AUGUST 6 marks the 78th anniversary of the first use of an atom bomb on a populated city, Hiroshima.

An estimated 90,000 to 140,000 people died immediately as a result of the blast, heat, or acute effects of radiation.  

Three days later, a second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 60,000 to 80,000. 

On July 21, acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s biopic ‘Oppenheimer’ was released to a global audience 

Universal’s local distributor in Japan has yet to announce a theatre release date for the movie.

The following is the chronology of events in 1945 that led to the bombing of Japan:

May 7:  Nazi Germany unconditionally surrenders to the Allies; it is confirmed the Nazis are nowhere close to making an atom bomb, despite the efforts of a team led by Werner Heisenberg.

July 16:  Successful “trinity” test of a plutonium fission bomb using an implosion mechanism at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

July 17-August 2:  Potsdam conference where Stalin repeats his Yalta promise to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to launch an attack against Japan once the Nazis were defeated in Europe

August 6:  Untested uranium fission bomb drops on Hiroshima

August 7:  USSR declares war on Japan, invades Manchuria, defeats Japan’s Kwantung Army, en route to planned invasion of Hokkaido

August 9:  Plutonium fission bomb drops on Nagasaki

The geostrategic objectives of the US in demonstrating its weapon of mass destruction to its emerging Soviet rival, extensively documented by the American historian Gar Alperovitz, emerged in a contemporaneous film documentary on Ted Hall (2023), the youngest scientist on Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project team, who along with Klaus Fuchs and other project scientists, leaked crucial bomb design details to the Soviets in the 1940s. The intention, the film informs us, was to prevent a US monopoly over weapons of mass destruction and its anticipated resort to nuclear blackmail in the post-WW2 era.

The balance of terror in the ensuing decades was almost upset on too many occasions, most dramatically during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when we were, without exaggeration, literally seconds from nuclear Armageddon. 

In the 1980s, millions were on the streets in Berlin, London and New York protesting against the madness of short and intermediate range ballistic missiles on hair-trigger alert in Nato bases (Pershing 2 missiles) and in their Warsaw Pact counterparts (SS20 missiles). 

In Southeast Asia, many still harboured the illusion that it was all happening “over there”. 

Carl Sagan and his atmospheric scientist colleagues soon thereafter dispelled our sense of remove.  An enveloping persisting blanket of carbon soot lofted into the stratosphere from burning cities would precipitate a protracted nuclear winter globally, leading to agricultural collapse and worldwide famine.

On July 18, USS Kentucky made a port call at Busan in a show of force vis-à-vis North Korea, the first time in 42 years a US ballistic missile submarine visited South Korea.

Just as US residents within 50km of an intercontinental ballistic missile base might feel nervous as high priority targets in a nuclear exchange, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine docking at Busan (or Singapore’s Changi Naval Base, or a Filipino naval base) is in effect a mobile launch platform for more than 200 independently targetable nuclear warheads (475-kiloton hydrogen bombs).

Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s tweet trying to square her country’s obligations under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (Treaty of Rarotonga, 1985) with her US treaty ally’s dictum of neither confirm nor deny nuclear armaments of visiting warships and warplanes..

It’s time for an Asean Peoples’ no nukes network to hold governments to account for painting bull’s eyes on the backs of their citizens. – August 5, 2023.

* Chan Chee Khoon reads The Malaysian Insight.
 

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.