Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow was born in Hiroshima in 1932. When Harry S. Truman took the horrifying, inhuman and fateful decision on August 6, 1945, to single out the United States for dubious renown as the only country in history to use the atomic bomb against another people—and did so twice in three days despite the horrendous results of the first attack—Setsuko, now 85, was a 13-year-old schoolgirl. At the precise moment in which the Doomsday Clock struck twelve in Hiroshima, she was only eighteen blocks from the hypocenter of the blast. What she would witness would be the direct results of nuclear holocaust—her city leveled, and friends, family, classmates literally vaporized or melting before her eyes in the expansion wave and firestorm that followed detonation of a primitive US A-bomb known as “Little Boy”.   Detonation over Hiroshima Setsuko’s immediate survival, and the fact that she also survived the nuclear aftermath and has reached ...

In a tweet I posted earlier this year when Washington was still on the fence as to whether or not Barack Obama should be the first sitting president to visit the site of the first of two US nuclear bombings of Japan at the end of World War II, I suggested he should not only go, but that he should also carry a heartfelt American apology with him. In the end, Mr. Obama indeed went, but he did not—and this, unfortunately, comes as no surprise, considering standing US policy on the subject—make any apology for what many, including myself, consider one of the worst war crimes in human history. US President Obama with Japan's Prime Minister Abe at the  Hiroshima Memorial. Last Friday, Obama became the first US president in the seven decades since to end of World War II to pay an official visit to the Hiroshima Memorial, a 30-acre park at the ground-zero epicenter of the nuclear blast that instantaneously laid waste to the Japanese city killing tens of thousands in the blink ...

I think I speak for many when I say that for “boomers” like myself—those of us who grew up in the Cold War years of the post-World War II era—it is singularly disturbing to witness how quickly the world appears capable of regressing from the time of relative peace and cooperation painstakingly forged after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s to a frightening and paranoid climate of East-West power struggles and the general panic that they engender. And just let me say to those who aren’t panicked and afraid, you probably should be. As I have stated a number of times in both essays and public presentations, I believe that we are currently facing the most dangerous time for world peace since the Cold War era. And the development of this new—yet old—climate of impending world violence has come at an absolutely dizzying rate, since the collapse of tolerably good relations between Russia and the West over the Ukrainian crisis—underscored by superpower rivalry in Syria...