RANT: TOMORROW

 

TOMORROW (August 6) is the eightieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing by the United States, the first time a nuclear weapon was used in war. (The bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, was the last time such a weapon was used. So far.) Much has been written about these two Japanese cities, destroyed by America’s atom bombs, because they represent the ultimate of cautionary tales. If we treat nuclear weapons, of whatever size, as somehow ‘useable’ in a conflict, as tactical weapons that can draw a line in the sand to make your opponent stop and reconsider their actions, and if we assume such weapons can be contained on a battlefield and not spread to a broader, even a global, conflagration, then we are kidding ourselves. Escalation is almost guaranteed following a nuclear detonation, particularly if the other side is also a nuclear power. 

 

The BBC recently published an interesting article on a subset of victims of the Hiroshima bombing, namely Koreans living in the city at the time. Of Hiroshima's 420,000 people, 120,000 were Korean (IIUC the population statistics from the article). In addition, of the immediate dead following the detonation, which was some seventy-thousand people, 20% were Korean. 

Korean nationals were in Hiroshima as part of a conscripted work force or else they had come there to escape poverty in their homeland. Note: Korea had been a colony of Imperial Japan for some thirty years prior to WWII and tens of thousands of its citizens were dragooned into supporting Japan's war effort, in its factories and other sectors needing manpower. Following the bombing, the conscripts were given tasks like retrieving and burning the dead. This exposed them, disproportionately, to dangerous levels of radiation.

 

Granted, the dangers of radiation poisoning were not well known at the time, still the Koreans were treated as essentially slave labour before, during, and for a time, after the war. Many of the survivors returned home and many suffered the aftereffects of radiation exposure with higher rates of cancer, heart and kidney disease, etc. According to one survivor, a Mr. Shim:

 

“Koreans were second-class citizens – often given the hardest, dirtiest and most dangerous jobs… In the aftermath of the bomb, this distribution of labour translated into dangerous and often fatal work for Koreans in Hiroshima. Korean workers had to clean up the dead… At first, they used stretchers, but there were too many bodies. Eventually, they used dustpans to gather corpses and burned them in schoolyards. It was mostly Koreans who did this. Most of the post-war clean-up and munitions work was done by us." (BBC)

 

SCORES of returnees, including Mr. Shim, settled in Hapcheon, a small county in South Korea, dubbed “Korea’s Hiroshima” because so many survivors chose to live there. Long term studies of the survivors suggest higher than normal mortality rates when compared to Japanese survivors, and higher rates of disease and genetic disorders affecting their second and third generation descendants. Eighty years on and the peoples of two countries live with life altering effects stemming from the detonation of a single atomic bomb. Imagine the effects today’s nuclear arsenals would have on our cities should they ever be used.

👉Let’s hope that never happens.🙏

 

Cheers, Jake.

   

[The Day After and Threads are a couple of movies that should scare the pants off any viewer. Both depict life in a city following a nuclear attack. Hang on to yer knickers!]