announce an Defence spending as a deep shelter. arrive.
have the benefit of this advice.
HARRY Truman, president, claimed that the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was a military necessity to shorten the Japan and saves lives. reasoning was echoed by the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, prime minister Winston Churchill, and William Rust, editor of the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker. Cynical In reality the bombs were cynical diplomatic blows against the Soviet Union. The Cold War began before the 'hot' one had finished.
From 1941 until the spring of 1945, the United States, Britain, and the USSR had co-existed in an uneasy, temporary necessary alliance.
By April 1945 Hitler's forces were being crushed between the advancing Red Army Allies In the Far Americans controlled seas and the skies.
On 23 April, Admiral Leahy, one of ruman's visors, wrote: 'No® 'narm coula be cone to our wal prospects if Russia should slow down or even stop its war effort in Europe or Asia.' The US Joint Staff planners told their chiefs the following day: 'Early Russian entry into the war against Japan longer necessary to make invasion feasible.' With Germany almost finished and Japan in full retreat, the basis of the alliance with the USSR was beginning to crumble. The Americans were preoccupied about the shape of the post-war world.
in •East Europe the Hiroshima regimes were done for ever. The despised dictators and monarchs had been sent packing. From the JAPAN Baltic in the north to the Adriatic the south, governments were trol.
In West Europe, the working class was demanding Nagasaki change, and in France and Italy large Communist alist Challenge 7 August 1980 Page 6* On Thursday 7 August, 35 years and one day after the first atomic bomb was dropped, the government will increase in Civil of £18m.
However the bulk of that sum will go towards special deep shelters for the administration of central and local government. Working people do not need anything so extravagant The Stationary Office pamphlet Protect and Survive tells us we can survive by white-washing our windows and wrapping our head in a jacket when the nuclear war-heads It's a pity the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not ! These latest proposals really spell out ruling class policy. For the the US Wing of nationalism.
easing war with Truman's words His dutifully War UnIs Potsdam with commenting on".?
Bomb but postponed Truman East the both the military adparticular tugal.
Moreover, 1945.
becoming old they could do.
pro-Russian taking conParties enrich, chance. hands any joyed mass support. Throughout the third world there was a stirrthe millary pressure political pressure mounting, it was -- time to tell the Russians that if they did not cooperate 'they could go to hell' What made the US president so cocky was his knowledge that America was on the brink of producing the atomic bomb. During the late spring and early summer of 1945, the scientists were urged to come up with the goods. The Secretary, Henry Stimson, wrote to Truman about impending • meeting Attlee and Stalin 'the greatest com would ...if the bomb had not yet been "laid Truman replied that he had the . MCCLE until ...15 July to give us more time'.
was far more in terested in impressing the Russians with the Bomb than he was in getting peace with Japan. He already knew that the American State Department had received a Japanese peace feeler • via Por the Americans had intercepted a message saying TERUFUMI Sasaki was a doctor on the staff of Hiroshima's Red Cross Hospital on 6 August This is how American journalist John Hersey reported Sasaki's experience:
•By nightfall 10,000 victims of the explosion had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and he was worn out, moving aimlessly and dully up down the stinking corridors with wadges of bandages and bottles of mercurochrome.
'Other doctors saline solution on the worst burns. That was all 'After dark they worked by the light of the city's fires and by candles that the ten remaining nurses held for them. Dr Sasaki had not been out of the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what happened beyond the windows and the doors.
and for the ministrators, nuclear shelters will be bought or provided for. The mass of the people will be left to take their The cynicism of these proposals is unbelievable, until you remember that they are proposals made by the same ruling class that murdered and maimed some three quarters of a million people in two atomic raids in 1945. Such proposals should not suprise us. What they should do is reinforce our determination to pursue the class war more vigorously, so that we can remove from their power they have to launch a nuclear war.
BOB PENNINGTON recalls the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
that a former Japanese premier was visiting Moscow to explore the chances of peace. Stalin asked Truman at Potsdam whether this merited a reply, but Truman was too determined to teach the Russians a lesson to say 'Yes'.
The atomic. bombs Eisenhower: 'The A-bombings weren't needed.' THE American Newsweek on 11 November 1963 reported the Eisenhower, the former supreme military commander of the Allied dent A-bombings. • voiced to him (Secretary of ings, first on me be or. ings, first peter lig defeated.. • It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing.
dropped on 6 August and 9 August — the latter being the day the USSR entered the war against Japan. American needlessly killed 250,000 people, maiming and mutilating dreds of thousands more. It was their way of telling the Russians in particular and the world in general who was top dog and were putting compresses of Had were magazine Wilhelm 1952-60 about the Error Rodgers message into hunment left leaders. 'Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood and vomit were everywhere. Patients were ayung by une nunareas, nobody to carry away the corpses. Some of the hospital staff distributed biscuits and rice balls, but the charnel house smell was so strong, fen were hungry.
Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest, •Hersey that when he woods a man in uniform asked: anything to drink?' Thinking there was just one soldier Kleinsorge approached with the water 'When he penetrated the bushes he saw there were about 20 men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.... Their mouths were mere swollen, pus covered wounds.
Kleinsorge, a Ger nightmarish state as this. down their cheeks..
Truman is now dead and all his old advisors are either dead or retired. But the same type of ped ple run the American state In Britain they can rely or Thatcher, David Owen and Bil Fact their apologists, just as Truman could rely on Clem Attlee to take the the labour move ment. In 1945 the labour moveit to the right-wing Today too much is at stake in terms of mega-death ever to make that error again:
but there was ; told was going through the 'Have you