We have a couple new foreign teachers in our school; one from Calgary, and one from a town in Cornwall, England. That makes five Canucks and an Englishman - and yet in about half the classrooms are maps of the USA. I guess maybe it helps that there are seven American military bases in Paju...
In the news, in case you missed it, North Korea has agreed to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear reactor in return for a million tonnes of fuel oil, and a promise that it won't get attacked in the foreseeable future. It still gets to keep the nuclear weapons it already has, and any that it can make from the material it has already produced... But it looks as though I won't be getting nuked anytime soon. Probably.
Oh, yeah, btw: the US has almost 6000 active nuclear warheads, as does Russia. North Korea has material for about 4 or 5, maybe. Also, the US remains the only country in the world to actually use a nuke against another country. Not that the North Korean regime isn't psychotic - but I just thought I'd throw that in for a little perspective.
1 comments:
An excellent discussion of the pros and cons of the use of atom bombs on Japan can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
The arguments against the bombings are of course strong, but if one weighs the total casualty count in Asia (Manchuria and elssewhere, in addition to Japan) by all parties, it is not so clear that more people died from the bombing than would have died if the bombs had not been dropped.
In Japan the US would almost certainly have deployed fire-bombing, which had already killed on the order of 100,000 in Tokyo and perhaps a quarter of that in Dresden. Although in general I would side with some of the top US military men, who opposed the bombing, I don't think the issue is straightforward, especially given the very strong pressure to end the war as quickly as possible. As well, the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, and the like left little sympathy for anything other than total war against Japan.
I'll have another brief diatribe about the US nuclear force at another time ;^)
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