature abhors a vaccuum, hundred mile an hour winds rushed in to fill in behind the blast wave causing the smouldering remains of buildings to burst into flames up to 5 kilometers away from ground zero, in its turn creating a firestorm which took over 48 hours to bring under control.
These are the bare facts, before even attempting to get your head around the physical and emotional suffering which the people of the Urikame valley, who survived, sustained on that day and for decades after.
I am not going to argue the rights and wrongs of President Truman's decision, there is only what happened. Whether the two bombs saved many millions more Japanese and Allied people than the casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is just conjecture based on the casualty rates of the millitary (on both sides) and civilians during the battles for Okinawa and Iwo Jima. There is only what actually happened.
I mention this on a day where the dirty game being played by Russia and the USA, of war by proxy in Syria, came ever closer to an actual confrontation between the two. A confrontation an unwilling Europe would be potentially sucked into by default as NATO's "An attack against one member, is an attack against all" came into effect and the USA looked to call in its chips.
This is the dangerous game Trump is now playing after last night's attack on a Syrian Air Base by US Cruise missiles. Whether or not Assad's military used chemical weapons and crossed the USA's line in the sand is neither here nor there when you have a US President whose grasp on reality appears extremely shaky at best, whose popularity ratings are plunging faster than Brexit Sterling is devaluing or the UK economy is collapsing and is increasingly looking as if he will face impeachment on a number of serious tax avoidance and other issues.
I have been on active service, I have seen at first hand and what normal, fun loving men with kids, a wife or a partner at home can do to each other when Governments decide to escalate a conflict. At what point in any future conflict does one side or the other decide that maybe a Hiroshima or Nagasaki needs to happen again, to 'save lives'?
Once, I would have had confidence that mutual assured destruction would keep heads 'clear' but with the likes of "willy waving leaders" like Putin and Trump, I do not have this confidence anymore. I fear Israel will trigger a nuclear war in the MIddle East, as another member of the "willy waver" club, Netanyahu, would want to show both Putin and Trump just how tough he is in defence of Israel.
Remember Netanyahu is yet another right wing Head of State, who is under investigation for illegal financial activities which have the potential to destroy his political career and land him in jail. Another right wing Head of State in ever increasing trouble, Ms May of the UK Brexit Empire 2.0, may also see benefit in an escalating Syrian conflict as the Tory general election financial misuse heads for the English courts with the potential to bring down the current UK Government and force a new general election. Though what use the UK's "severely degraded conventional military capability" (according to current Pentagon analysis) would be to the USA, is a moot point.
So while we consider whether Scotland should remain as a region of Englandshire or breathe the air of independence as a nation once more, we need to keep a careful eye on just where Trump and Putin's proxy war in Syria might take us in the future and trust the majority of EU nation states, via NATO, have the courage to tell Trump he is on his own in this "manno a manno" Middle East battle with Putin. NATO pact or no NATO pact, this is not Europe's fight, no matter how hard the UK Establishment media will continue to try and tell us otherwise.
Syria must not be allowed to become the "poor, little" Serbia of the 21st Century.
In the same layer of fused together ceramacised bric-a-braq, nearly a metre thick, there was a belt buckle and tiny white glass spheres collected in a pile which could well have been the remains of a fuse box - with bits of what looked like wire sticking out like some modern work of art. Maybe the pincers and belt buckle are all that was left of the electrician who had been fixing a fuse on the fuse box, we will never know because the only evidence of carbon based materials, whether wood or human, is a thin layer of charcol dust at the bottom of the pile.
Five seconds later the blast compression wave landed from on high and sped off on its five kilometer dash to Nagasaki Harbour at twice the speed of sound and with a destructive force of twice that of the worst Typhoon ever recorded hitting Japan, the shape of the Urikame river valley acting to contain and focus the blast. The blast wave saw steel panel railway bridges bent and ripped apart with whole panels thrown 100 metres, the metal structures of factory buildings bent as if merely a child's toy, ferro-concrete walls and buildings pounded into dust, the air was sucked out of the chests of any animal in its path which had survived the intial flash of 3000 C plus heat. Then to add insult to injury, as nature abhors a vaccuum, hundred mile an hour winds rushed in to fill in behind the blast wave causing the smouldering remains of buildings to burst into flames up to 5 kilometers away from ground zero, in its turn creating a firestorm which took over 48 hours to bring under control.
These are the bare facts, before even attempting to get your head around the physical and emotional suffering which the people of the Urikame valley, who survived, sustained on that day and for decades after.
I am not going to argue the rights and wrongs of President Truman's decision, there is only what happened. Whether the two bombs saved many millions more Japanese and Allied people than the casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is just conjecture based on the casualty rates of the millitary (on both sides) and civilians during the battles for Okinawa and Iwo Jima. There is only what actually happened.
I mention this on a day where the dirty game being played by Russia and the USA, of war by proxy in Syria, came ever closer to an actual confrontation between the two. A confrontation an unwilling Europe would be potentially sucked into by default as NATO's "An attack against one member, is an attack against all" came into effect and the USA looked to call in its chips.
This is the dangerous game Trump is now playing after last night's attack on a Syrian Air Base by US Cruise missiles. Whether or not Assad's military used chemical weapons and crossed the USA's line in the sand is neither here nor there when you have a US President whose grasp on reality appears extremely shaky at best, whose popularity ratings are plunging faster than Brexit Sterling is devaluing or the UK economy is collapsing and is increasingly looking as if he will face impeachment on a number of serious tax avoidance and other issues.
I have been on active service, I have seen at first hand and what normal, fun loving men with kids, a wife or a partner at home can do to each other when Governments decide to escalate a conflict. At what point in any future conflict does one side or the other decide that maybe a Hiroshima or Nagasaki needs to happen again, to 'save lives'?
Once, I would have had confidence that mutual assured destruction would keep heads 'clear' but with the likes of "willy waving leaders" like Putin and Trump, I do not have this confidence anymore. I fear Israel will trigger a nuclear war in the MIddle East, as another member of the "willy waver" club, Netanyahu, would want to show both Putin and Trump just how tough he is in defence of Israel.
Remember Netanyahu is yet another right wing Head of State, who is under investigation for illegal financial activities which have the potential to destroy his political career and land him in jail. Another right wing Head of State in ever increasing trouble, Ms May of the UK Brexit Empire 2.0, may also see benefit in an escalating Syrian conflict as the Tory general election financial misuse heads for the English courts with the potential to bring down the current UK Government and force a new general election. Though what use the UK's "severely degraded conventional military capability" (according to current Pentagon analysis) would be to the USA, is a moot point.
So while we consider whether Scotland should remain as a region of Englandshire or breathe the air of independence as a nation once more, we need to keep a careful eye on just where Trump and Putin's proxy war in Syria might take us in the future and trust the majority of EU nation states, via NATO, have the courage to tell Trump he is on his own in this "manno a manno" Middle East battle with Putin. NATO pact or no NATO pact, this is not Europe's fight, no matter how hard the UK Establishment media will continue to try and tell us otherwise.
Syria must not be allowed to become the "poor, little" Serbia of the 21st Century.
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