TUC Radio Archive Special for Hiroshima Day 2016
Disarmament is more urgently needed now that nuclear weapons have spread far beyond the original weapons states and there are even voices in Japan’s parliament today that call for nuclear weapons. And Makhijani shows that we can only find the path back from the abyss if we are clear and honest about how nuclear weapons were invented and first used. And there is much information in this talk that has been shunned or kept secret.
In common history Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima represent the beginning and the end events of World War II suggesting that the attack on Pearl Harbor forced the US into war and the bombing of Hiroshima saved the lives of up to one million US soldiers who might have been killed in an invasion of Japan. With help from long ignored or classified information Arjun Makhijani re-analyzes both events. This talk, given to Nuke Free Now in August 2012 near the Los Alamos Weapons Lab, presents thought provoking information about why and how nuclear weapons were developed and who really was in control of their use.
Questions raised are: Why was the US fleet moved from San Diego to Pearl Harbor? Does the Japanese attack have anything to do with the US oil embargo? What were the original goals of the Manhattan Project and why and when were they changed? And who was in charge of this secret program when even the US Vice President or the generals responsible for WWII did not know?
Makhijani, originally from Mumbai, India, holds a Ph.D. in engineering with focus on nuclear fusion from the University of California, Berkeley. He has written books and articles on the nuclear fuel cycle, weapons production, testing, workers’ exposure to radiation and nuclear waste. He also wrote the ground breaking book: Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, the first analysis of a transition to a U.S. economy based completely on renewable energy. Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, the website is IEER.org and has three decades of activism for disarmament.
Listeners are invited to post comments on Makhijani’s Blog on the IEER.org web site at
http://ieer.org/disarmament/from-pearl-harbor-to-hiroshima
Arjun Makhijani spoke on August 4, 2012 at the Nuke Free Now Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Thanks to KEXP, Seattle, program host Mike McCormick for giving me the audio for this program.
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