Friday, August 08, 2008 Editorials: Horror of nuclear weapons
THE youths of Aug. 6, 1945 who are still alive today would remember the horrifying news that preceded the report that World War had ended.
It was about the destruction of a place in Japan called Hiroshima.
One bomb alone did it, ending a war that began four years earlier and killed hundreds of Filipinos, generating untold destruction and loss of lives in the country.
The bomb wrought such devastation that in a blink of an eye more than 140,000 people were killed and tens of thousands of others were injured with radiation.
That translated into deforming, damning burns.
Cold War
What followed after the release of that first atom bomb by the United States was a horrifying experience for the rest of mankind.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, the rival of US, scrambled to gain a similar military ascendance.
Thus was born the so-called diplomatic “cold war” where Communist Russia worked hard to catch up with the armed power of America.
Little did the world realize how humbling to Japan was the second atom bomb dropped in the City of Nagasaki several hours after the first.
Japan struggled for spiritual strength to rise again from its wound.
Nagasaki fully humbled the once mighty empire of the Rising Sun.
Anniversary
Last Wednesday, some 45,000 people gathered in that same city to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the unleashing of the horror that mankind could bring upon itself.
The group gathered “amid hope that the next United States president will work for the abolition of atomic weapons.”
The mayor of Hiroshima noted that the United States is one of only three countries that oppose a UN resolution submitted by Japan calling for the abolition of nuclear arms.
He expressed hope that the US president elected this November will listen conscientiously to the majority, for whom the top priority is human survival.
Call
The mayor pointed to the bomb’s effects where the “voices, faces, and forms never left the hearts of survivors.”
Today, the average age of survivors in that horrifying episode of human experience in this planet “should teach us the grave import of the truth, born of tragedy and suffering, that the only role for nuclear weapons is to be abolished.”
