Nukes: Iran and North Korea are not the problem (Mickey Z.)

[Tace]

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Oct. 16, 2006 -- NEW YORK -- Thanks to the nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran, there's no shortage of rhetoric along these lines: "We can't let rogue nations have nukes. They might use them." Absent from the discussion are two elementary questions. First: What is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons (and have civilians been targeted)?

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. government ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A Tokyo radio broadcast described how "the impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animal, were seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast." Tokyo radio went on to call Hiroshima a city with corpses "too numerous to be counted ... literally seared to death." It was impossible to "distinguish between men and women." The Associated Press carried the first eyewitness account: a Japanese solider who described the victims as "bloated and scorched -- such an awesome sight -- their legs and bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister." After visiting the devastated city, Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett described Hiroshima as a "death-stricken alien planet" with patients presenting purple skin hemorrhages, hair loss, drastically reduced whiteblood cell counts, fever, nausea, gangrene, and other symptoms of a radiation disease he called an "atomic plague."

Shortly after Hiroshima (and Nagasaki), American nuclear researchers finally got around to examining the effects of plutonium on the human body. "There were two kinds of experiments," says Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation. "In one kind, specific small groups (African-American prisoners, mentally retarded children, and others) were induced, by money or by verbal subterfuge, to submit to irradiation of one kind or another. In all, some 800 individuals participated in these 'guinea pig' trials. In the second kind, large civilian populations were exposed to intentional releases of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere."

Far from a momentary lapse amidst post-"Good War" paranoia, these U.S. radiation experiments have left a trail of declassified documents that stretches three miles long.

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