Remembering Hiroshima
Sixty years ago today the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended WWII and opened the eyes of the world to the horrors of nuclear war. A nuclear arms race ensued. After the cold war ended, many expected that nuclear proliferation would become a thing of the past. Some moves were made to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons. However, recently, several countries have been acting to build their own nuclear weapons programs, among the most disturbing being perhaps North Korea ("6-way" talks to stop that program are currently deadlocked) and Iran.
Courtesy of the "ENERGÍA NUCLEAR" webpage
In the past few weeks, there has also been a lot of talk about China, its nuclear program, and its intentions. According to the New York Times, Major Geneneral Zhu Chenghu said at an official briefing that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is ready to use nuclear weapons against the US over Taiwan. To quote him,
"If the Americans are determined to interfere [with the PRC's plans for Taiwan], then we will be determined to respond," he said. "We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese."
While the general's comments were quickly said to be his personal opinion, anyone familiar with the workings of the upper eschelon of the Chinese Communist Party will pretty quickly tell you that "personal opinions" up there are kept in the closed circle and are never made public, except by design. At best, it seems to us, there is a significant group in the Party elite who would advocate for such a move. At worst, it is an unwritten policy.
Today, while thinking about the effects of Hiroshima, and remembering the general's words, we looked at a map of China. Xian is just east of the centre of the country. He's he's talking about hundreds of millions dead, minimum. We then thought, what kind of thinking could lead to a government to believe that it had the authority make such a decision for its people? The Hiroshima bomb was tiny compared to most nuclear payloads today, and it killed 140, 000, including those that died from radiation after the immediate blast.
It has even been argued as well that the CCP actually wants war, as a means to "expand" and preserve the Party's existence.
All this may sound far-fetched and inconceivable. Could a government really be that self-serving and willing to sacrifice its own people? We are sure the world would never want to see another Hiroshima, much less dozens.
Comments are welcome and very much appreciated!
This entry was posted
on Saturday, August 06, 2005 at 11:01 p.m..
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August 09, 2005 10:42 p.m.Hi Marc-Andre,
Good thinking! Unfortunately, our guess is that very few people in China will actually hear anything of the sort, unless people outside make an effort to help them. Basically, as we understand it, the whole purpose of The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party is to allow the Chinese people a chance to evaluate their leadership based on realities that most Chinese people have never heard of. The Tiananmen Square Massacre remains unknown to most of the country, and is the topic most filtered by China's "great firewall." (with Nine Commentaries and Falun Gong not far behind). Full report: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/. Recently, Beijing has been using French-bought technology to jam various shortwave radio broadcasts into China as well. To counter these trends, a company called Dynamic Internet Technology is managing to facilitate information flow across the "great firewall," but this is still only available to the more technically savvy users. And, we're not quite sure how you'd get around the closed-circuit cameras trained on each computer terminal at the internet cafes, like in Shanghai...
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