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dwight d eisenhower
Hiroshima Survivors Warn Against Nuclear War 79 Years After US Bombing
"The world needs to stop nuclear war from ever happening again," said one hibakusha. "But when I turn on the news, I see politicians talk about deploying more weapons, more tanks. How could they?"
Aug 06, 2024
As the number of people who survived the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rapidly dwindles 79 years after the attacks, hibakusha—the Japanese word for the survivors—and others are imploring humanity to do everything possible to avert another nuclear war.
"People still don't get it. The atomic bomb isn't a simple weapon. I speak as someone who suffers until this day: The world needs to stop nuclear war from ever happening again," Shigeaki Mori, who was an 8-year-old boy on his way to school on the morning of August 6, 1945,
toldThe New York Times. "But when I turn on the news, I see politicians talk about deploying more weapons, more tanks. How could they? I wish for the day they stop that."
Keiko Aguro was also 8 years old and standing on a road near her home in Hiroshima when a U.S. B-29 Superfortress dropped one bomb over Hiroshima that exploded with the force of 16 kilotons of TNT. The explosion destroyed nearly everything and everyone within about a 1-mile (1.62 km) radius. As many as 90,000 people died from the heat, blast wave, and ensuing inferno. Tens of thousands of others were injured, many of them mortally. Tens of thousands more would perish from radiation over the following weeks, months, and years.
"As survivors, we cannot do anything but tell our story," Aguro said. "'For we shall not repeat the evil'—this is the pledge of survivors. Until we die, we want to tell our story, because it's difficult to imagine."
"Now what survivors worry about is to die and meet our family in heaven," Aguro added. "I heard many survivors say, 'What shall I do? On this planet there are still many many nuclear weapons, and then I'll meet my daughter I couldn't save. I'll be asked: Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?' There is no answer I can tell them."
Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was obliterated in a 20-kiloton air burst that killed as many as 75,000 people that day, with a similar number of people wounded and tens of thousands more dying later from radiation.
The authors of the Times piece—Kathleen Kingsbury, W.J. Hennigan, and Spencer Cohen—wrote that "as another anniversary of August 6 passes, it is necessary for Americans—and the globe, really—to listen to the stories of the few human beings who can still speak to the horror nuclear weapons can inflict before this approach is taken again."
However, they note that "countries like the United States, China, and Russia are spending trillions of dollars to modernize their stockpiles," while "many of the safeguards that once lowered nuclear risk are unraveling and the diplomacy needed to restore them is not happening."
"The threat of another blast can't be relegated to history," the trio wrote. But they added that nearly eight decades later, many Americans still hail the bombings as "necessary and heroic acts that brought the war to an end."
But the prevailing U.S. historical narrative—which portrays the bombings as critical to ending the war—ignores the lack of consensus and grave misgivings among senior military commanders about dropping the bombs. Seven of the eight five-star generals and admirals at the time opposed its use. One of them, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said as president that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work on the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—marked this year's ignominious anniversary with a report focusing on how children are affected by nuclear war and the threat thereof.
The report contains graphic descriptions of the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and of nuclear weapons testing on children around the world. It also explains how fear of thermonuclear annihilation affected children during the Cold War and how humanity can protect children by disarming.
"Today, several thousand nuclear weapons still exist in the arsenals of nine countries, posing a unique existential threat to people everywhere, especially children. Many have vastly greater explosive yields than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the ICAN report states.
"To protect humanity from the catastrophic harm that nuclear weapons are designed to inflict, governments must act with urgency to eliminate them completely—the only guarantee against their further use and testing," the publication continues. "This would be a great service to the current generation of children and to all future generations, who would grow up free from the threat of nuclear war."
"The alternative is to pass on to them a world still teetering on the brink of catastrophe," ICAN added. "Or, quite unthinkable, a world reeling from the horrors of another nuclear attack, perhaps with a death toll orders of magnitude greater than that of the atomic bombings of 1945."
Echoing ICAN, Hiroshima Gov. Hidehiko Yuzaki said during the annual commemoration of the bombing at Hiroshima Peace Park that "as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will surely be used again someday."
"Nuclear weapons abolition is not an ideal to achieve far in the future," Yuzaki stressed. "Instead, it is a pressing and real issue that we should desperately engage in at this moment since nuclear problems involve an imminent risk to human survival."
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Why Joe Biden Is a Foreign Policy Failure
Only an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine; alas, Biden doesn’t even try.
Jan 15, 2024
When it comes to foreign policy, the president of the United States has two essential roles. The first is to rein in the military-industrial complex, or MIC, which is always pushing for war. The second is to rein in U.S. allies that expect the U.S. to go to war on their behalf. A few savvy presidents succeed, but most fail. Joe Biden is certainly a failure.
One of the savviest presidents was Dwight Eisenhower. In late 1956, he confronted two simultaneous crises. The first was a disastrously misguided war launched by the United Kingdom, France, and Israel to overthrow the Egyptian government and retake control of the Suez Canal following its nationalization by Egypt. Eisenhower forced the allies to stop their brazen and illegal attack, including through a U.S.-sponsored United Nations General Assembly resolution. The second crisis was the Hungarian Uprising against Soviet domination of Hungary. While Eisenhower sympathized with the uprising, he wisely kept the U.S. out of Hungary and thereby avoided a dangerous military showdown with the Soviet Union.
Eisenhower’s historic farewell address to the American people in January 1961 alerted the public to the growing power of the MIC:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Even Eisenhower did not fully rein in the military-industrial complex, especially the Central Intelligence Agency. No president has done so entirely. The CIA was created in 1947 with two distinct roles. The first and valid one was as an intelligence agency. The second and disastrous one was as a covert army for the president. In the latter capacity, the CIA has led one calamitous failure after another from Eisenhower’s time till now, including coups, assassinations, and stage-managed “color revolutions,” all of which have produced endless havoc and destruction.
Following Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy brilliantly resolved the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, narrowly avoiding nuclear Armageddon by facing down his own war-mongering advisers to reach a peaceful solution with the Soviet Union. The following year he successfully negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, over Pentagon objections, and then won Senate ratification, thereby pulling the U.S. and Soviet Union back from the brink of war. Many believe that Kennedy’s peace initiatives led to his assassination at the hands of rogue CIA officials. Biden has joined the long line of presidents that have kept classified or redacted thousands of documents that would shed more light on the assassination.
Sixty years onward, the MIC has an iron grip on American foreign policy. As I’ve recently described, foreign policy has become an insider racket, with the MIC in control of the White House, Pentagon, State Department, the Armed Services Committees of the Congress, and of course the CIA, all in a tight embrace with the major arms contractors. Only an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine.
Alas, Biden doesn’t even try. Throughout his long political career, Biden has been supported by the MIC and has in turn enthusiastically supported wars of choice, massive arms sales, CIA-backed coups, and NATO enlargement.
America foreign policy is rudderless, with a president whose only foreign policy recipe is war.
Biden’s 2024 military budget breaks all records, reaching at least $1.5 trillion in outlays for the Pentagon, CIA, homeland security, non-Pentagon nuclear arms programs, subsidized foreign weapons sales, other military-linked outlays, and interest payments on past war-related debts. On top of this mountain of military spending, Biden is seeking an additional $50 billion in “emergency supplemental funding” for America’s “defense industrial base” to keep shipping munitions to Ukraine and Israel.
Biden doesn’t have any realistic plans for Ukraine, and even rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022 that would have ended the conflict based on Ukrainian neutrality by ending Ukraine’s futile bid to join NATO (futile because Russia will never accept it). Ukraine is big business for the MIC—tens and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of arms contracts, manufacturing facilities across the U.S,, the opportunity to develop and test new weapons systems—so Biden keeps the war going despite the destruction of Ukraine on the battlefield, and the tragic and needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. The MIC, and hence Biden, continue to shun negotiations, even though direct U.S.-Russia negotiations regarding NATO and other security issues (such as U.S. missile placements in Eastern Europe) could end the war.
In Israel, Biden’s failure is even more on display. Israel is led by an extremist government that reviles the two-state solution, according to which Israelis and Palestinians should live side by side in two sovereign peaceful and secure states, or indeed any solution that grants Palestinians their political rights. The two-state solution is deeply embedded in international law, including U.N. Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and supposedly in U.S. foreign policy. The Arab and Islamic leaders are committed to normalizing and securing safe relations with Israel in the context of the two-state solution.
Yet Israel is led by violent zealots who make the messianic claim that God has given Israel all the land of today’s Palestine, including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. These zealots therefore insist on political domination over the millions of Palestinians in their midst, or their annihilation or expulsion. Netanyahu and his colleagues don’t even hide their genocidal intentions, though most foreign observers don’t fully understand the biblical references that the Israeli leaders invoke to justify their ongoing mass slaughter of the Palestinian people.
Israel now faces highly credible charges of genocide in the International Court of Justice in a case brought by South Africa. The documentary record presented by South Africa and others is as clear as it is chilling. Israeli politics is not the politics of pragmatism and certainly not the politics of peace. It is the politics of biblical apocalypse.
Biden nonetheless provides Israel with the munitions to carry out its massive war crimes. Instead of acting like Eisenhower and pressing Israel to end its slaughter in contravention of international law including the Genocide Convention, Biden continues to ship munitions, even bypassing congressional review to the maximum extent he can. The result is U.S. diplomatic isolation from the rest of the world, and the growing involvement of the U.S. military in a war that is rapidly and all-too-predictably expanding across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. In the recent U.N. General Assembly vote backing political self-determination for the people of Palestine, the U.S. and Israel stood alone save two votes: Micronesia (bound by compact to vote with the U.S.) and Nauru (population 12,000).
America foreign policy is rudderless, with a president whose only foreign policy recipe is war. With the U.S. already up to its neck in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Biden also intends to ship more arms to Taiwan despite China’s strident objections that the U.S. is thereby violating long-standing U.S. commitments to the One-China policy, including the commitment made 42 years ago in the U.S.-PRC Joint Communique that the U.S. government “does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan.” Eisenhower’s dire prophecy has been confirmed. The military-industrial complex threatens our liberty, our democracy, and our very survival.
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It’s the 70th Anniversary of the US’ ‘Original Sin’ In Iran
Since the CIA-backed coup in 1953, both nations have a long list of nefarious things that the other side has done to them; some may be more legitimate than others.
Aug 19, 2023
The history of U.S.-Iranian relations dates to the time when the once mighty Persian Empire, thanks to the Great Game played by Russia and Great Britain, was anything but mighty.
The “Yengi Donya” or new world, as the Persians called the United States, was an emerging global power with no colonial aspirations in Persia. Iranians admired America for its ideals of liberalism, democracy, and individual freedom. For Iranians, the U.S. was the land of Howard Baskerville, the martyr of their 1906 Constitutional Revolution, and Morgan Shuster, the young financier who tried against all odds to help Iran stand on its feet against British and Russian colonialism. That history is long forgotten, however.
The romantic relationship that once existed between the two countries came to an abrupt end when Washington played a critical role in toppling the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 19, 1953.
Unbeknownst to Iranians, Eisenhower had personally approved “Operation Ajax,” which we know now was assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, to remove Mosaddegh. The U.S. had committed its “original sin” in Iran.
In the runup to the coup, Washington cut off its financial assistance to Iran, which, due to a British-sponsored boycott of Iranian oil, was facing a severe financial crisis. Indeed, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in response to Mosaddegh’s pleas for an emergency loan, had asserted that “it would not be fair to the American taxpayers… to extend any considerable amount of economic aid to Iran.” After the coup, Eisenhower approved an emergency loan in the amount of $45 million to help the new Iranian government.
But unbeknownst to Iranians, Eisenhower had personally approved “Operation Ajax,” which we know now was assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, to remove Mosaddegh. The U.S. had committed its “original sin” in Iran.
This episode marked the transformation of the U.S. image from a benevolent power sympathetic to Iranian aspirations to one similar to that of the British and Russians. To many Americans, however, the significance of the coup remains unknown.
Indeed, in the middle of the 1979-80 U.S. embassy hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter called Mossadegh’s ouster “ancient history” and “something that happened 30 years ago.” But, for many Iranians, the episode’s trauma remains a living memory. Iranian students who stormed the embassy in November 1979, including Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, believed that Washington was “plotting” another coup in Iran by giving refuge to the ailing, exiled Shah. But, with the embassy seizure and subsequent hostage crisis, Iran, too, had committed its “original sin.”
These two episodes have left a deep wound in the relationship between the two countries. As the veteran American diplomat John Limbert observes, “The hostage crisis still casts its long shadow over how America and Americans view Iran. The event lurks behind some American analysts’… descriptions [of Iran] as rogue state, axis of evil…” Indeed, other than sporadic and tactical cooperation on issues of mutual interest, Iran and America have failed to overcome the ghosts of their history.
Obama’s presidency offered an exceptional opportunity to overcome the past decades of squandered opportunities. Except for the breakthrough on the nuclear issue, however, he was faced with Ayatollah Khamenei’s “clenched fist.” Trump’s renunciation of Washington’s commitments under the JCPOA only exacerbated Khamenei’s deeply held suspicions of the U.S.
It Is Time to Move On
Recently, Iran’s former foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, who had advised Khamenei to accept secret talks with the U.S. over the nuclear issue, urged the leadership to hold more comprehensive talks with Washington on the broadest possible range of issues.
“Because of our tensions with the west, especially with the U.S., they pressure us at every opportunity… It is time to sit and talk with the U.S…. maybe we call it political negotiations,” he observed. Salehi, who also served as chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, warned that so long as Iran was at loggerheads with the U.S. it cannot sustain healthy relations with any country, even including its most powerful partners, China and Russia.
Iran’s nuclear program has long been a source of tension between the two countries. The dispute actually dates back to the Shah’s time when Tehran and Washington fought over Iran’s rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the U.S. categorically rejected the existing nuclear program in Iran and pressured other countries not to cooperate with Tehran to reconstitute it.
A negotiating framework that addresses mutual interests and concerns, such as the security of the Persian Gulf, is not only desirable and long overdue; it’s necessary.
Realizing that Iran would never agree to halt all uranium enrichment, President Barack Obama accepted a limited but strongly verified program, which led to the signing of JCPOA (which included the four other members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) in 2015. However, Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA unshackled Tehran’s nuclear program from the limits established by the 2015 accord.
While President Joe Biden promised to return to the agreement during his presidential campaign in 2020, the two sides have failed to come to a formal understanding in the two-and-a-half years that followed his inauguration. The Biden administration has thus been pursuing its own “maximum pressure” campaign although its rhetoric has been considerably more diplomatic than the Trump administration’s.
Dismantling Iran’s nuclear program might be an ideal outcome for the U.S., but it is very unlikely that any ruling regime would accept it. Thus, the only viable solution for the U.S. is an agreement that verifiably keeps Iran’s nuclear program checked. For now, the prisoner swap and Iran’s dilution of its 60% enriched-uranium stockpile is a positive step toward deescalation.
Another source of tension between Iran and the U.S. is Iran’s regional ambitions, especially its activities in the Persian Gulf. Washington sees Iran’s harassment of foreign-flagged oil tankers as a threat to international maritime security and the free flow of oil. For the Islamic Republic, as it was for the Shah, the security of the Persian Gulf is indispensable to Iran’s security. When Washington, in violation of international law, confiscated Iranian oil shipments, Iranians responded by seizing and harassing foreign-flagged tankers in the Persian Gulf.
Most recently, the U.S. has escalated by dispatching 3,000 troops to the region with the aim of deterring Iran.
However, the U.S. already has a substantial military presence in the region that is fully capable of deterring Iran. Dispatching more troops will only increase Iran’s insecurities in its immediate periphery. Accidents and miscalculation could drag both sides into an unwanted direct conflict at a time when Washington is more focused on the Ukrainian war and tensions with China over Taiwan and the larger Indo-Pacific region.
Because of its size, population, and strategic location, Iran is one of the pillars of security and stability in the region and cannot be excluded from regional calculations or be expected to capitulate to U.S. ultimatums. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2018 list of 12 demands on Iran totally failed to address any of Iran’s legitimate concerns. This is why the “maximum pressure” policy pursued by Trump, who insisted rhetorically that he would talk to the Iranians without preconditions, failed miserably.
A negotiating framework that addresses mutual interests and concerns, such as the security of the Persian Gulf, is not only desirable and long overdue; it’s necessary.
Iran and the U.S. both have a long list of nefarious things that the other side has done to them; some may be more legitimate than others. But, in the words of former President Ronald Reagan, “between American and Iranian basic national interests there need be no permanent conflict.” It is time for Iran and the U.S. to talk based on recognition of the other party’s core interests and mutual respect.
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