1. The Nuclear Threat Initiative will host a free 1-hour, live-streamed conversation on Sunday, August 3, with @JimCameron + @ErnestMoniz moderated by Christiane @amanpour!
Join CNN Anchor, Christiane Amanpour for a conversation with Academy Award-winning director James Cameron² and Nuclear Threat Initiative CEO Ernest J. Moniz.
The conversation will preview Ghosts of Hiroshima³, a new book out this week to coincide with the 80th commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
This hour-long discussion will cover why Cameron and Moniz are sounding the alarm on the today’s nuclear threats and highlight the power of storytelling to imagine a safer future.
2. “Ghosts of Hiroshima stands as an important and compelling account of one of the most important events of the twentieth century.”
James Cameron
3. Einstein was deeply disturbed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. – He felt a profound sense of guilt and regret for his role in initiating the development of such a destructive weapon.10 Μαρ 2024 From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Her Name, Titanic, this masterpiece of nonfiction arrives in time to honor the eightieth anniversary of the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.
For all humanity, it was, literally and figuratively, childhood’s end.
No one recognized the flashes of bright light that filled the sky. Survivors described colors they couldn’t name. The blast wave that followed seemed to strike with no sound. In that silence came the dawn of atomic death for two hundred thousand souls.
On August 6, 1945, twenty-nine-year-old naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on the last day of a business trip, looking forward to returning home to his wife and infant son, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived the atomic blast and got on a train to Nagasaki, only to be bombed again.
Jacob Beser, a Manhattan Project engineer, looked down on Hiroshima and saw the ground boiling. Years afterward, he referred to what he witnessed as “the most bizarre and spectacular two events in the history of man’s inhumanity to man.”
From that first millionth of a second, people began to die in previously unimaginable ways. Near Hiroshima’s hypocenter, teeth were scattered on the ground, speckles of incandescent blood were converted to carbon steel, a child’s marbles melted to blobs of molten glass.
From the bombs were born radioactive substances that mimicked calcium in growing bones and which, ten years later, filled hospitals with a shocking truth: nuclear weapons, more than anything else, were child-killers.
Based on years of forensic archaeology combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, during which our modern civilization entered its most challenging phase—a nuclear adolescence that, unless we are very wise and learn from our past, we may not survive.
4. “Ghosts of Hiroshima” will focus in part on the true story of a Japanese man during World War II who survived two atomic bombings: after living through the explosion in Hiroshima, he took a train to Nagasaki, enduring another blast there.
Truman did not seek to destroy Japanese culture or people; the goal was to destroy Japan’s ability to make war. So, on the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the world’s first atom bomb over the city of Hiroshima.
There was some impulse to use that second bomb because there was also curiosity about what it could do. It was a different kind of bomb from the uranium bomb used on Hiroshima. It was a plutonium bomb of a different kind and of one that was considered to be highly important for the military future.
After the bomb was dropped, Stalin was furious. The place Russia had earned as a world power by its victory in the war had been snatched away. “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world,” he is said to have told Kurchatov. “The balance has been destroyed.”
However; no specific mention of atomic bombs was made to the Japanese government prior to bombing Hiroshima. One thing the Americans did do however was drop leaflets over Japanese cities which had not been bombed yet, warning residents to evacuate the area.
Einstein was deeply disturbed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. – He felt a profound sense of guilt and regret for his role in initiating the development of such a destructive weapon.
Hiroshima was chosen as the primary target since it had remained largely untouched by bombing raids, and the bomb’s effects could be clearly measured. While President Truman had hoped for a purely military target, some advisers believed that bombing an urban area might break the fighting will of the Japanese people.
No one person can be credited with producing the world’s first atomic bomb but two men had outsize achievements in that effort: physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Army Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves.
So far as the atomic bomb is concerned, I think that its advent was most unfortunate because now it will give the pacifists a chance to state that there can be no more wars, which has been their favorite thesis and chief means of producing wars for the last 6000 years.
https://www.youtube.com/live/f_1MLFpmbhg?si=Fsl8jGRk_h-Ut1n1
