Falling Out

OF THE MANY COMPLAINTS I have about Donald Trump,, among the most serious is his removal of the United States from the nuclear arms agreement with Iran, an action which precipitated hostilities. The argument made by Republicans that the agreement guaranteed that Iran would eventually have nuclear weapons is, like many republican arguments, fatuous. Atomic bombs breed bad reasoning, it seems. Or maybe its the other way around. My reasoning concerning Nagasaki and Hiroshima, bad or not, is that dropping atomic bombs on them was a war crime, two war crimes, since, by the summer of forty five the Japanese military was defeated and destroyed, the American bombers were bombing Japanese cities uncontested at will, and the Japanese were sending messages to the Russians inquiring about the possibility of communicating with the United Stats about a possible peace arrangement. A new book entitled "Fallout" by Lesley Blume explores an interesting aspect of the atomic bombings of Japan, the aftermath,and how the American people and the world came to know details about the events because of the determined reporting of john Hersey, one of the most respected war correspondents of the second world war. few people understand the true nature of nuclear bombs at the time; president harry Truman did not, nor did the American people. The idea that radiation would kill people for years after the actual explosion was unknown, and reports that it would were at first considered propaganda by the Japanese, "Tokyo tales". The American occupation forces strictly censored the American news media covering post war japan, and even though American soldiers picked up burnt objects as souvenirs of the bombs, the actual condition of the Japanese people, suffering from radioactive poisoning, were kept quiet. Hersey's book "Hiroshima" awakened the world to the harsh realities of the atomic age. The possibility that Iran might produce an atomic bomb at some future date is not a problem. Its a hypothetical, an abstraction, speculation. The problem is the fact that at least nine other nations already have atomic bombs, some in large quantities, and that most of these nations, like the United States, have a history of belligerent, aggressive foreign policy and behavior, with governments which often exercise poor judgment.Only the United States has used nuclear bombs in war, under questionable circumstances, against an already defeated enemy. Every nuclear arms control expert, every geo-political scholar, every atomic scientist considers it a miracle that the past seventy five years has been free of nuclear war.but even miracles have limits.