The BOMB Is Still ALIVE!!!
On August 6, 2005, The Associated Press reported:
“Hiroshima marked the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack Saturday with prayers and water for the dead and a call by the mayor for nuclear powers to abandon their arsenals and stop ‘jeopardizing human survival.’… ‘Many people around the world have succumbed to the feeling that there is nothing we can do,’ he said. ‘Within the United Nations, nuclear club members use their veto power to override the global majority and pursue their selfish objectives.’…
“Officials estimate that about 140,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months after the Enola Gay dropped its deadly payload over the city, which then had a population of about 350,000. Three days later, another U.S. bomber, Bock’s Car, dropped a plutonium bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing about 80,000 people. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, ending World War II… Hiroshima officials now put the total number of dead in this city alone at 242,437.This year, 5,373 more names were added to the list.”
As NetWorld pointed out, “The city of Hiroshima had invited governmental officials from 38 countries to participate in the memorial, including officials from the five nuclear powers–the USA, Great Britain, Russia, China and France. But only Russia sent a representative!”
Most Americans still believe that the USA did the right thing in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Reuters reported on August 6, 2005: “[According to a telephone poll], 57 percent approved of the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while 38 percent said they disapproved.” USA Today wrote on August 6, 2005, that “hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions more Japanese military and civilians and U.S. military would have died if a land invasion of Japan had taken place. The A-bomb led to much deadlier nuclear weapons… The A-bomb indeed was hell for Japanese who lived in or near Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it also was the high-water mark of WWII because it ended the hell for all others fighting that conflict.”
The BBC News also explained, in its article of August 6, 2005, that “Many commentators believe the US attack helped bring an early end to World War II in the Pacific.”
But not everyone agrees.
In their article, “The myths of Hiroshima,” which was published in the LA Times on August 5, 2005, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, co-authors of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” paint quite a different picture. They state:
“To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even ‘saving’ a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.
“This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war… Americans were also told that use of the bombs ‘led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands.’ But it’s not that straightforward… it was the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final ‘shock’ that led to Japan’s capitulation.
“The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that ‘special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities’ warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
“The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper’s magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
“The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on ‘an essentially defeated enemy.’ President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.
“These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.”
Whether one agrees with the statements in the above article, or not, perception is sometimes stronger than fact. As the article continues to explain, the official version has “made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy’s arsenal… Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately threaten our very survival. Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare–and Osama bin Laden’s frequently voiced dream–an atomic suitcase bomb smuggled into an American city: ‘Of course it could be done,’ Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, ‘and people could destroy New York.’ Ironically, Hiroshima’s myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender–and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast.”
War leads to more war, and nuclear weapons WILL be used in the next World War. To say that nuclear weapons will never be used in war is plainly wrong. They HAVE been used before–in Hiroshima and Nagasaki–and the Bible clearly shows that they WILL be used again. In fact, the coming war will threaten the very survival of man–and if God would not shorten those days, NO FLESH would be saved ALIVE (Matthew 24:22). We are living in sobering times, indeed. Will man ever learn–BEFORE it is too late?
New Avian Flu Is Coming
On August 5, 2005, the Boston Globe reported that “Russian authorities, struggling to contain an outbreak of avian flu that has killed thousands of birds in Siberia, yesterday acknowledged that a spread of the virus into Europe seems almost inevitable… health officials confirmed that the outbreak includes a strain that has been known to affect humans. Scientists fear that expansion of the virus’s geography increases the chances of a major outbreak within the human population.”
On August 10, 2005, Reuters reported about these additional facts: “A bird flu outbreak extended its reach in Russian Siberia and spread to Mongolia on Wednesday, and neighboring Kazakhstan confirmed a fowl virus found in the Central Asian state could kill humans. Officials said no people had been infected so far, but the highly potent H5N1 strain has killed over 50 people in Asia since 2003. Outbreaks in the ex-Soviet bloc raised fears the virus could infect humans and trigger a global epidemic… Some Russian health and veterinary officials have suggested migrating birds could export the virus as far away as the United States from Siberia… There are no known cases of H5N1 bird flu passing from one human to another, but some health officials fear that the virus could mutate and create a pandemic to rival the 40 million people killed by Spanish flu at the end of World War One.”
Fuel Crunch Reaches Astronomical Proportions
The Associated Press reported on August 10, 2005:
“While fliers haven’t yet had to add that problem to the list of headaches associated with air travel, it may not be far away. Airports in Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada recently came within a few days–and at times within hours–of running out of jet fuel. Because of supply bottlenecks, airlines were forced to fly in extra fuel from other markets and scramble for deliveries by truck. But these are expensive, short-term fixes that do not address what airline executives consider to be the underlying problem: with passenger traffic rising above pre-9/11 levels, the nation’s aviation business is slowly outgrowing the infrastructure that fuels it. What started as routine supply tightness in these markets quickly snowballed following disruptive events that included a hurricane, a canceled fuel shipment and, ironically, the airlines’ own efforts to prevent shortages, according to several airline executives… The fuel supply woes are dogging an industry already losing billions of dollars a year in large part because of soaring fuel costs. The price of jet fuel averages $1.91 per gallon in Los Angeles, up 46 percent from a year ago, according to government data.”
West Nile Virus in San Diego
On August 4, 2005, The Union Tribune reported that “Three more dead birds have tested positive for West Nile virus in San Diego County, bringing the total number to five this year.” The paper continued with a rather humorous statement–if it weren’t so tragic:
“Most people infected with West Nile won’t become sick, though about 20 percent will experience flulike symptoms. About one in 150 infected people experience severe symptoms, including high fever, coma, tremors, muscle weakness and paralysis. A small percentage of them die.”
Coming Merger of Catholics and Anglicans?
On August 5, 2005, the “Church Times” published an interesting article about an agreement reached by the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church, pertaining to the role of the “Virgin Mary.” The article pointed out:
“A new arcic report, published this week, argues that differences in the understanding of the Virgin Mary should not divide the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches… The 60-page text, Mary: Grace and hope in Christ, brings to an end the work of the second phase of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II), which first met in 1983. The report was published on Monday in Seattle, in the United States.”
Incredibly, the report tries to justify the WRONG doctrine of the “immaculate conception,” by misquoting or misapplying Scripture. [The teaching of the “immaculate conception” holds that Mary, throughout her life, including after the birth of Christ, never had a sexual relationship with any man–which is contrary to Scripture.] The report does not even attempt to justify the WRONG teaching of Mary’s assumption–which idea is also clearly in violation of Biblical teaching. The article points out:
“The statement proposes a new understanding of the immaculate conception and the assumption, in a theological framework ‘of grace and hope.’ It links Gabriel’s affirmation of Mary as ‘graced’ in Luke 1 to the immaculate conception. ‘In view of her vocation to be the mother of the Holy One (Luke 1:35), we can affirm together that Christ’s redeeming work reached back in Mary to the depths of her being, and to her earliest beginnings. This is not contrary to the teaching of scripture’…
“The Commission does not resolve what it describes as ‘problems not only for Anglicans but also for other Christians’ about the immaculate conception and the assumption, in that they were defined respectively by the Pope as having been ‘revealed by God’ (1854) and “divinely revealed” (1950). These phrases ‘reflect the theology of revelation that was dominant in the Roman Catholic Church at the time… They have to be understood today in the light of the way this teaching was refined by the Second Vatican Council’…”
What is interesting about this development is the fact that the Anglican Church–unlike the Catholic Church–is willing to compromise their beliefs in order to merge with the Catholics.
