Not the Hero We Deserve, But the Hero We Need

Almost missed anniversary

I was looking for stories about the 57th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing yesterday, but apparently didn't look in the right places. So, today I find one:



Reuters: Hiroshima Hits 'Pax Americana' at A-Bomb Memorial. Bush is apparently annoying the mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba:

Akiba invited Bush to Hiroshima "to confirm with his own eyes what nuclear weapons can do to human beings" and lashed out at Washington's go-it-alone stance.



"America has not been given the right to impose a 'Pax Americana' and to decide the fate of the world," Akiba said.



"Rather, we, the people of the world, have the right to insist that we have not given you the authority to destroy the world."

"Destroy the world"? Where does that nonsense come from?



For a Reuters' piece, it actually manages to have a shade of balance:

While Japan each year solemnly mourns its own war dead, less attention is paid to the victims of its military aggression and hardly any to the fact that its own military was engaged in research on an atomic bomb during World War II.



In a small but timely reminder of that research, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said at the weekend that secret documents on Japan's nuclear efforts, taken out of the country in 1949, had been returned to the institute in charge of the research.



Historians have long known about the research, although how much progress was made is a subject of debate.

I knew that Japan has a long-standing abhorence of nuclear weapons, but I didn't know that their development of an atomic bomb during the war was anything more than a rumor. Interesting.