76th anniversary of the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6 and 9, 1945

Never Again! All Out to Make Canada a Zone for Peace!

On the very sad anniversaries of the U.S. nuclear attacks against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) expresses its deepest respects to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their families.

This Day. France conducted nuclear tests in Algeria 61 years ago but still refuses to apologize

On February 13, 1960 (exactly 61 years ago today), the French conducted their first nuclear test at Reggane in south west Algeria. The first underground test, on May 1, 1962, code-named Beryl, resulted in radioactive vapour escaping through fissure in a rock. Its ill-effects are still felt by the people of Algeria. France has refused to apologize and has also not released archival material about this test as well as others clearly reflecting ill-intent | Mohamed Boukreta

Research notes: The militarized Atlantic – From Norfolk and Halifax to the Irish and Baltic seas

Work in progress by Tony Seed

A report conducted by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) – published in July – found that the two vessels came within 50-100 metres of each other during the horrific incident on November 6, 2018. The investigation revealed that it was the third time in four years that a submerged Royal Navy submarine had narrowly missed a calamitous collision with another vessel.

Hiroshima and Halifax

Painting of the Halifax Explosion

By Tony Seed

The 75th Anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on the Sixth of August 1945 is a historic universal event with profound immediate significance to present international relations, the danger of war and even nuclear war. For Haligonians, the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has a special meaning ,which is even more poignant in the wake of the hugely destructive explosion in  Beirut, Lebanon on August 4.

From Sahtú (Great Bear Lake) to Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Canada and the atom bomb

It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe.
– William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada (August 6, 1945, uncensored diaries)

On July 28, 1931 the first shipment of uranium was loaded onto a small craft at LaBine Point, on the eastern shore of Sahtú (Great Bear Lake, McTavish Arm), NWT | Public Archives of Canada C-23960

By KIM PETERSEN*

Few Canadians know of Canada’s link to Little Boy, the so-christened uranium bomb that exploded over Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that devastated Nagasaki. Not only were Japanese citizens expendable in the nuclear holocaust, but the “Canadian Genocide Machine” [1] wreaked long-lasting damage on the Original Peoples in the Arctic.

74th anniversary of nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis!

Today marks the 74th 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.

Bridge of Spies: Will the real James B. Donovan stand up?

Tom Hanks is today’s Everyman good guy movie star – an honest, trustworthy and stand-up white man just like Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck and, yes, even John Wayne. In the recent film Bridge of Spies, one of those “inspired by true events” obfuscations, Hanks plays a certain James B. Donovan. In the movie, Donovan is an insurance lawyer lured into defending Soviet spy Rudolf Abel back in the good old days of the Cold War in order to prove that this is the land of justice and due process. Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg, appears to be headed into Oscar territory.

This day. Remember the Rosenbergs, murdered by the US ruling circles 63 years ago

Crimes of the Cold War | DOUGAL MACDONALD

On June 19, 1953, U.S. citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York on the false charge of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. The U.S. and Soviet Union were nominally allies against Nazi Germany at the time so the Rosenbergs were actually sentenced to death for passing secrets to a U.S. ally, which makes no sense. But the U.S. was a Soviet ally in name only. It is now well-known that the U.S. ruling circles, which had conspired with Nazi Germany during the war, had decided to openly betray the anti-fascist alliance before the war ended and to rebuild Germany as an anti-communist bulwark against the Soviet Union.

‘America First’ means nuclear superiority

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR*

Indian Punchline (February 6) – The US president’s annual State of the Union address traditionally focuses on domestic issues but it also throws some light on the foreign policy priorities. President Trump’s speech on Tuesday February 5 adhered to the pattern and if anything, the portions on foreign policy received scant attention, restricted to his “agenda to protect America’s National Security.” Trump’s re-election bid for a second term in 2020 provided the backdrop.

Warship Watch. No to foreign warships in Halifax Harbour!

Haligonians have a long history of protesting visits by warships. Photo of May 29, 2012 action.

(October 13) – On October 5, the French Rubis-class nuclear-powered submarine L’Améthyste arrived at Canadian Forces Base Shearwater in Halifax, the first such visit in two years. Speaking on behalf of the organization No Harbour for War, Allan Bezanson unequivocally rejected the presence of the submarine. “We want Halifax to be a factor of peace in the world and a zone for peace,” he told the Chronicle Herald. He pointed out that the comings and goings of these warships is usually tied in with war exercises.

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.

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.

A historic countdown to the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

To this day the United States claims that its actions on the morning of August 6, 1945, when it dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and on August 9 when it dropped a bomb on Nagasaki, were righteous, moral and proper. The following is a compilation of articles that create a historical countdown from Pressing Issues which looks at the behind the scene events of the days leading to the US nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively on August 6 and August 9, 1945. These unprecedented war crimes had nothing to do with the fight against Japanese militarism, which was suffering defeats everywhere and whose surrender was imminent. Examining the nuclear attacks on Japan, it is worth quoting General Eisenhower that ”the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”This mass murder of civilian populations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was instead meant as a threat to the peoples of the world, especially the Soviet Union, showing the depths of depravity and criminality to which the U.S. was willing to sink to establish its domination.GREG MITCHELL* provides a day-to-day chronology.

No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Canada needs an anti-war government! All out to make Canada a zone for peace

On the occasion of the 71st anniversary of the first use of a nuclear weapon against human beings, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls on Canadians to go all out to make Canada a zone for peace that stands against all U.S. imperialist war preparations and gets Canada out of NATO and NORAD.

CPC(M-L) calls on Canadians to be on alert to the manoeuvres of the U.S. ruling elite to unite its warring factions behind a Hillary Clinton war president with their own program to “make America great again.” The biggest efforts of the U.S. establishment and its allies at this time are to block the resistance movements of the people, especially their political mobilization for democratic rights and against war and aggression, in particular against U.S. preparations for a third world war. On the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, CPC(M-L) emphasizes the internationalist duty of Canadians to ensure Canada is not a factor for war as well as to directly oppose the election of a war president and the acceleration of war preparations in the U.S.

Thousands of Germans protest against arms exports, military mission in Middle East

Turnout doubles for the Easter pacifist marches, whose numbers had been decreasing since the end of the Cold War | Juventud Rebelde

FRANKFORT (March 29)  — Nearly 20,000 people participated in the traditional Easter pacifist marches in Germany to demand an end to arms exports and military missions, which are mentioned as the cause of the massive flows of refugees in the world.

New York Times: Tool of US nuclear disinformation

Alamagordo atomic test, July 15, 1945 | Jack Abbey

The New York Times’ longtime nuclear power reporter, Matthew Wald, has announced that he’s been hired as the senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the chief lobbying arm of the nuclear industry. Investigative reporter Karl Grossman wrote a piece a few years ago on the ties between the Times and the nuclear power establishment that go back to the dawn of the Atomic Age. 

Declassified US nuclear target list shows reckless disposition toward nuclear annihilation

The U.S. National Security Archive[1] recently released a declassified report on the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956. The report is a telling reminder of the depths of depravity and irrationality of the U.S. imperialists, who with their doctrine Might Makes Right, are willing to annihilate humanity in the name of containing communism and establishing global hegemony, aims which they continue to pursue today. What they achieved was the imposition of their irrationality on the world, based on the assumption that everyone else surely shared their depravity. These declassified documents are a sobering reminder that it is the U.S. which is the main culprit for nuclear proliferation and the major threat to peace and humanity in the world today.

Excerpts from the National Security Archive’s Electronic Briefing Book No. 538 on the SAC report are posted below.

70th anniversary of bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Never again! Fight for an anti-war government!

Seventy years ago on August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki causing the instant slaughter of 200,000 people and damage from nuclear fallout which has lasted generations. The action, authorized by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, was ostensibly to end the Pacific War and save American lives.

This day in 1966: The US nuclear weapons ‘accident’ in Spain

L to R: Lorenzo Gonzalez, Ana Josefa Lopez, and director Dina Hecht. Broken Arrow 29 (1986) | Courtesy: Dina Hecht

By JOHN HOWARD

This month, with little fanfare, Palomares begins its 50th year as “the most radioactive town in Europe.” If you’ve heard of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island but are unfamiliar with Palomares, you might wonder why. All appear in Time’s top-ten list of the world’s “worst nuclear disasters.” Palomares moreover has been called the worst nuclear weapons accident in history. So why do so few people outside Spain know about it?

The cover-up and whitewash were figurative, also literal. Though four nuclear bombs were rained on Spain, many vaguely recall a lone “lost” bomb, fished out of the Mediterranean intact.

Mandela is dead: Why hide the truth about apartheid?

A refelection by FIDEL CASTRO

Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro

(December 12, 2013) – Maybe the empire thought that we would not honor our word when, during days of uncertainty in the past century, we affirmed that even if the USSR were to disappear Cuba would continue struggling. World War II broke out on September 1, 1939 when Nazi-fascist troops invaded Poland and struck like a lightning over the heroic people of the USSR, who contributed 27 million lives to preserve mankind from that brutal massacre that ended the lives of 50 million persons.

Sighting. Fukushima

Josetxo Ezcurra

Why did Japan surrender?

US General Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, accepts the unconditional surrender document signed by the Japanese | Keystone/Getty Images

Sixty-six years ago, the US dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Now, some American historians admit that’s not what ended World War II in Asia | GARETH COOK, Boston Globe

‘Mock disaster’ aboard visiting US nuclear sub, and the disinformation of the Chronically Horrid

By TONY SEED

ALTHOUGH the vast majority of Canadians want an independent and nuclear-free Canada, a Canada which is a factor for peace, not war, the Government of Canada continues to welcome the unceasing “visits” of U.S. and NATO nuclear-capable warships with open arms: no questions asked. Its total hypocrisy is to the extent that it also claims to be the greatest upholder of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty under the pretext of “security” when it comes time to attacking independent states who are not kowtowing to the dictate of the United States.

Washington’s threat to the Grand Banks: By what right does the US lay claim to the sea and sky?

By TONY SEED

HALIFAX (12 April 2005) – The pressure exerted by Washington against allied countries goes so far as to directly exclude them from its master plans and to even directly threaten them, facing them with the alternative of either following a pro-American policy or resigning and withdrawing from state power. In the 1980s, these demands, as arrogant as they were unscrupulous, were experienced by the government of New Zealand, which opposed the presence of American nuclear ships in the ports of New Zealand. As then Prime Minister Lange stated, the Reagan White House tried to threaten the New Zealand government into not following an anti-nuclear or anti-American policy. The same language was used against Denmark and Holland, which had publicly refused to deploy US nuclear arms on their territories, especially Greenland. In opposition to all norms governing international relations threats were also addressed to Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme, who expressed opposition to the American policy of war and aggression in Central America. (His subsequent assassination was never solved.)