{"id":140132,"date":"2019-08-12T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=140132"},"modified":"2019-08-09T11:42:50","modified_gmt":"2019-08-09T10:42:50","slug":"as-india-and-pakistan-and-america-and-iran-go-toe-to-toe-now-is-the-time-to-recall-the-scorched-corpses-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/08\/as-india-and-pakistan-and-america-and-iran-go-toe-to-toe-now-is-the-time-to-recall-the-scorched-corpses-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki\/","title":{"rendered":"As India and Pakistan \u2013 And America and Iran \u2013 Go Toe-To-Toe, Now Is the Time to Recall the Scorched Corpses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited<\/p><\/div>\n

8 Aug 2019 – <\/em>We like our anniversaries in blocks of fifty or one hundred \u2013 at a push we\u2019ll tolerate a twenty five. The 100th anniversary of the Somme (2016), the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain (2015). Next year, we\u2019ll remember the end of the Second World War, the first \u2013 and so far the only \u2013 nuclear war in history.<\/p>\n

This week marks only the 74th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima<\/a> and Nagasaki<\/a>. It doesn\u2019t fit in to our journalistic scorecards and \u201ctimelines\u201d. Over the past few days, I\u2019ve had to look hard to find a headline about the two Japanese cities.<\/p>\n

But, especially in the Middle East and what we like to call south-east Asia, we should be remembering these gruesome anniversaries every month. Hiroshima was atomic-bombed 74 years ago on Tuesday, Nagasaki 74 years ago on Friday. Given the extent of the casualty figures, you\u2019d think they\u2019d be unforgettable. But we don\u2019t quite know (nor ever will) what they were.<\/p>\n

The bombing of the two cities, we are told, left between 129,000 and 226,000 dead. The first US statistics suggested only <\/em>66,000 dead in Hiroshima, 39,000 in Nagasaki. But in later years, the Hiroshima authorities estimated their dead alone at 202,118 \u2013 taking account of those who later died of radiation sickness, rather than just the incinerated corpses and human shadows left in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.<\/p>\n

In the Middle East, where Aleppo and Mosul and Raqqa count the dead from conventional bombs \u2013 American, Russian, Syrian \u2013 in the tens of thousands, you might think the 1945 statistics would leave the folk who live there pretty cold. But the book of crises unfolding in the region \u2013 by the chapter, almost every month \u2013 is of critical importance to every soul who lives between the Mediterranean and India<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For India itself is a nuclear power. So is Pakistan<\/a>. And so, of course, is Israel<\/a>. None of them have signed the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons<\/a> Treaty (NPT). All are threatening war, over Kashmir, or over Iran<\/a>, the only nation under threat which has not (yet) got nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Ayatollah Khomeini originally seized on America\u2019s refusal to express its remorse at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings \u2013 \u201cthey\u2019ve killed hundreds of thousands of people \u2026 many years have passed and they can\u2019t even bring themselves to apologise,\u201d he said, and the current Iranian leadership have continued Khomeini\u2019s theme. The \u201conly nuclear criminal in the world,\u201d according to the \u201cSupreme Leader\u2019s\u201d successor, Ali Khamanei, \u201cis falsely claiming to fight the proliferation of nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hiroshima<\/p><\/div>\n

Iran, it should be added, did sign the NPT, but was later found in non-compliance of the safeguard agreement. And Iran, of course, is the non-nuclear power now being constantly threatened with war by two nuclear powers \u2013 America and Israel \u2013 the first of which, under Donald Trump<\/a>, tore up his country\u2019s commitment to the only international agreement that ever existed to limit Iran\u2019s nuclear programme.<\/p>\n

As the US applies new sanctions to Iran \u2013 miserably supported by the ever-compliant banks and big businesses of Europe \u2013 Iran marginally breaks its side of the nuclear control agreement. And thus becomes the recipient of even more ferocious threats from Washington and Israel.<\/p>\n

The word \u201cnuclear\u201d is not just a harmless adjective. Look at the old photographs of the blisters on the dying Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iran itself suffered the horrors of gas warfare when Iraq \u2013 supported at the time by the US \u2013 used chemicals on Iranian soldiers and civilians. I saw their gas-gangrene wounds with my own eyes in the late 1980s and they reminded me of the Hiroshima snapshots. The Iranians really do know the effects of \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yet they, we are supposed to believe, are the nuclear \u201cthreat\u201d in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic is no saints\u2019 paradise. Its corruption (within the government), its cruelty towards its own dissenters, its hangman\u2019s noose justice against its own people and its prim disgust at even the most innocent demand for freedom, scarcely qualify the immensely wealthy Revolutionary Guards Corps \u2013 \u201cheroes\u201d of a new \u201ctanker war\u201d<\/a> and masters of Houthi drone technology \u2013 to give lectures on morality. And if we thought that the Iranians held in reserve \u2013 let us say \u2013 200 nuclear warheads, we should be trembling in our boots. But they don\u2019t. It\u2019s Israel that conceals \u2013 but will not say so \u2013 perhaps 200 nuclear warheads<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Not only do we not complain about this. We regard any suggestion of their existence as akin to interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Israel has never confirmed that their nuclear weapons exist: therefore we must not say that they do. Enquire about their exact number and you are treated by Israel\u2019s supporters with deep suspicion. It\u2019s a private matter, we are led to understand. Anyway the Israelis can be trusted with such vile weapons. Can\u2019t they?<\/p>\n

Which brings us to Saudi Arabia. Every nation in the Middle East which seeks nuclear power \u2013 and the list includes Egypt, by the way \u2013 insists, like Iran, that the technology is needed to build power plants.<\/p>\n

Read more: It is Trump that needs to be deterred from war, not Iran<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet when Reuters \u2013 whose investigations of human rights and secret criminal activities in the region are first class<\/a> in both courage and detail \u2013 reports on the accurate leaks that US energy secretary Rick Perry approved six secret authorisations to give nuclear assistance to Saudi Arabia, few outside Congress issued a murmur of concern. Not even Israel \u2013 which always rages when America\u2019s arms manufacturers hoover up billions of dollars from Arab arms buyers, especially from Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

South Koreans \u2013 those endangered people always under nuclear threat from the Rocket-man-turned-good-guy further north \u2013 are also bidding for the Saudi nuclear deal. So are the Russians. So how come, now that the Saudi regime has talked of \u201ccutting off the head of the snake\u201d in Iran, we don\u2019t regard Riyadh as a potential nuclear threat?<\/p>\n

How soon will it be before we wonder if the Saudis aren\u2019t going a bit too far down the nuclear path and we suggest a nuclear control agreement along the lines of Obama\u2019s Iran deal? After all, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman \u2013 and let\u2019s not bring up the little matter of the Saudi evisceration and chopping up of poor Jamal Khashoggi at this point \u2013 told CBS last year that his Kingdom would develop nuclear weapons if Iran did.<\/p>\n

And as we digest all this \u2013 although we really are not talking about it at all, are we? \u2013 India decides to tear up its own legal arrangements in Jammu and Kashmir. As the only Muslim-majority state in India, it is now to be split into two union territories, diminishing Muslim power and allowing non-Muslim Indians from other regions to move into this dangerous remnant of the old Raj. The Hindu-led government used a presidential order to revoke the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan, which holds the other bit of Kashmir \u2013 both claim the whole area as their own \u2013 is understandably infuriated by this change in the status quo.<\/p>\n

And both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Indeed, there was nothing more pathetic, after Pakistan\u2019s first nuclear tests in 1998, than to travel around this other \u201cIslamic Republic\u201d and, amid the abject poverty of its villages, gaze at the awful commemorative papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 re-creations of the granite mountains in which the explosions took place. There is, I suppose, no point in adding that there are more armed extremist Islamists on Islamabad\u2019s payroll in both Pakistan and Afghanistan \u2013 coddled by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency \u2013 than there are in the whole of Iran.<\/p>\n

So this is a very good week, as we typically ignore the commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for us to remember the nuclear threat in the Middle East. At least one nation in every potential conflict in the region \u2013 from the Indus to the Mediterranean \u2013 is a nuclear power or a prospective nuclear power. India against Pakistan and vice-versa, the US with Iran, the Israelis with Iran \u2013 or just about any other Levantine power \u2013 and the Saudis versus Iran, and Iran against almost anyone else except Syria.<\/p>\n

Oh yes, and Donald Trump has just pulled out of the Cold War Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia \u2013 blaming Russia for violating the ban on missiles ranging up to 3,400 miles. All Russia\u2019s fault, says Mike Pompeo. The treaty is now \u201cdead\u201d, the Russian foreign ministry confirms. So it\u2019s time, perhaps, to re-watch those old documentaries of the the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay and the bomb codenamed \u201cLittle Boy\u201d and the brilliant mushroom cloud and all those scorched corpses at Hiroshima.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Robert Fisk is the multi-award winning Middle East correspondent of <\/em>The Independent, based in Beirut. He has lived in the Arab world for more than 40 years, covering Lebanon, five Israeli invasions, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein\u2019s invasion of Kuwait, the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the 2011 Arab revolutions. Occasionally describing himself as an \u2018Ottoman correspondent\u2019 because of the huge area he covers, Fisk joined <\/em>The Independent in 1989. He has written best-selling books on the Middle East, including <\/em>Pity the Nation and<\/em> The Great War for Civilisation. He was born in Kent in 1946 and gained his BA in English and Classics at Lancaster University. He holds a Ph.D. in politics from Trinity College, Dublin. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 msn.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Aug 2019 – This week marks only the 74th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the past few days, I\u2019ve had to look hard to find a headline about the two Japanese cities. But, especially in the Middle East and what we like to call south-east Asia, we should be remembering these gruesome anniversaries every month. Hiroshima was atomic-bombed 74 years ago on Tuesday; Nagasaki 74 years ago on Friday. Given the extent of the casualty figures, you\u2019d think they\u2019d be unforgettable. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":140133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[120,1347,260,487,866,504,291,91,429,1301,450,109,287,985,380,70,126,118,172,875,75],"class_list":["post-140132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction","tag-conflict","tag-hiroshima-and-nagasaki","tag-history","tag-human-rights","tag-indigenous-rights","tag-international-relations","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-nuclear-ban-treaty","tag-nuclear-war","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-social-justice","tag-solutions","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war","tag-west","tag-wmd","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}