Hiroshima: 70 years on.

The debate about dropping “Little Boy” started shortly after Colonel Tibbets brought the Enola Gay to a halt on Tinian’s airfield to great fanfare, touching down at 2:58 pm, after a mission lasting 12 hours and 13 minutes.
It will continue for another 70 years.
There will be those generally some Guardian readers and Mr Corbyn’s supporters who denounce those who sent Colonel Tibbets and his crew on their mission as war criminals.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served to write a warning note in the annals of history. They were an actual demonstration of the horror of nuclear weapons. Of course there are those who argue (correctly) that the bombings saved lives as it brought the war to an end and saved the cost in blood and treasure of an invasion of Japan.
The British Gazette however would draw the Reader’s attention to the following hypothetical scenario:
Let us suppose – purely for the sake of conjecture – that the USA through diplomatic channels contacted the Japanese and a demonstration was arranged at an isolated spot in the Pacific. That senior IJN officers in a Japanese warship sailed there under a Flag of Truce and witnessed the awful power of the atomic bomb. Then let us suppose they decided to advise the Emperor to surrender unconditionally.
What would have been the result?
Well we can see it in a strange fashion now. There are numerous conspiracy theories about events that either happened or did not happen. Most famously are the Holocaust Deniers. Then there are those who suggest that “Nine Eleven” – the attack on New York’s “Twin Towers” was somehow stage managed by other than the late Bin Laden.
Had the above scenario taken place there would be those in the world today who would suggest that atomic weapons are a con, that they don’t work and it is all a bluff. That the demonstration and the mushroom cloud was a cleverly staged trick by the US military.
Today, no one – outside psychiatric hospitals – disputes the awful reality of nuclear weapons. That is what was bought with the lives of those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago.