Nuclear End of Days

The United States forced the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II   by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later.  The A-bomb dubbed Little Boy killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima, while another 70,000 were killed in the nuclear conflagration in Nagasaki  brought about by the bomb called  Fat Man.

The use by the  U.S. of nuclear weapons was said to have been intended to avert the loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives in the event of a land invasion of Japan.  The thinking was that Japanese soldiers and civilians would choose to fight to the end or commit suicides like they did in defending Saipan.

Now, aside from the United States, many of the former members of the USSR led by Russia, as well as China, possess nuclear weapons that could annihilate all life forms on the face of the Earth many times over in a nuclear World War III.

The only thing stopping a doomsday scenario involving the use of nuclear weapons, which are far more powerful now that those dropped in Japan, is a concept called M.A.D or the mutually assured destruction of all parties and non-parties alike in a nuclear war.

But even without the use of nuclear weapons, man’s war-mongering ways have always produced horrific destruction and unthinkable loss of lives like the million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, the wanton killing  by retreating Japanese and bombing of about 100,000 Filipino civilians during the Liberation of Manila in 1945, or the various pogroms or ethnic cleansings like those seen in Kosovo.

In fact, taken as single bombing events, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki carnage were surpassed by the firebombing of Tokyo on the evening of March 9 lasting until dawn under Operation Meetinghouse. In that operation, 334 B-29 bombers dropped 1,655 tons of cluster napalm bombs that incinerated the whole of Tokyo, with the biggest fatality estimate pegged at 200,000.

This tells us that even if the world is rid of all nuclear weapons, man still has plenty of war-making technologies to effect mass extermination of people. However, no singular class of weapons like the nuclear bombs can assure total annihilation at the shortest possible time of mankind.   With nuclear weapons, the End of Days is just a push-button away.–End- 

                                                  

Image by: 4BP