70
YEARS, NEVER AGAIN: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Week!
August
5-9, 2015
Thursday,
August 6: Join
the annual Procession and Commemoration as Boston
Remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From throughout the region, we will gather at 3 pm at First Church of Boston, 66
Marlborough St, and proceed through the Public Garden to Copley Square, to
remember through dance, music, and speakers the horrendous bombings that
launched the age of nuclear peril. This is one of many events
across Massachusetts
calling attention to the people’s demand for nuclear disarmament.
Entering
the Age of Nuclear Terror
Seventy
years ago, on July 16, 1945, an assortment of scientists, including refugees who
had fled European fascism, succeeded in exploding the first experimental atomic
bomb in the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico…
Then mission creep entered the picture and a
scramble for other targets ensued. Despite the certainty that Japan was trying
to find a way to surrender with honor, the U.S. military started looking for
Japanese targets. The Trinity test bomb was essentially identical to the one
that would destroy Nagasaki a few weeks later on Aug. 9. Motivating
factors
for not just mothballing the massively expensive project included 1) the huge
secret costs that would be difficult to explain to Congress if the bomb hadn’t
been used, 2) the momentum that had been built up was impossible to stop, 3) the
unquenchable desire to achieve retribution against Japan for its ambush at Pearl
Harbor (killing 2,500 soldiers), and 4) the need to demonstrate to the Soviet
Union that the United States had “the bomb” and to warn Stalin to stay away from
the spoils of the already defeated Japan. More
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