Geography Archives: Japan

“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported on Monday.

Let’s start with the total amount of radiation that the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant STILL contains today. The spent fuel at the site contains 85 times more cesium-137 than Chornobyl and 50,000 to 100,000 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. 

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 heralded the atomic age and ushered in the military-industrial complex that took over the United States.

U.S. government documents admit the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union.

Mythology about these mass civilian slaughters warps thinking about U.S. militarism.

July 1939, Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist and a refugee in U.S., had sought the help of Einstein to persuade the U.S. administration headed by President Roosevelt, to construct an atomic bomb as a counter to an identical programme that, it was then suspected, Nazi Germany had embarked upon.

“It has never been true that nuclear war is ‘unthinkable.’ It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.” —E.P. Thompson

“Piping water into the sea is an outrage. The sea is not a garbage dump,” said one local fisherman earlier this year.

U.S. politicians from both parties agree: the deficit doesn’t matter. In their bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, Biden and Republicans are boosting military spending to $886 billion while making it harder for poor people to receive food stamps and welfare.

During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where the meeting was held.

Joe Biden’s visit to Hiroshima in the framework of the G7 once again brings to the surface the cynical memory of an empire that 78 years ago unleashed the power of “a thousand suns” on a defenseless population.

It may be recalled that after Japan alarmingly announced in April 2021 its plan to start releasing around 1.3 million metric tons of contaminated wastewater from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea, countries in the rest of eastern Asia and the Pacific region protested. Environmental groups and even the Japanese people opposed it.

The U.S. knows from its experience in defeating Germany, Japan, and the “Asian Tigers,” that a decisive way to slow a competitor’s growth rate is to get it to reduce its level of investment, which is what it is now trying to do to China.

Kailath, originally from Kerala but settled in the U.S., is one of the foremost names in the world in communications, control and signal processing. I remembered his words while reading the recent startling headlines that China has become the world leader in 37 of 44 critical technologies evaluated by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

As a result of military aid from the U.S. and many European states, Ukraine became the 3rd biggest importer of major arms during 2022.

The Times should issue an immediate correction and apology.

In 1904, Jack London, the most celebrated American writer of the time, was sent as a reporter to cover the war between Russia and Japan.

Reminiscent of Imperial Japan’s “Comfort Women,” the organized sex trade near U.S. bases in Korea involved horrendous human rights violations.

Many if not most readers will be familiar with the following saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, U.S. government officials lied to the media and Congress, claiming there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that civilians did not face “undue suffering,” that it was “a very pleasant way to die.”