Portside

Against all odds, 122 countries agreed in July to ban nuclear weapons. At the heart of the United Nations treaty is an explicit ethical goal: to protect peoples of the world from the humanitarian catastrophe that would ensue if nuclear weapons were employed. Once 50 states ratify the treaty, it will enter into international law. The United States, the only country to use nuclear weapons, dropped the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 at Hiroshima, and Aug. 9 on Nagasaki.

On August 6 – Hiroshima Day – I participated in a groundbreaking event at the South African Museum in Cape Town entitled The Missing Link: Peace and Security Surrounding Uranium.

Reader Comments: 2016 Election Campaign - After the DNC, Hillary, Jill and the Donald; The Election and After - Strategy for this election AND going forward; Climate Change policy needs to be front and center; Campaign for Leonard Peltier's freedom; Ireland and Iceland set the example - jailing bankers that caused meltdown; Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials at the UN and in New York; Letters to the Wall - What the Vietnam War was all about; and more . . . .

In this exclusive interview, Prof Peter Kuznick speaks of: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagazaki; US crimes and lies behind the Vietnam war, and what was really behind that inhumane invasion; why the US engaged a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and how that war and the mainstream media influences the world today; the interests behind the assassinations of President Kennedy; US imperialism towards Latin America. . .the War on Terror and War on Drugs.

Secrecy, extraordinary levels of classification, lies, denial, and deception became the chief legacy of the initial impulse to censor radiation information from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

On this 70th anniversary of the criminal US bombings against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we renew our commitment to abolish nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. In our anti-imperialist endeavor, we are certain that unity among us will defeat warmongering and militarist policies, since the peoples’ will is a just peace.

The anniversary of the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki compels us to think more deeply about the continued existence of nuclear weapons.

It’s well known that as the Truman White House made plans to use the first atomic bombs against Japan in the summer of 1945, a large group of atomic scientists, many of whom had worked on the bomb project, raised their voices, or at least their names, in protest.