Hiroshima, Nagasaki: 78th Anniversary + US military interventions

The bomb detonated at an altitude of approximately 500 metres and had a yield of 21 kilotons. Casualty estimates by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation for immediate deaths range from 60,000 to 80,000.
In the weeks that followed the bombings and Japan’s surrender, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the object of intense studies by U.S. scientists. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was founded to study the effects of radioactive contamination on the victims. Its results, including the extensive film and photo material taken at the time, remained classified for decades.”   https://www.ctbto.org/news-and-events/news/6-and-9-august-1945-hiroshima-and-nagasaki

Yesterday the Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui marked this anniversary.  He said at the ceremony, also attended by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, ” … the road to a world without nuclear weapons was getting steeper, due in part to Russia’s nuclear threats, but that this made it all the more important to bring back international momentum towards that goal.”

What he did not say is who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Seemingly that piece of history, the name of the country that used nuclear weapons after firebombing Japan where the estimated death toll is a million Japanese, is being written out of the history books and must now remain forgotten.  Japan is happy to forget it and change history by dropping in Russia, as if. Did the US State Dept write his speech?

A year ago Ben Norton dived into the numbers of US military interventions. The US military launched 469 foreign interventions since 1798, including 251 since the end of the first cold war in 1991, according to official Congressional Research Service data.

This data was published on March 8, 2022 by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), in a document titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022.”

The list of countries targeted by the US military includes the vast majority of the nations on Earth, including almost every single country in Latin America and the Caribbean and most of the African continent.

It is important to stress that all of these numbers are conservative estimates, because they do not include US special operations, covert actions, or domestic deployments.   The report likewise excludes the deployment of the US military forces against Indigenous peoples, when they were systematically ethnically cleansed in the violent process of westward settler-colonial expansion.  CRS acknowledged that it left out the “continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States.”

Of the total 469 documented foreign military interventions, the Congressional Research Service noted that the US government only formally declared war 11 times, in just five separate wars.  There is more detail in Ben’s older article.

Let us not forget it

but this forms a major part of the reason why we are moving on to a multipolar world and a new financial system.  The world cannot afford this any longer.  We cannot afford to have people hungry without clean water and dying of misery while the US does its best to keep it so.   Will we see another war in the Coup Belt?

Kinetic war and economic war and resource war is why the world is crying out. This is why we have BRICS, SCO, Eurasian Economic Union, and a wealth of other organizations where we step by step teach one another as a species how to live without war.