Source:
John Pilger
In a major essay to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima, John Pilger describes reporting from five 'ground zeros'
for nuclear weapons - from Hiroshima to Bikini, Nevada to Polynesia and
Australia. He warns that unless we take action now, China is next.
When
I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still
there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease:
legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a
bank to open.
At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite.
I
stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the
river where the survivors still lived in shanties. I met a man called
Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was
wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He described a huge
flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical
short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was
thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were
left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were
people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I
was certain I was dead."??Nine years later, I returned to look for him
and he was dead from leukaemia.
"No radioactivity in Hiroshima
ruin" said The New York Times front page on 13 September, 1945, a
classic of planted disinformation. "General Farrell," reported William
H. Lawrence, "denied categorically that [the atomic bomb] produced a
dangerous, lingering radioactivity."
Only one reporter,
Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the perilous journey to
Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, in defiance
of the Allied occupation authorities, which controlled the "press pack".
"I
write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the London
Daily Express of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his Baby
Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people with
no visible injuries who were dying from what he called "an atomic
plague".
For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.
The
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated
mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was
justified by lies that form the bedrock of America's war propaganda in
the 21st century, casting a new enemy, and target - China.
During
the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the atomic
bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.
"Even
without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States
Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have
exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and
obviate the need for invasion. "Based on a detailed investigation of all
the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese
leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have
surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if
Russia had not entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion
had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in
Washington contains documented Japanese peace overtures as early as
1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German
ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US made clear the Japanese
were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the
terms were hard". Nothing was done.
The US Secretary of War,
Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US Air
Force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be
able "to show its strength". Stimson later admitted that "no effort was
made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in
order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb".
Stimson's foreign
policy colleagues - looking ahead to the post-war era they were then
shaping "in our image", as Cold War planner George Kennan famously put
it - made clear they were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the
[atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie
Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb,
testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our
enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis."
The
day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced his
satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
The
"experiment" continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and
1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall
Islands in the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every
day for 12 years.
The human and environmental consequences
were catastrophic. During the filming of my documentary, The Coming War
on China, I chartered a small aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the
Marshalls. It was here that the United States exploded the world's first
Hydrogen Bomb. It remains poisoned earth. My shoes registered "unsafe"
on my Geiger counter. Palm trees stood in unworldly formations. There
were no birds.
I trekked through the jungle to the concrete
bunker where, at 6.45 on the morning of March 1, 1954, the button was
pushed. The sun, which had risen, rose again and vaporised an entire
island in the lagoon, leaving a vast black hole, which from the air is a
menacing spectacle: a deathly void in a place of beauty.
The
radioactive fall-out spread quickly and "unexpectedly". The official
history claims "the wind changed suddenly". It was the first of many
lies, as declassified documents and the victims' testimony reveal.
Gene
Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, "They
knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of
the shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people]
were not evacuated; I was not evacuated... The United States needed
some guinea pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do."
Like
Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated
experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project
4.1, which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment
on "human beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon".
The
Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 - like the survivors of Hiroshima I
interviewed in the 1960s and 70s - suffered from a range of cancers,
commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and
stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed
horribly.
Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been
evacuated during the H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini,
Rongelap's skies darkened and it rained what first appeared to be
snowflakes. Food and water were contaminated; and the population fell
victim to cancers. That is still true today.
I met Nerje
Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on Rongelap.
She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair missing. "We were
bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded," she said. "White
dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We
used it as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started
falling out."
Lemoyo Abon said, "Some of us were in agony.
Others had diarrhoea. We were terrified. We thought it must be the end
of the world."
US official archive film I included in my film
refers to the islanders as "amenable savages". In the wake of the
explosion, a US Atomic Energy Agency official is seen boasting that
Rongelap "is by far the most contaminated place on earth", adding, "it
will be interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in
a contaminated environment."
American scientists, including
medical doctors, built distinguished careers studying the "human
uptake'. There they are in flickering film, in their white coats,
attentive with their clipboards. When an islander died in his teens, his
family received a sympathy card from the scientist who studied him.
I
have reported from five nuclear "ground zeros" throughout the world --
in Japan, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Polynesia and Maralinga in
Australia. Even more than my experience as a war correspondent, this has
taught me about the ruthlessness and immorality of great power: that
is, imperial power, whose cynicism is the true enemy of humanity.
This
struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at Maralinga
in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk on which
was inscribed: "A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9
October 1957". On the rim of the crater was this sign:
WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD
Radiation levels for a few hundred metres around this point may be above those considered safe for permanent occupation.
For
as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. Raw
plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so
dangerous to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 per cent
chance of cancer.
The only people who might have seen the sign
were Indigenous Australians, for whom there was no warning. According
to an official account, if they were lucky "they were shooed off like
rabbits".
Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is
shooing us all off like rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily
torrent of anti-Chinese rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the
torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric. Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a
threat: Wuhan .... Huawei. How confusing it is when "our" most reviled
leader says so.
The current phase of this campaign began not
with Trump but with Barack Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to
declare the greatest build-up of US naval forces in the Asia-Pacific
region since World War Two. Suddenly, China was a "threat". This was
nonsense, of course. What was threatened was America's unchallenged
psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most successful, the
most "indispensable" nation.
What was never in dispute was its
prowess as a bully - with more than 30 members of the United Nations
suffering American sanctions of some kind and a trail of the blood
running through defenceless countries bombed, their governments
overthrown, their elections interfered with, their resources plundered.
Obama's
declaration became known as the "pivot to Asia". One of its principal
advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as WikiLeaks
revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean "the American Sea".
Whereas
Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of
marketing."I state clearly and with conviction," said the new president
in 2009, "that America's commitment is to seek the peace and security of
a world without nuclear weapons."
Obama increased spending on
nuclear warheads faster than any president since the end of the Cold
War. A "usable" nuclear weapon was developed. Known as the B61 Model 12,
it means, according to General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that "going smaller [makes its use] more
thinkable".
The target is China. Today, more than 400 American
military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships
and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to
South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and
India, the bases form, as one US strategist told me, "the perfect
noose".
A study by the RAND Corporation - which, since
Vietnam, has planned America's wars - is entitled War with China:
Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the
authors evoke the infamous catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist,
Herman Kahn - "thinking the unthinkable". Kahn's book, On Thermonuclear
War, elaborated a plan for a "winnable" nuclear war.
Kahn's
apocalyptic view is shared by Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an
evangelical fanatic who believes in the "rapture of the End". He is
perhaps the most dangerous man alive. "I was CIA director," he boasted,
"We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training
courses." Pompeo's obsession is China.
The endgame of
Pompeo's extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the Anglo-American
media, where the myths and fabrications about China are standard fare,
as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the sub-text of this
propaganda. Classified "yellow" even though they were white, the Chinese
are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an "exclusion act"
from entering the United States, because they were Chinese. Popular
culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, "sneaky", depraved,
diseased, immoral.
An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was
devoted to promoting fear of the "yellow peril" as if all of Asia was
about to fall down on the whites-only colony by the force of gravity.
As
the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China's modernism,
its secular morality and "contributions to liberal thought threatened
European face, so it became necessary to suppress China's role in the
Enlightenment debate .... For centuries, China's threat to the myth of
Western superiority has made it an easy target for race-baiting."
In
the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher
described those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as "rats,
flies, mosquitoes and sparrows". Hartcher, who favourably quotes the
American demagogue Steve Bannon, likes to interpret the "dreams" of the
current Chinese elite, to which he is apparently privy. These are
inspired by yearnings for the "Mandate of Heaven" of 2,000 years ago. Ad
nausea.
To combat this "mandate", the Australian government
of Scott Morrison has committed one of the most secure countries on
earth, whose major trading partner is China, to hundreds of billions of
dollars' worth of American missiles that can be fired at China.
The
trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by
violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have
formed a vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a
delivery rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused
in a supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist
attacks on Asian-Australians.
"We are not your enemy," a
high-ranking strategist in China told me, "but if you [in the West]
decide we are, we must prepare without delay." China's arsenal is small
compared with America's, but it is growing fast, especially the
development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.
"For
the first time," wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, "China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high
alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack...
This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy..."
In
Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of
international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a
"blinding attack on China" was planned, "with strikes that could be
mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take
out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible
use-it-or-lose-it dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war."
In
2019, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold
War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range
bombers rehearsed an "Air-Sea Battle Concept for China" - ASB - blocking
sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China's access to
oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
It
is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and
Road Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build
strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.
In
Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical
of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the
ironic title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal
Cultural Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the US and Europe.
"Many Americans imagine," she said, "that Chinese people live a
miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the
yellow peril has never left them... They have no idea there are some 500
million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it's 600
million."
Modern China's epic achievements, its defeat of
mass poverty, and the pride and contentment of its people (measured
forensically by American pollsters such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or
misunderstood in the West. This alone is a commentary on the lamentable
state of Western journalism and the abandonment of honest reporting.
China's
repressive dark side and what we like to call its "authoritarianism"
are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we
are fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it
is time we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.
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