It was on this day, that man wanted to show his prowess. It was on this day that man wanted to know that he had a bomb in his hand, and he could use it. It was on this that man thought that justice could prevail with a bomb. It was on this day that man felt the deep thrills to experiment with the unknown.
It landed on earth. The earth was engulfed with a ball of fire. The fish in the rivers, turned. No time to flutter. Died. The same happened on earth too. One lack, forty thousand people died. This was just what the ball of fire did. The wind carried the nuclear radiation in its wing. It spread through the thin filter of the environment, surrounded the clean air, and left scars of unheard injuries for generations to come.
Strategies to War
The fundamental principle of war bases itself on the premise – The greatest impact in the shortest time. Hiroshima was not just a word that sounded poetic for the American generals. It was a place that fit the bill most perfectly - a “greatest impact in the shortest time”. A target that was spread over three miles stretch. A target that had a large urban population and above all the Target Committee, Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945 stated that “…any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb”. It also looked at the other possibilities: “For the Little Boy the detonation heights should correspond to a pressure of 5 psi, a height of the Mach-stem of 100 feet and a magnitude of detonation of either 5,000 or 15,000 tons of H.E. equivalent…and for the Fat Man the detonation heights should correspond to a pressure of 5 psi, a height of the Mach-stem of 100 feet, and a magnitude of explosion of 700, 2,000, or 5,000 tons of H.E. equivalent…” (Minutes of the second meeting of the Target Committee, Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945)
Psychological Factors in Target Selection
Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama and Kokura Arsenal were the places that were decided as targets. It was like any other war – the psychological impact needed to be the severest. The act of using the nuclear bomb was to proclaim to the world the bravado of the mighty American Army. The main objective to obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and above all making the initial use of the bong “sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity is released.”
What followed was an ocean of death.
The seemingly simple theory of Einstein’s Theory of Relatively was an instant success, because the experiments scored a perfect 10. E=MC2 was the lingo to understand Einstein where energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared!
Einstein had felt the urgency to develop the bomb, to counter the growing threat of Nazi Hitler. It was a bizarre turn of priority that Japan was pulverized as priority, just three months before the surrender of Germany.
August 06 comes every day. Countries spend vast corpuses of wealth on nuclear weaponization, when the same money could guarantee basic amenities to its people like safe drinking water, sanitation and fundamental health care.
The world has learnt little from the greatest nuclear catastrophe. Japan needed a Hiroshima to realize that it could not retaliate tit-for-tat. If the world had to heal from the after effects of such a colossal tragedy, it had to lead the way for a world against nuclear proliferation. Japan today is one of the staunch up-holder of anti nuclearization.
If this could not teach the world a lesson, nothing else can.
2 comments:
I really liked your blog. However, I am not sure World learns anything from errors such as Hiroshima, Jalianwala baug, and etc.
Good analysis. The mankind is not kind enough to learn any thing from such incidents.
Post a Comment