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Man, I come home and find a new set of ballz on my screen!

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IAS - Where Space Is Golden!

Man, I come home and find a new set of ballz on my screen!

I'm like Frankenstein, Captain Avatar keeps making parts for me :)
[Edit] If he could just find me a brain now!

I don't know about that, all brains and no ballz? That just woudn't be right.
But I did laugh my ass off when I saw it!

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IAS - Where Space Is Golden!

Man, I come home and find a new set of ballz on my screen!

I'm like Frankenstein, Captain Avatar keeps making parts for me :)
[Edit] If he could just find me a brain now!

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As for the subject of the thread, in 1984, my high school Asian Studies teacher, who was in the USAAF during WWII and the beginning of the occupation (WAAF I think the term is. Can't remember exactly), described the devastated landscape of Hiroshima to us from firsthand account.

Years later, she visited a museum (either there or in Nagasaki, I can't remember) and described a statue made from Japanese equivalent of pennies sent by children from all over Japan for the memorial. It was in the shape of a child raising hands to the heavens. ([EDIT] It isn't the similar statue that was dedicated in the 1990s. I've been searching for a link to one she described in 1984[/EDIT])

She was tough as nails as a teacher, and it's the only time I ever saw her break down and have to take a moment to compose herself.

Many people tend to make light of the subject. I guess it's easy to be cavalier about it when you don't have to see it firsthand.

Sorry Neo, didn't mean to start something else on your topic, but it was the first one I clicked on when I got home. It made me laugh when I saw Cr's Avatar and after work I needed it. Tell me the reason for your picture and why you made the thread?

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IAS - Where Space Is Golden!

Years later, she visited a museum (either there or in Nagasaki, I can't remember) and described a statue made from Japanese equivalent of pennies sent by children from all over Japan for the memorial. It was in the shape of a child raising hands to the heavens. ([EDIT] It isn't the similar statue that was dedicated in the 1990s. I've been searching for a link to one she described in 1984[/EDIT])

The Story Of Sadako



Sadako was in her first year of life when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. She was two kilometers away from where the bomb exploded. Most of Sadako's neighbors died, but Sadako wasn't injured at all, at least not in any way people could see. Right after the war there wasn't enough food and medicine to go around, making it difficult to stay alive. Fortunately several other countries sent food and money to help Japan get back on its feet.

Up until the time Sadako was in the seventh grade (1955) she was a normal, happy twelve year old girl. However, one day after an important relay race that she helped her team win, she felt extremely tired and dizzy. After a while the dizziness went away leaving Sadako to think that it was only the exertion from running the race that made her tired and dizzy. But her tranquillity did not last. Soon after her first encounter with extreme fatigue and dizziness, she experienced more incidents of the same.

One day Sadako became so dizzy that she fell down and couldn’t get up. All of her school-mates noticed and informed her teacher. Later Sadako’s parents took her to the Red Cross Hospital to see what was wrong with her. Sadako found out that she had leukemia, a kind of blood cancer. Nobody could believe it.

At that time they called leukemia the “A-bomb disease”. Almost everyone who got this disease died, and Sadako was very scared. She wanted to go back to school, but she had to stay in the hospital where she cried and cried.

Shortly thereafter, her best friend, Chizuko, came to visit her. Chizuko brought some origami (folding paper). She told Sadako of a legend. She explained that the crane, a sacred bird in Japan, lives for a hundred years, and if a sick person folds 1,000 paper cranes, then that person would soon get well. After hearing the legend, Sadako decided to fold 1,000 cranes in the hope that she would get well again.

Sadako's family worried about her a lot. They often came to visit her in hospital to talk to her and to help her fold cranes. After she folded 500 cranes she felt better and the doctors said she could go home for a short time, but by the end of the first week back home the dizziness and fatigue returned and she had to go back to the hospital.

Sadako kept folding cranes even though she was in great pain. Even during these times of great pain she tried to be cheerful and hopeful. Not long afterwards, with her family standing by her bed, Sadako went to sleep peacefully, never to wake up again. She had folded a total of 644 paper cranes.

Every one was very sad. Thirty-nine of Sadako's classmates felt saddened by the loss of their close friend and decided to form a paper crane club to honor her. Word spread quickly. Students from 3,100 schools and from 9 foreign countries gave money to the cause. On May 5, 1958, almost 3 years after Sadako died, enough money was collected to build a monument in her honor. It is now known as the Children's Peace Monument, and is located in the center of Hiroshima Peace Park, close to the spot where the atomic bomb was dropped.

Children from all over the world still send folded paper cranes to be placed beneath Sadako’s statue on August 6 - Peace Day. And in so doing, they make the same wish which is engraved on the base of the statue:

THIS IS OUR CRY AND OUR PRAYER,

IN BUILDING PEACE IN THIS WORLD.



Click the pic

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

Poor Sadako-chan... I'll have her in my prayers, along with the victims of the A-bombs, along with the victims of war...

"War makes no one great" - Yoda

Perhaps USA could have thrown both bombs into the ocean right next to Tokyo or Osaka (in the ocean)... Perhaps that would still have inspired so much fear and terror to end WWII... But only god knows...
Anyway, that's my opinion...

I hope with all my heart that no nuke's are ever used again. Ever.

Are you serious?

Are you for real?

Nope. I have read about the info before, but I'm sure that many others have not. Hell, most of the people (age range 20-25) I get stuck working with wouldn't know a thing about events like this, that just shows you how good are schools are.

Just trying to get the thread back on track, after I started it wrong and to see neo's viewpoint.

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IAS - Where Space Is Golden!

sadly the world faces more danger from the dreaded atomic bomb than ever before...for 60 years the horror of the destruction and carnage produced by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been enough to prevent them from being used again...but now other forces are at work in the world...people who crave the destruction and terror that the use of atomic bomb could create...there is no depth they would not go to make whatever point it is that they are trying to make...and eventually they will acquire what they so fervently desire...and not even taking terrorists into consideration...with more countries than ever claiming nuclear capability...it is harder than ever to know for certain that a madman's itchy fingers will not gain of seat of power that will give them control of this terrible weapon...the genie is out of the bottle...and we must hope that a large region of the world does not have to be destroyed...in order to teach a new generation by graphic example...why we must never use this weapon again...right now though...we are vulnerable to the whims and wishes of terrorists...who's hunger for destruction and attention seems to know no bounds...so we must hope...hope for some future sanity...from these present day...hate driven fools...and the fools who follow them.

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PROUD TO BE TFFE!

Are you serious?

Are you for real?

Nope. I have read about the info before, but I'm sure that many others have not. Hell, most of the people (age range 20-25) I get stuck working with wouldn't know a thing about events like this, that just shows you how good are schools are.

Just trying to get the thread back on track, after I started it wrong and to see neo's viewpoint.

There wasn't anything in the news about it here until today. Here the media will force feed you over and over the dates we were attacked (12/7, 9/11) but you hardly ever here the dates that we did the attacking.

I know the usual justification: the enormous casualties incurred in the Okinawan invasion foreshadowed even greater US casualties in any invasion of the home islands.

I've often wondered how an extended blockade (since their navy, air forces, and industry were smashed) and slowly starving them out would have worked, and how history would have viewed that.

I've read there was a second urgency. The Soviets were done in Europe, moving troops east. Eventually they would invade Manchuria (Aug 8, two days after Hiroshima) and the northern islands. The bombs were a windfall for the US: they would likely shock Japan into surrendering immediately and unconditionally, giving the Soviets little excuse for invasion.

According to the book "Superfortress", by the time the bombs were dropped, they accounted for "2% of the total land area devastated by aerial bombing" on mainland Japan. This was a time before targeting computers and GPS guidance, when to get a single factory or train depot nations routinely carpet-bombed entire suburbs.

We know now that nuclear weapons have a more lasting and horrific impact through radioactive effects than an equivalent amount of explosive or incendiary devices. They didn't know that back then. Literally, nobody knew.

To me, considering the attitudes of all nations at the time, use of atomic weapons was an historic inevitability at least once, if not in 1945 in Japan, then it would have been a short time later in Europe, by one side or the other, or in Korea or China when China entered the Korean War. As it actually was, there were still many people all over America who advocated their use by US forces in Korea. In that respect, the world is probably better off that two were used when only two existed. Not a justification for the decision, just something to be thankful for in retrospect.

Still, I think we have too much tendency to try to judge, to second-guess, the huge decisions others have had to make using our modern sensibilities and hindsight. The U.S., despite being directly in the war less than four years, was war-weary, and much of the rest of the world far moreso. Neither side was very concerned about civilian casualties (look up Japan's occupation record in China, which rivals the most hideous policies of the Nazis). When you're in a war, it's hard to justify incurring casualties on your side to avoid casualties on the other side. It's easy to examine documents after the fact and say "coulda-woulda-shoulda-done", but who knew THEN if there was even a signifcant faction advocating surrender? The U.S. government didn't know what the Japanese government was thinking at the time, just the crafted messages it was sending and the tenacity Japanese forces were still showing. I don't think anyone today can realistically judge whether Truman made a "good" or "bad" decision, knowing what he did and did not know and the pressures on him to act.

Hiroshima was a tragedy. Nagasaki was an even bigger tragedy (there's some discussion about whether the decision to drop on Nagasaki was based on a misinterpretation by the US of a single admittedly ambiguous word in a broadcast from the Japanese government). Both were wrapped in a larger tragedy that was World War II.

In the end I don't believe the bombs themselves are the ultimate tragedy. The ultimate tragedy lies in unrestricted industrialized warfare coupled to nationalistic fervor and lack of understanding or compassion everywhere, by all nations, lessons the entire world failed to realize, or just didn't see any way to solve, after World War I and hence brought to hideous consequence by the more powerful machines of World War II.

Here's an interesting aside: I vaguely remember reading something many many years ago saying scientists had theorized about nuclear fusion of hydrogen way back during the time of the development of the fission bomb, but they didn't know under what conditions it occurred other than high temperatures. Apparently some physicists were worried just a little that the atomic bombs could, given sufficient available hydrogen, start an uncontrolled fusion reaction in the environment. The first bomb was tested in a desert. No data available; hydrogen is very tenuous in the atmosphere. However the one dropped on August 9 was on Nagasaki, a port city, a secondary target, and with much dihydrogen monoxide available. Chew on THAT a while...

Here's an interesting page: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It wasn't a prom hall.

It was the Chambers of Commerce.

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It wasn't a prom hall.

It was the Chambers of Commerce.

I realized that after I followed the link that Murasaki posted.
All I had to go by at the time was the pic that NA posted, the picture
properties says it's a prom hall, Go figure :/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Hiroshima-pref-prom-hall-04.jpg

Yes, shame on them!

If you followed my link about Sadako, you would have seen on the same page the story about the dome:



4. A-bomb Dome

At the beginning of the Hiroshima area economically, Hiroshima responded to the need for a central facility through which to expand trade routes. Plans were drawn up for a commercial exhibition hall on the banks of the Motoyasu River. Construction was completed in April 1915, and the new building was named the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition HMI. It was formally opened to the public in August that year. In 1921 the name was changed to the Hiroshima Prefectural Products Exhibition Hal], and again in 1933 to the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. During the war, as Japan's economic fortunes worsened, the hall was commandeered for such governmental, quasi-governmental and rationing offices as the Chugoku-Shikoku Public Works Office, the Hiroshima District Lumber Control Corporation and others.

Standing a mere 160 meters northwest of the hypocenter, the building was heavily damaged by the blast, then burned from the ceiling down by fires ignited instantly by the heat rays. All occupants of the building perished. Because the force of the blast came from almost directly above, however, the section of the building under the central dome remained standing. The skeletal structure of the dome looming high above the ruins was a conspicuous landmark and became known locally as the A-bomb Dome.

The A-bomb Dome must be passed on to future generations as a symbol of peace and as a witness that conveys the story of the horror and tragedy of nuclear weapons.

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

And please don't call NeoAmsterdam for Neo, he hates it!

O.k., now that I know I won't.

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IAS - Where Space Is Golden!

I know the usual justification: the enormous casualties incurred in the Okinawan invasion foreshadowed even greater US casualties in any invasion of the home islands.

I've often wondered how an extended blockade (since their navy, air forces, and industry were smashed) and slowly starving them out would have worked, and how history would have viewed that.

we might have stopped the japanese without using the atomic bomb...but we could never stop the atomic bomb...sooner or later...someone was going to use one...since WWII ended...the atomic bomb has never been used again as a weapon of mass destruction...but it had to be used at least once...before humanity could understand what a terrible weapon it was...would it have been of greater benefit if the first bomb dropped had been a few years later...when they were much more powerful?...

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PROUD TO BE TFFE!

Luckily it ended with the Tsar Bomb. Once the Russians had that one exploded above Nova Zembla, the Americans quit building their bigger bombs...

Yield was 100 Megatons, but because they wanted their air-crew to survive, they put it between 50 and 57 megatons. It was told in the news as 100 megatons!

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It's hard for us now, 60 years later, to condemn the actions of the world's leaders then: the decision to drop the bomb; the decision to start the war; the decision to declare a committment to defend the homeland to the death (a phrase that was shown not to be mere rhetoric Okinawa); the various alternatives not taken by both sides. I too hope that the bomb will "never again" be used, but what we understand now, in political, scientific and ethical terms is wholly different from those considerations in 1945, while at the same time those considerations are today all affected by the actions of world leaders before and since 1945.

It wasn't a prom hall.

It was the Chambers of Commerce.

I realized that after I followed the link that Murasaki posted.
All I had to go by at the time was the pic that NA posted, the picture
properties says it's a prom hall, Go figure :/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Hiroshima-pref-prom-hall-04.jpg

Yes, shame on them!

If you followed my link about Sadako, you would have seen on the same page the story about the dome:



4. A-bomb Dome

At the beginning of the Hiroshima area economically, Hiroshima responded to the need for a central facility through which to expand trade routes. Plans were drawn up for a commercial exhibition hall on the banks of the Motoyasu River. Construction was completed in April 1915, and the new building was named the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition HMI. It was formally opened to the public in August that year. In 1921 the name was changed to the Hiroshima Prefectural Products Exhibition Hal], and again in 1933 to the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. During the war, as Japan's economic fortunes worsened, the hall was commandeered for such governmental, quasi-governmental and rationing offices as the Chugoku-Shikoku Public Works Office, the Hiroshima District Lumber Control Corporation and others.

Standing a mere 160 meters northwest of the hypocenter, the building was heavily damaged by the blast, then burned from the ceiling down by fires ignited instantly by the heat rays. All occupants of the building perished. Because the force of the blast came from almost directly above, however, the section of the building under the central dome remained standing. The skeletal structure of the dome looming high above the ruins was a conspicuous landmark and became known locally as the A-bomb Dome.

The A-bomb Dome must be passed on to future generations as a symbol of peace and as a witness that conveys the story of the horror and tragedy of nuclear weapons.

to try to clear something up...i'm sure that the term "prom hall" was used as an abbreviation of "Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall"...i don't think the term "prom" was meant to have the same meaning as it would in western cultures...to those who read it as that sort of "prom" it might seem to trivialize what it really was...but i think it's a case where an abbreviation has been taken out of context.

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PROUD TO BE TFFE!

Luckily it ended with the Tsar Bomb. Once the Russians had that one exploded above Nova Zembla, the Americans quit building their bigger bombs...

Yield was 100 Megatons, but because they wanted their air-crew to survive, they put it between 50 and 57 megatons. It was told in the news as 100 megatons!

In truth, the "city killers" were largely unpopular simply because of inefficiency. Think of the geometry of an explosion: I can either have one volume of hot air that describes a certain radius of destruction on the ground, or I can have maybe six smaller spheres that describe the same volume of hot gas, but, all added up, cover a lot more area.

Two examples of this are the MIRV and the cluster-bomb. The Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicle lets one nuclear-tipped missile go up and then split its payload over a wide area. These were popular in the late cold war because they wouldn't just kill, say, downtown Manhattan, but would destroy the boroughs, airports, bases, etc around it, while being cheaper to produce than six independent missiles.

A cluster-bomb is the same thing. It splits its payload into smaller bomblets to cover a greater area on the ground. Instead of putting one big crater in a road or runway, it hoses over a few hundred feet or so, making it far harder to repair.

No, whatever you've read, the big city-killer types weren't scary to the planners of armaggeddon, they were just inefficient.