10 January 2011. A World to Win News Service. Two recent medical studies compare the long-term effects of the U.S.-led assaults on Falluja in 2004 to what the U.S. inflicted on Vietnam – and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S.-led invaders moved into this town of a few hundred thousand people just north-west of Baghdad in April 2003 and took over a local secondary school to use as their headquarters. On the evening of 28 April several hundred townspeople defied a military curfew and staged a rally to demand that the school be reopened. Rocks were thrown. U.S. soldiers stationed on the roof opened fire on the crowd and kept shooting for a long time, killing 17 people and wounding more than 70. U.S. troops also fired on a demonstration held to protest these deaths two days later. The city became a focal point of early resistance to the American occupation.
In the two assaults on Falluja in 2004, U.S. military actions made it clear that the invaders were as anxious to punish the city and its inhabitants as to retake control and root out insurgent fighters. The city's political symbolism became crystallised in March 2004 when a military convoy carrying mercenaries from the infamous Blackwater company was ambushed and four of them killed, their charred bodies left on defiant display.
The U.S. launched the first all-out attack on Falluja shortly after. Homes, businesses and other buildings were bombed into ruins, but the invaders failed to take the city. The American military called it some of the heaviest urban combat its forces had engaged in since the battle of Hue in 1968, during the Vietnam war. By the time of the second assault in November, many fighters had left Falluja.
The U.S.'s lust for vengeance against a whole population was demonstrated by the weapons it used. Thermobaric bombs (a highly explosive mixture of fuel and air that has blast effects similar to tactical nuclear weapons) and other munitions were dropped to systematically demolish the houses and kill anyone in or near them. A modern version of napalm was also employed. Most infamous was the U.S.'s extensive and indiscriminate use of artillery shells filled with white phosphorous, an incendiary powder that sets fire to whatever it touches – and the fires cannot be put out with water. It also leaves behind a toxic residue.
The invaders made no distinction between fighters and the civilian population. In fact, U.S. troops stopped many civilians from leaving the besieged city. Their war-fighting tactics were meant, as in Vietnam, to kill all, burn all.
These facts were brought out by a few journalists in Iraq and abroad at the time. But recently new evidence has come out that the damage to Iraqis was worse and far more long-lasting than even most opponents of the occupation could imagine in 2004.
There have been recurring reports about birth defects among children born in Falluja. In January and February of 2010, three UK-based scientists organized a study to determine the facts. A trained research team accompanied by locally-trusted people was able to visit 711 homes in Falluja and worked with several thousand people to fill out a medical questionnaire. The researchers believe that the responses to questions were truthful because while confidential they could be cross-checked with medical records.
The survey revealed that since January 2005 the city's remaining population had suffered an enormous spike in infant mortality (80 children per thousand died in their first year, most probably due to congenital birth defects). This is about four times higher than in Egypt and eight times higher than in Kuwait. The study also found "alarming" cancer rates, including leukaemia, brain cancer and breast cancer, especially among people under 34. An unusually low proportion of children under four were boys (860 per 1000), suggesting that sudden genetic damage had killed many unborn males, since the male-female balance in children older than five was normal. The birth rate for women in Falluja was about 30 percent less in 2004-2008 than in comparable periods before. This, the study concluded, could be the result of both lower fertility and birth defects, providing additional indications of possible genetic damage.
Since the study confines itself to direct evidence, the authors of the peer-reviewed paper "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth-Sex Ratio in Falluja, Iraq, 2005-2009 (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2010 – 7) wrote that that their findings in and of themselves cannot conclusively show the cause or causes of this extremely unusual and suddenly-appearing situation. However, they make two points of fact. The first is the probability, based on the medical evidence, of toxic damage to genes as the common origin of the birth defects, infant deaths and cancers. The second is that this evidence of probable "genetic stress" appeared within a year of the assaults on Falluja. The sudden shift in the ratio of boys to girls in live births almost surely places the triggering event(s) in 2004.
The report discusses similar statistical manifestations among people exposed to atomic radiation in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, UN troops exposed to depleted uranium shells in Bosnia and survivors of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S. admits it used depleted-uranium assault rifle and artillery rounds during the two 2004 attacks on Falluja. It shot thousands of tonnes of this material in Iraq during a few weeks of 2003 alone.
A new study covering 2010 is even more horrifying and convincing. Lead by four doctors and researchers (two working in Falluja and two abroad), this survey of four extended families conducted at Falluja General Hospital concludes that the percentage of babies born with malformations in that city since 2003 has reached 15 percent, about 11 times the normal rate. Even worse, rather than falling off, the percentage jumped in the first half of 2010.
The most common deformities are congenital heart defects, followed by neural tube (brain and spinal cord) and skeletal defects. This cannot be a matter of bad luck. The statistical probability of such a high concentration is close to zero. Further, the authors state, such cases are most often not mainly caused by heredity – the problem usually does not come from the parents' genes, but from damage to the unborn child's genes due to environmental factors and the conditions of pregnant mothers. The paper says that the nature of these deaths and their known correlation with war events strongly raises the question of "war contaminants", especially the poisoning of the environment due to metals, citing uranium as an example.
None of the parents in the particular families studied were wounded or trapped in rubble, nor is there "an obvious relationship to adjacent bombing/burning of their houses or to the activity of cleaning/recovery of injured-dead people or to personal acute symptoms with them having a child with birth defect in the following years," the paper points out.
"This suggests that the birth defect in these families might not be due directly to acute exposure [to contaminants], but could be associated to their long term exposure and body accumulation of toxicants which persist in the environment." ("Four Polygamous Families with Congenital Birth Defects from Fallujah, Iraq," International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2011 – 8)
In other words, the problem is likely to get worse.
In this sense, the continued process of the concentration of contaminants in the environment and their accumulation in human bodies could, as the report suggests, be similar to what happened with Agent Orange in Vietnam. The U.S. bombed much of South Vietnam with defoliants and herbicides (plant-killers) containing the toxic chemical dioxin. This was meant to get rid of the vegetation providing Vietnamese revolutionaries with cover from American attacks and kill peasants' crops, forcing them into the cities. According to Vietnamese authorities today, about 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 people being killed or maimed and half a million children born with birth defects. (Globe and Mail, 12 July 2008. Also see Wikipedia, "Agent Orange".)
Now, three and a half decades after the end of the war, America's Agent Orange is continuing to kill Vietnamese. Not only are people who were exposed back then suffering horrible cancers today, and not only are their descendants afflicted by birth defects, including heartbreaking deformations, but there are increasing concentrations of the toxin among fish, animals and people. Not only have the last four decades been hell for many Vietnamese, despite the end of the war; scientists expect the next 40 years to see an enormous amount of new suffering.
In discussing depleted uranium, the latest research journal report says, "It is unclear whether its radiation-derived mutational effects or its chemical toxic effects are more relevant." Both lead to birth defects, from exposure to the parents before the child is conceived and exposure to the mother before it is born. The chemical toxic effects are at least as bad as those from radiation. And both will last for a very long time.
Depleted uranium is, in a way, today's moral equivalent to Agent Orange – a hi-tech fix to the problem of fighting unjust wars at a minimum cost to the oppressor by bringing into play the productive and technological superiority of the imperialist powers.
This by-product of making enriched uranium is now prized for rifle and artillery shells because it makes them better able to penetrate hard substances like metal and concrete. These projectiles catch fire after penetrating and are generally more deadly. It is known that the powder they release on impact is chemically toxic (poisonous) and radioactive (although much less than natural uranium, and not at all comparable to the bomb-quality metal). But the U.S. and its European allies will not allow so much as any discussion in the UN, the World Health Organization and other forums as to why it should not be used.
It took many years before scientific evidence that Agent Orange causes birth defects was accepted, and there is still resistance to the idea, not because the facts are unclear but because so much is at stake politically. Although these reports about Falluja are scientifically impeccable, writing and publishing them required courage because they, too, venture into what has been declared politically forbidden territory.
To help the people of Falluja, the new paper calls for further research into how the environmental contaminants work and the identification of families at risk. This would make it possible to provide help for those already affected and counselling for those families already identifiable as facing the likelihood of dead children and ruined lives. That, of course, is not likely to happen in the Iraq that the U.S. invasion and occupation has created. The U.S.-supported Iraqi authorities and their media tried to stop the earlier medical survey by labelling it "terrorist" and threatening to arrest people who cooperated with it.
This medical tragedy could be taken to stand for what the U.S. (and the UK and other allies) have done to Iraq. Although, from the media, you might think the war is over, there are still 50,000 U.S. troops there and it is not certain what the U.S. will be able to do or will be forced to do there within the broader context of its never-abandoned goals of Mid-Eastern domination and its face-off with Iran. But the toxic effects of the occupation are continuing to accumulate in Iraq and the region.
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Donnerstag, 27. Januar 2011
Donnerstag, 5. August 2010
The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: not just history
2 August 2010. A World to Win News Service. Following are excerpts from previous issues of AWTWNS that continue to be, unfortunately, very relevant to today's unfolding events.
"That fateful summer, 8:15. The roar of a B-229 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast – silence– hell on earth.
''The eyes of young girls watching the parachute melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. Their hair stood on end. Their clothes were ripped to shreds. People trapped in houses toppled by the blast were burned alive. Others died when their eyes and internal organs burst from their bodies. Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead." (From the 6 August 2007 memorial statement by Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, in a plea to rid the world of all nuclear weapons)
On 6 August 1945 the U.S. unleashed the atomic bomb on humanity. The world's first use of nuclear weapons, against the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was followed on 9 August by the bombing of Nagasaki.
.
The two atomic bombs dropped at the end of World War 2 were deliberately set to explode high in the air. The point was to maximize the killing, not the destruction of buildings. More than 110,000 people died immediately in the two bombings and the radiation eventually killed hundreds of thousands more. Many years of painful death by cancer and later birth defects lay ahead for the survivors and their descendents.
If terrorism is defined as the killing of innocent civilians for a political purpose, then the world has seldom seen such terrorism. Think of 40 times 11 September 2001 in New York and you will only imagine the first few seconds.
Shortly after, Japan surrendered. But its economy and capital city had been destroyed before the atomic bombs reduced two non-military and relatively unimportant cities to towns of the dead. Many historians believe that country was on the verge of surrender before those terrible days in August 1945. The main reason the U.S. wanted to use atomic weapons was as a demonstration of strength to threaten the USSR. The Soviet Union was then a socialist country. It had been allied with the U.S. against Germany and Japan during the war, but even before that war was over, the U.S. was baring its teeth to the USSR and setting out to dominate the world.
Before World War 2, bombing civilians was considered a barbaric and illegal act. The U.S. was not the only nation to commit that crime in WW2, but along with the British it did so on an enormous scale. Since then the U.S. has threatened to use nuclear weapons on dozens of occasions, not only against the USSR when that country later became an imperialist rival to the U.S., but also Vietnam and China. That the U.S. would make first use of nuclear weapons whenever it felt its interests sufficiently threatened has been official U.S. doctrine and the cornerstone of American military policy from the 1950s through today.
[Recently U.S. President Barack Obama confirmed that this doctrine is still basically in force and especially applicable in an attack on Iran. See "The U.S., Israel and the bomb: reason to worry," AWTWNS 31 May 2010.]
Hiroshima: survivors' stories
Just after World War 2, a young American journalist named John Hershey went to interview survivors of the atomic bombing. The result, Hiroshima, is one of those books that helped change the outlook of millions of people who read it. It tells the story of six people, beginning with what they were doing at the moment when the earth and sky suddenly filled with fire – talking, looking out the window, going to work, etc. They were all civilians living ordinary lives like their counterparts in any other country.
About half the deaths were caused by the explosion and the collapsing buildings. A mother describes what happened right after the bomb went off. Seeing "the youngest of her three children, buried breast-deep and unable to move, [she] crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free the child." After saving one of her children, the woman began searching for the other two: "She called the names of her ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter…the voices [of the children] from below answered…in a frenzy [the mother] made the wreckage fly above the crying voices."
A quarter of those who died were burned alive. Those who died slowly over the next hours, days and years considered the dead lucky. Hershey describes a room with 20 young men whose eyes had melted in their eye sockets. One of his six survivors describes going out in a boat on a river near town and finding hideously burned people still alive whose flesh was beginning to peel off their bodies.
"He found about 20 men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge glovelike pieces.
"Then he got into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily that the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated [full of pus] and smelly.
"With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself: 'These are human beings. These are human beings.'"
"Towns of the dead": a Hiroshima survivor speaks
"In August 6th, 1945, I was 13 years old, a sophomore at a girls' high school in Hiroshima. Starting in July, like the senior students, the second-year students were mobilized to three munitions factories for the country. At the time, I was living in Miyajima-guchi, in west Hiroshima. I was sent to an aircraft factory in the small town of Koi, in northwest Hiroshima. Most of the workers in the factory were mobilized students, and there were very few adult specialists.
"In the morning of that fateful day, August 6th, it was very hot with the burning summer sun. That day, we were to visit a beach to go swimming since the factory was to be closed for one day to conserve electricity. But an air attack warning had delayed our departure a while, and I was reading a book I had borrowed from a friend. I felt relieved when the air attack alert was called off, thinking that the American aircraft had flown away as usual without bombing. Then, a friend of mine outside of the factory called, 'Look! There's a plane. It might be a B-29! It's dropping something that looks like a parachute!'
Then, a yellow-orange coloured light flashed like a bolt of lightning as if several thousand magnesium bombs had exploded when I turned my head to look in that direction I felt a massive shock hit my body accompanied by a large boom. The blast, contaminated with glass and dirt, blew through the inside of our factory, and I was knocked down to the floor. I thought that our factory had been directly hit by a bomb. Through cracked pillars and beams that had collapsed, I could see a faint light in the dark cloud of dust. It was the factory door. I crawled through the rubble towards the door.
"'Are you hurt?' one friend called to me. I looked at my body. My uniform was red, stained with blood from my nose that was bleeding from the bomb blast. The inside of my left arm had been scraped with a piece of glass and was also bleeding. Many small glass shards were stuck all over my clothes and skin. I pressed my wounds with a cloth borrowed from my friend and ran to a back hill not far from there, hurried by my friend shouting, 'Run to a dugout!' On the way, I looked up at the sky. The beautiful blue sky of the morning was starting to change. A black cloud covered the sky as if it were getting ready to attack us. The cloud changed to red, grey and again to black, and grew even bigger to eventually cover the whole sky. It appeared monstrous. This cloud is called a 'mushroom cloud' and it does indeed look like a mushroom. I ran into the dugout on the hillside and received just a treatment of mercurochrome. Meanwhile, when I was washing my face stained from my nosebleed, big drops of rain came down. Somebody screamed, 'The Americans are dousing us with gasoline!', 'They are going to burn the hill and we will all be killed!' Everyone ran into the dugouts in fear. The rain was black, sticky and contaminated with sand and soil. It was several months before we realized that the rain was dangerously radioactive.
"On that day, the first-year students of my high school had been mobilized to help dismantle buildings in the city centre. Those 12-year-old girls, 220 in total, all perished by the end of the day, suffering from burns, without receiving any care or being able to see their families before dying. I wondered and still wonder for what reasons they had to die like this.
"Many of the survivors, who had mutually congratulated each other after having survived the effects of the bomb, also died within a few days with acute symptoms of fever, diarrhoea, vomiting, violet spots on the skin, hair loss, etc. People who had come to Hiroshima to help also showed the same symptoms and either died or suffered for a long time from radiation sickness. At the time, however, we could not even begin to imagine that these symptoms were being caused by the radioactive effects of an atomic bomb.
"The atomic bombs turned both Hiroshima and Nagasaki into towns of the dead. There were red burned and bloated dead bodies piled up high, the corpses with the guts and the eyes popped out, over-capacitated trains burned black and crisp, people buried alive under buildings and dead, lines of ghost-looking people with burned frizzled hair and burned skin hanging, etc… It was not a scene of human life but a miserable hell. I never forget the mortification I had not being able to give water to those crowds of barely living survivors who were not able to save their own children or parents.
"The atomic bomb brought 140,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 70,000 deaths in Nagasaki 62 years ago. People around the world need to know how a nuclear bomb can brutally destroy a city and take so many lives away, miserably, in a split second, and also should know that nuclear bombs today can bring even more horrifying destruction upon us."
[Excerpted from an eyewitness account by Hiroshima survivor Yuko Nakamura, posted on august6.org, the Web site of a coalition of U.S. organizations that held actions in August 2007 to commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and oppose an American attack on Iran.]
"That fateful summer, 8:15. The roar of a B-229 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast – silence– hell on earth.
''The eyes of young girls watching the parachute melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. Their hair stood on end. Their clothes were ripped to shreds. People trapped in houses toppled by the blast were burned alive. Others died when their eyes and internal organs burst from their bodies. Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead." (From the 6 August 2007 memorial statement by Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, in a plea to rid the world of all nuclear weapons)
On 6 August 1945 the U.S. unleashed the atomic bomb on humanity. The world's first use of nuclear weapons, against the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was followed on 9 August by the bombing of Nagasaki.
.
The two atomic bombs dropped at the end of World War 2 were deliberately set to explode high in the air. The point was to maximize the killing, not the destruction of buildings. More than 110,000 people died immediately in the two bombings and the radiation eventually killed hundreds of thousands more. Many years of painful death by cancer and later birth defects lay ahead for the survivors and their descendents.
If terrorism is defined as the killing of innocent civilians for a political purpose, then the world has seldom seen such terrorism. Think of 40 times 11 September 2001 in New York and you will only imagine the first few seconds.
Shortly after, Japan surrendered. But its economy and capital city had been destroyed before the atomic bombs reduced two non-military and relatively unimportant cities to towns of the dead. Many historians believe that country was on the verge of surrender before those terrible days in August 1945. The main reason the U.S. wanted to use atomic weapons was as a demonstration of strength to threaten the USSR. The Soviet Union was then a socialist country. It had been allied with the U.S. against Germany and Japan during the war, but even before that war was over, the U.S. was baring its teeth to the USSR and setting out to dominate the world.
Before World War 2, bombing civilians was considered a barbaric and illegal act. The U.S. was not the only nation to commit that crime in WW2, but along with the British it did so on an enormous scale. Since then the U.S. has threatened to use nuclear weapons on dozens of occasions, not only against the USSR when that country later became an imperialist rival to the U.S., but also Vietnam and China. That the U.S. would make first use of nuclear weapons whenever it felt its interests sufficiently threatened has been official U.S. doctrine and the cornerstone of American military policy from the 1950s through today.
[Recently U.S. President Barack Obama confirmed that this doctrine is still basically in force and especially applicable in an attack on Iran. See "The U.S., Israel and the bomb: reason to worry," AWTWNS 31 May 2010.]
Hiroshima: survivors' stories
Just after World War 2, a young American journalist named John Hershey went to interview survivors of the atomic bombing. The result, Hiroshima, is one of those books that helped change the outlook of millions of people who read it. It tells the story of six people, beginning with what they were doing at the moment when the earth and sky suddenly filled with fire – talking, looking out the window, going to work, etc. They were all civilians living ordinary lives like their counterparts in any other country.
About half the deaths were caused by the explosion and the collapsing buildings. A mother describes what happened right after the bomb went off. Seeing "the youngest of her three children, buried breast-deep and unable to move, [she] crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free the child." After saving one of her children, the woman began searching for the other two: "She called the names of her ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter…the voices [of the children] from below answered…in a frenzy [the mother] made the wreckage fly above the crying voices."
A quarter of those who died were burned alive. Those who died slowly over the next hours, days and years considered the dead lucky. Hershey describes a room with 20 young men whose eyes had melted in their eye sockets. One of his six survivors describes going out in a boat on a river near town and finding hideously burned people still alive whose flesh was beginning to peel off their bodies.
"He found about 20 men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge glovelike pieces.
"Then he got into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily that the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated [full of pus] and smelly.
"With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself: 'These are human beings. These are human beings.'"
"Towns of the dead": a Hiroshima survivor speaks
"In August 6th, 1945, I was 13 years old, a sophomore at a girls' high school in Hiroshima. Starting in July, like the senior students, the second-year students were mobilized to three munitions factories for the country. At the time, I was living in Miyajima-guchi, in west Hiroshima. I was sent to an aircraft factory in the small town of Koi, in northwest Hiroshima. Most of the workers in the factory were mobilized students, and there were very few adult specialists.
"In the morning of that fateful day, August 6th, it was very hot with the burning summer sun. That day, we were to visit a beach to go swimming since the factory was to be closed for one day to conserve electricity. But an air attack warning had delayed our departure a while, and I was reading a book I had borrowed from a friend. I felt relieved when the air attack alert was called off, thinking that the American aircraft had flown away as usual without bombing. Then, a friend of mine outside of the factory called, 'Look! There's a plane. It might be a B-29! It's dropping something that looks like a parachute!'
Then, a yellow-orange coloured light flashed like a bolt of lightning as if several thousand magnesium bombs had exploded when I turned my head to look in that direction I felt a massive shock hit my body accompanied by a large boom. The blast, contaminated with glass and dirt, blew through the inside of our factory, and I was knocked down to the floor. I thought that our factory had been directly hit by a bomb. Through cracked pillars and beams that had collapsed, I could see a faint light in the dark cloud of dust. It was the factory door. I crawled through the rubble towards the door.
"'Are you hurt?' one friend called to me. I looked at my body. My uniform was red, stained with blood from my nose that was bleeding from the bomb blast. The inside of my left arm had been scraped with a piece of glass and was also bleeding. Many small glass shards were stuck all over my clothes and skin. I pressed my wounds with a cloth borrowed from my friend and ran to a back hill not far from there, hurried by my friend shouting, 'Run to a dugout!' On the way, I looked up at the sky. The beautiful blue sky of the morning was starting to change. A black cloud covered the sky as if it were getting ready to attack us. The cloud changed to red, grey and again to black, and grew even bigger to eventually cover the whole sky. It appeared monstrous. This cloud is called a 'mushroom cloud' and it does indeed look like a mushroom. I ran into the dugout on the hillside and received just a treatment of mercurochrome. Meanwhile, when I was washing my face stained from my nosebleed, big drops of rain came down. Somebody screamed, 'The Americans are dousing us with gasoline!', 'They are going to burn the hill and we will all be killed!' Everyone ran into the dugouts in fear. The rain was black, sticky and contaminated with sand and soil. It was several months before we realized that the rain was dangerously radioactive.
"On that day, the first-year students of my high school had been mobilized to help dismantle buildings in the city centre. Those 12-year-old girls, 220 in total, all perished by the end of the day, suffering from burns, without receiving any care or being able to see their families before dying. I wondered and still wonder for what reasons they had to die like this.
"Many of the survivors, who had mutually congratulated each other after having survived the effects of the bomb, also died within a few days with acute symptoms of fever, diarrhoea, vomiting, violet spots on the skin, hair loss, etc. People who had come to Hiroshima to help also showed the same symptoms and either died or suffered for a long time from radiation sickness. At the time, however, we could not even begin to imagine that these symptoms were being caused by the radioactive effects of an atomic bomb.
"The atomic bombs turned both Hiroshima and Nagasaki into towns of the dead. There were red burned and bloated dead bodies piled up high, the corpses with the guts and the eyes popped out, over-capacitated trains burned black and crisp, people buried alive under buildings and dead, lines of ghost-looking people with burned frizzled hair and burned skin hanging, etc… It was not a scene of human life but a miserable hell. I never forget the mortification I had not being able to give water to those crowds of barely living survivors who were not able to save their own children or parents.
"The atomic bomb brought 140,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 70,000 deaths in Nagasaki 62 years ago. People around the world need to know how a nuclear bomb can brutally destroy a city and take so many lives away, miserably, in a split second, and also should know that nuclear bombs today can bring even more horrifying destruction upon us."
[Excerpted from an eyewitness account by Hiroshima survivor Yuko Nakamura, posted on august6.org, the Web site of a coalition of U.S. organizations that held actions in August 2007 to commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and oppose an American attack on Iran.]
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