[D66] John Pilger: Another Hiroshima is coming

[R.O.]

  ANOTHER HIROSHIMA IS COMING… UNLESS WE STOP IT NOW

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In a major essay to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of 
Hiroshima, John Pilger describes reporting from five 'ground zeros' for 
nuclear weapons - from Hiroshima to Bikini, Nevada to Polynesia and 
Australia. He warns that unless we take action now, China is next.


When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was 
still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at 
ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting 
for a bank to open.


At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her 
silhouette were burned into the granite.


I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the 
river where the survivors still lived in shanties. I met a man called 
Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was 
wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.


He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like 
an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black 
rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my 
flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, 
there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin 
or hair. I was certain I was dead."??Nine years later, I returned to 
look for him and he was dead from leukaemia.


"No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said The New York Times front page 
on 13 September, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. "General 
Farrell," reported William L. Lawrence, "denied categorically that [the 
atomic bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity." Lawrence 
received the Pulitzer Prize.


Only one reporter, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the 
perilous journey to Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic 
bombing, in defiance of the Allied occupation authorities, which 
controlled the "press pack".


"I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the 
London Daily Express of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his 
Baby Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people 
with no visible injuries who were dying from what he called "an atomic 
plague".


For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and 
smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.


The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated 
mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was 
justified by lies that form the bedrock of America's war propaganda in 
the 21st century, casting a new enemy, and target - China.


During the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the 
atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.


"Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States 
Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have 
exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and 
obviate the need for invasion. "Based on a detailed investigation of all 
the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese 
leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have 
surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if 
Russia had not entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion 
had been planned or contemplated."


The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace 
overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 
1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US made 
clear the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including 
"capitulation even if the terms were hard". Nothing was done.


The US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was 
"fearful" that the US Air Force would have Japan so "bombed out" that 
the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". Stimson later 
admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to 
achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb".


Stimson's foreign policy colleagues - looking ahead to the post-war era 
they were then shaping "in our image", as Cold War planner George Kennan 
famously put it - made clear they were eager "to browbeat the Russians 
with the [atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General 
Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic 
bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia 
was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis."


The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced 
his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".


The "experiment" continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and 
1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall 
Islands in the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every 
day for 12 years.


The human and environmental consequences were catastrophic. During the 
filming of my documentary, The Coming War on China, I chartered a small 
aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It was here that the 
United States exploded the world's first Hydrogen Bomb. It remains 
poisoned earth. My shoes registered "unsafe" on my Geiger counter. Palm 
trees stood in unworldly formations. There were no birds.


I trekked through the jungle to the concrete bunker where, at 6.45 on 
the morning of March 1, 1954, the button was pushed. The sun, which had 
risen, rose again and vaporised an entire island in the lagoon, leaving 
a vast black hole, which from the air is a menacing spectacle: a deathly 
void in a place of beauty.


The radioactive fall-out spread quickly and "unexpectedly". The official 
history claims "the wind changed suddenly". It was the first of many 
lies, as declassified documents and the victims' testimony reveal.


Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, 
"They knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the 
day of the shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but 
[people] were not evacuated; I was not evacuated... The United States 
needed some guinea pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do."


Like Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated 
experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project 
4.1, which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment 
on "human beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon".


The Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 - like the survivors of Hiroshima I 
interviewed in the 1960s and 70s - suffered from a range of cancers, 
commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and 
stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed 
horribly.


Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the 
H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap's skies darkened and 
it rained what first appeared to be snowflakes. Food and water were 
contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still 
true today.


I met Nerje Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on 
Rongelap. She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair 
missing. "We were bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded," she 
said. "White dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the 
powder. We used it as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair 
started falling out."


Lemoyo Abon said, "Some of us were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We 
were terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world."


US official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders 
as "amenable savages". In the wake of the explosion, a US Atomic Energy 
Agency official is seen boasting that Rongelap "is by far the most 
contaminated place on earth", adding, "it will be interesting to get a 
measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment."


American scientists, including medical doctors, built distinguished 
careers studying the "human uptake'. There they are in flickering film, 
in their white coats, attentive with their clipboards. When an islander 
died in his teens, his family received a sympathy card from the 
scientist who studied him.


I have reported from five nuclear "ground zeros" throughout the world -- 
in Japan, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Polynesia and Maralinga in 
Australia. Even more than my experience as a war correspondent, this has 
taught me about the ruthlessness and immorality of great power: that is, 
imperial power, whose cynicism is the true enemy of humanity.


This struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at 
Maralinga in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk 
on which was inscribed: "A British atomic weapon was test exploded here 
on 9 October 1957". On the rim of the crater was this sign:


*WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD*

/Radiation levels for a few hundred metres around this point may be 
above those considered safe for permanent occupation./


For as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. 
Raw plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so 
dangerous to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 per cent 
chance of cancer.


The only people who might have seen the sign were Indigenous 
Australians, for whom there was no warning. According to an official 
account, if they were lucky "they were shooed off like rabbits".


Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off 
like rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of 
anti-Chinese rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of 
anti-Russia rhetoric. Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan 
.... Huawei. How confusing it is when "our" most reviled leader says so.


The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack 
Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of 
US naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. 
Suddenly, China was a "threat". This was nonsense, of course. What was 
threatened was America's unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the 
richest, the most successful, the most "indispensable" nation.


What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully - with more than 30 
members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind 
and a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, 
their governments overthrown, their elections interfered with, their 
resources plundered.


Obama's declaration became known as the "pivot to Asia". One of its 
principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as 
WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean "the American Sea".


Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of 
marketing."I state clearly and with conviction," said the new president 
in 2009, "that America's commitment is to seek the peace and security of 
a world without nuclear weapons."


Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president 
since the end of the Cold War. A "usable" nuclear weapon was developed. 
Known as the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James 
Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that "going 
smaller [makes its use] more thinkable".


The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost 
encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. 
 From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and 
Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as 
one US strategist told me, "the perfect noose".


A study by the RAND Corporation - which, since Vietnam, has planned 
America's wars - is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the 
Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the infamous 
catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn - "thinking the 
unthinkable". Kahn's book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a 
"winnable" nuclear war.


Kahn's apocalyptic view is shared by Trump's Secretary of State Mike 
Pompeo, an evangelical fanatic who believes in the "rapture of the End". 
He is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. "I was CIA director," he 
boasted, "We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire 
training courses." Pompeo's obsession is China.


The endgame of Pompeo's extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the 
Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are 
standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the 
sub-text of this propaganda. Classified "yellow" even though they were 
white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an 
"exclusion act" from entering the United States, because they were 
Chinese. Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, 
"sneaky", depraved, diseased, immoral.


An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of 
the "yellow peril" as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the 
whites-only colony by the force of gravity.


As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China's modernism, 
its secular morality and "contributions to liberal thought threatened 
European face, so it became necessary to suppress China's role in the 
Enlightenment debate .... For centuries, China's threat to the myth of 
Western superiority has made it an easy target for race-baiting."


In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher 
described those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as "rats, 
flies, mosquitoes and sparrows". Hartcher, who favourably quotes the 
American demagogue Steve Bannon, likes to interpret the "dreams" of the 
current Chinese elite, to which he is apparently privy. These are 
inspired by yearnings for the "Mandate of Heaven" of 2,000 years ago. Ad 
nausea.


To combat this "mandate", the Australian government of Scott Morrison 
has committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major 
trading partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of 
American missiles that can be fired at China.


The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by 
violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have 
formed a vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a 
delivery rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused 
in a supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist 
attacks on Asian-Australians.


"We are not your enemy," a high-ranking strategist in China told me, 
"but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay." 
China's arsenal is small compared with America's, but it is growing 
fast, especially the development of maritime missiles designed to 
destroy fleets of ships.


"For the first time," wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned 
Scientists, "China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high 
alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack... 
This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy..."


In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of 
international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a 
"blinding attack on China" was planned, "with strikes that could be 
mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take 
out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible 
use-it-or-lose-it dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war."


In 2019, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the 
Cold War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range 
bombers rehearsed an "Air-Sea Battle Concept for China" - ASB - blocking 
sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China's access to 
oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.


It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and 
Road Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build 
strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.


In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, 
typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has 
the ironic title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, 
brutal Cultural Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the US and 
Europe. "Many Americans imagine," she said, "that Chinese people live a 
miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the 
yellow peril has never left them... They have no idea there are some 500 
million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it's 600 
million."


Modern China's epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the 
pride and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American 
pollsters such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the 
West. This alone is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western 
journalism and the abandonment of honest reporting.


China's repressive dark side and what we like to call its 
"authoritarianism" are the facade we are allowed to see almost 
exclusively. It is as if we are fed unending tales of the evil 
super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time we asked why: before it is 
too late to stop the next Hiroshima.

/Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger/


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