Vancouver Meeting on Korea: No good will come from considering the DPRK an aggressor

By PAULINE EASTON

The meeting of the “Vancouver Group,” comprised of the states which made war against the Korean people in 1950-53, took place on January 16 in Vancouver. From the point of view of its stated aim – to find a diplomatic versus military solution to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula – the Vancouver meeting was as unproductive as expected. It could not have been otherwise given that the participants did not include the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), which is the target of UN sanctions that the meeting sought to strengthen, nor China or Russia, two parties which border the DPRK. The “Vancouver Group” seeks to circumvent the UN Security Council, which is still regarded as the organization entrusted to safeguard world peace, and the UN General Assembly, which is said to represent all the countries of the world.

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Trump’s threats to use nuclear weapons

Before Donald Trump became President of the United States, he campaigned against war, yet the first anniversary of his inauguration is marked by the open and repeated threat to use nuclear weapons against Korea, an open-ended military presence in Syria, where the U.S. now has about 2,000 troops, and continued war against Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. The drone warfare broadly increased by President Obama has been further intensified by President Trump, involving far more bombings in dozens of countries.

Meeting on Korea in Vancouver: Let’s Discuss

TML Weekly published on January 13 a timely and enlightening Supplement on the one-day meeting in Vancouver on Korea co-hosted by the U.S. and Canada currently underway. It raises pertinent questions about what is really going on about a “diplomatic initiative” of a handful of selected countries out of those that make up the world, given that the two Koreas have already concluded initial agreements on a unified team to participate during the 2018 Olympic Winter Games and holding top level meetings. The TML edition includes in-depth material on the question of sanctions and blockades, pointing out “Since the 1909 London Naval Conference, it is an accepted principle in international law that a blockade is an act of war.”

On the Beach 2017. ‘The war was over… Was it started by an accident or mistake. There was no victor… ’

The US submarine captain says, “We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

72nd anniversary of nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis!

Today marks the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the morning of August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atom bomb that exploded above the Japanese city of Hiroshima killing about 140,000 people in the initial blast, in total more than 237,000. Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on the southern Japanese city of Nagasaki killing 8,500 people and eventually resulting in the deaths of more than 70,000 people due to exposure to radiation and injuries.

Facts about US aims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Protest against Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s new security laws at the Peace monument in Hiroshima August 6, 2015.

One of the controversies about how the atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are remembered concerns the U.S. aims in dropping the bombs. History as written by the victors declared that this act was necessary to force the surrender of militarist Japan and bring an end to the war. The death and destruction was a tragedy but the Japanese people themselves bore responsibility for their own suffering, so the story goes. To this day the U.S. refuses to apologize for these war crimes and on a visit to Hiroshima on May 27 U.S. President Obama did not even acknowledge that the U.S. perpetrated the crimes or why, merely stating that “death came from the sky.”

‘Little Boy’ – a macabre irony

Panoramic view of the monument marking the hypocenter, or ground zero, of the atomic bomb explosion over Nagasaki | Dean S Pemberton, Wikipedia

By LILI CHI*

Tom Ferebee opened the hatches that protected Little Boy. At 8:14 a.m., the Enola Gay gained in altitude and began the 158° turn. At 8:15 a.m, Ferebee activated the hatches. He dropped the “atomic baby.” The rotation put space between the apparatus and the blast. The 20,000-kiloton, 4-ton, 3-metre long bomb blew up at 600 metres in the air, levelling 75 square kilometres of downtown Hiroshima with its heat and the shock waves. The flash gave way to a gigantic mushroom cloud of smoke and fire that rose many kilometres in height. Some 200,000 Japanese people died, melted, in less than 5 minutes. It was the morning of August 6, 1945.