Dear Mr. Kristof,

Thanks for your thought provoking OpEd piece in today's New York Times,
but your conclusion is a bit weak in light of the underlying the real reason
for the timing of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which
was to break the secret agreement among the WWII allies that the Soviet
Union would invade Japan which would thereafter have become a Soviet
satellite state. As several recent US television documentaries have clearly
shown, the Soviets had already moved troops and their invasion of Japan
was imminent, in accord with that agreement reached shortly before the
defeat of Germany.

This reason for the timing of these atomic bomb tests on human beings
(it was the first human testing by design, US damage assessment teams
went in asap but rendered no medical aid) was, in character with how the
US has treated the native American peoples since its beginning, to break
this international agreement with the Soviet Union and initiate the first
strike nuclear threat posture that the United States still holds to this
day.

Is it any wonder that other nations of the world have responded in kind to
this ongoing first strike nuclear threat from the US, countries like Korea
today?

This is moral and ethical hypocricy at its most blatant and serious level.

The greatest tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is this resultant continued
ongoing nuclear weapons race, initiated and maintained by the US to the
detriment of the world and its own domestic population which suffers not
only because of the money squandered on such weapons instead of
education and health care, etc, but increasing crime and lawlessness due
to the obvious criminality of the US government in its actions and laws
made up by the few and enforced on its own citizens by violence and the
threat of violence -- the country which has the highest per capita
imprisonment rate in the world. This US agressive posture promising
the first use of these diabolical weapons of mass destruction is the real
ongoing tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that all of your cited "ending
the war sooner and saving lives" arguments simply obscure and obfuscate.

The greatest legacy and benefit of America's human sacrifice of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki civilian populations is that understanding it correctly can
help bring about the only realistic solution, complete global disarmament,
nuclear disarmament and complete global disarmament by all peoples working
together as an activity of conscience to create a sustainable global culture
of peace as per the United Nations 2000-2009 International Decade of
Creating a Culture of Peace for the 21st Century.

This is what the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings have
been coming to America to tell us over these past decades.

Especially today when we face the threats of "global terrorism" and this
karma of the US is being reflected back upon us by threats of suitcase
nukes blowing up American cities, we would also profit from examining
the comparative religious beliefs between Japan and the Islamic world.

The historically peaceful culture of Buddhism was perverted by militarism
in Japan and its tenets of self-sacrifice perverted into the Kamikaze
suicide bombers. Today the peaceful culture of Islam has been perverted
and its spirit of self-sacrifice to benefit the community of believers used
to justify suicide bombings of even civilian targets (as were Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, both largely Christian towns with their men away at war)
because of their precedent, fueled by the outrage against a "white
Christian" United States imposing its brand of state religion
(scientific liberalism) on the rest of the world under threat of the same
fate as Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Cleary, the USA is in reality human history's worst bully, not the world's
policeman.

The foundation for Earth's future global sustainable culture of peace is the
spiritual human civilization rising up from each human heart in respect of
all human beings as one family of life on this Earth, all as brothers and
sisters on this planet our home, the global interfaith spiritual
civilization
which will manifest by True Human Beings reawakening to the light of truth,
ie, understanding the absolute nature of truth.

The coming global human spiritual reawakening may be very fast, like a
consciousness revolution. Let's monitor its progress by August 9 Nagasaki
Day.

David Crockett Williams, August 5, 2003
Tehachapi, California
http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/vision.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-road-to-peace


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/05KRIS.html

New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Blood on Our Hands?

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious
events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58
years, there's an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.

There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral
standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the
first to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a
speech on Jan. 31, "Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan,
who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are
the policeman of the world?"

The traditional American position, that our intention in dropping the bombs
on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki was to end the war early and save lives, has
been poked full of holes. Revisionist historians like Gar Alperovitz argue
persuasively that Washington believed the bombing militarily unnecessary
(except to establish American primacy in the postwar order) because, as the
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey put it in 1946, "in all probability" Japan
would have surrendered even without the atomic bombs.

Yet this emerging consensus is, I think, profoundly mistaken.

While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese
historical research has bolstered it. The Japanese scholarship, by
historians like Sadao Asada of Doshisha University in Kyoto, notes that
Japanese wartime leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the
atomic bombing. The Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up,
so the peace faction seized upon the bombing as a new argument to force
surrender.

"We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to
end the war," Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, said
later.

Wartime records and memoirs show that the emperor and some of his aides
wanted to end the war by summer 1945. But they were vacillating and couldn't
prevail over a military that was determined to keep going even if that
meant, as a navy official urged at one meeting, "sacrificing 20 million
Japanese lives."

The atomic bombings broke this political stalemate and were thus described
by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from heaven."

Without the atomic bombings, Japan would have continued fighting by inertia.
This would have meant more firebombing of Japanese cities and a ground
invasion, planned for November 1945, of the main Japanese islands. The
fighting over the small, sparsely populated islands of Okinawa had killed
14,000 Americans and 200,000 Japanese, and in the main islands the toll
would have run into the millions.

"The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end
the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945, said
later.

Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited
island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could
keep its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have
waited longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki.

But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would not have worked. The
Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic
bombings on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it
expected another atomic bomb - on Tokyo.

One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot
named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated
about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he "confessed"
that the U.S. had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to destroy Tokyo "in
the next few days." The war minister informed the cabinet of this grim
news - but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the aftermath of the atomic
bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted on surrender and
were able to prevail.

It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are
regarded in some quarters as among the most monstrous acts of the 20th
century. But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of
Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but
that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse.

[see these links from above url]
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Nicholas D. Kristof Kristof Responds:
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E-mail: nicholas@...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/05KRIS.html
-----------------end article

*spiritual unity understanding*

Torahkum, The Law Stands Up

David Crockett Williams 661-822-3309
Chartered Life Underwriter
Bachelor of Science, Chemistry
Silk Road Peace March Co-Coordinator
www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/vision.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tehachapi-peace-center

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