WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #239, JULY 23, 2025.

 WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #239, JULY 23, 2025.   Compiled by Dick Bennett.

OMNI HIROSHIMA-NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE 2025
Why Did the US Nuclear Annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
FCNL:  the RADIATION EXPOSURE COMPENSATION ACT was expanded. 

OMNI HIROSHIMA-NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE 2025
August 10, 7p.m., at OMNI, Lee St.
MC Kelly Mulhollan
Keynote speaker Prof. Michael Anthony, UAF History Dept.
Songs by Still on the Hill, Geoff Oelsner, and Harmonia
Reading of names.
Discussion following with Prof. Art Hobson

 

Why Did the US Nuclear Annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

William Hartung and Ben Freeman.  The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America Into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home.   2025. 
Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.  No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimer would describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”

 

By that point, it was evident that the bomb would be used not to deter Germany but to destroy Japan, and not as the final act of World War II but as the opening salvo of what would become the Cold War. The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.
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Here is some good news from FCNL’S Susan Nahvi:  the RADIATION EXPOSURE COMPENSATION ACT was expanded.  Here is the article on our website that goes into more detail:  .  https://www.fcnl.org/updates/2025-07/historic-win-justice-advocates-secure-reca-expansion    Here is a short explanation that I lifted from the article:   
RECA was originally passed in 1990 to compensate uranium miners, downwinders, and nuclear workers suffering from cancer and other illnesses. This expansion brings long-excluded groups into the program.  However, some impacted communities were left out of the expansion because it cost ‘too much.’ There is still work to do. 
This victory was only made possible by decades of grassroots leadership from directly impacted communities.. At FCNL, we are honored to have stood with these leaders and our partners across the country who demanded justice for their communities. Some of these groups include the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, Just Moms St. Louis, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

 

 

END WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #239, JULY 23, 2025.   Compiled by Dick Bennett.