Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, The Manhattan Project’s Interactive History

As with the estimates of deaths at Hiroshima, it will never be known for certain how many people died as a result of the atomic attack on Nagasaki. The best estimate is 40,000 people died initially, with 60,000 more injured. By January 1946, the number of deaths probably approached 70,000, with perhaps ultimately twice that number dead total within five years. For those areas of Nagasaki affected by the explosion, the death rate was comparable to that at Hiroshima.

The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, Manhattan Project

In the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian and headed north by northwest toward Japan. The bomber’s primary target was the city of Hiroshima, located on the deltas of southwestern Honshu Island facing the Inland Sea. Hiroshima had a civilian population of almost 300,000 and was an important military center, containing about 43,000 soldiers.

The bomber, piloted by the commander of the 509th Composite Group, Colonel Paul Tibbets, flew at low altitude on automatic pilot before climbing to 31,000 feet as it neared the target area. At approximately 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time the Enola Gay released “Little Boy,” its 9,700-pound uranium bomb, over the city. Tibbets immediately dove away to avoid the anticipated shock wave. Forty-three seconds later, a huge explosion lit the morning sky as Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above the city, directly over a parade field where soldiers of the Japanese Second Army were doing calisthenics. Though already eleven and a half miles away, the Enola Gay was rocked by the blast. At first, Tibbets thought he was taking flak. After a second shock wave (reflected from the ground) hit the plane, the crew looked back at Hiroshima. “The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall,” Tibbets recalled. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 15 kilotons (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT).

On the ground moments before the blast it was a calm and sunny Monday morning. An air raid alert from earlier that morning had been called off after only a solitary aircraft was seen (the weather plane), and by 8:15 the city was alive with activity — soldiers doing their morning calisthenics, commuters on foot or on bicycles, groups of women and children working outside to clear firebreaks. Those closest to the explosion died instantly,Victim of atomic attack with the pattern of her clothing burned into her back. their bodies turned to black char. Nearby birds burst into flames in mid-air, and dry, combustible materials such as paper instantly ignited as far away as 6,400 feet from ground zero. The white light acted as a giant flashbulb, burning the dark patterns of clothing onto skin (right) and the shadows of bodies onto walls. Survivors outdoors close to the blast generally describe a literally blinding light combined with a sudden and overwhelming wave of heat. (The effects of radiation are usually not immediately apparent.) The blast wave followed almost instantly for those close-in, often knocking them from their feet. Those that were indoors were usually spared the flash burns, but flying glass from broken windows filled most rooms, and all but the very strongest structures collapsed. One boy was blown through the windows of his house and across the street as the house collapsed behind him. Within minutes 9 out of 10 people half a mile or less from ground zero were dead….

No one will ever know for certain how many died as a result of the attack on Hiroshima. Some 70,000 people probably died as a result of initial blast, heat, and radiation effects. This included about twenty American airmen being held as prisoners in the city. By the end of 1945, because of the lingering effects of radioactive fallout and other after effects, the Hiroshima death toll was probably over 100,000. The five-year death total may have reached or even exceeded 200,000, as cancer and other long-term effects took hold.

Derfner, Rattling the Cage: Terrorism, theirs and ours, Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2008

If there were any reason to believe that deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza would stop the rockets on Sderot and Ashkelon, I’d be in favor of deliberately targeting civilians. If it worked, it would ultimately save both Israeli and Palestinian lives.

I supported Israel’s unstated policy of punishing the civilian population in Lebanon during the war two summers ago because I saw no other way to rein in Hizbullah, no other means of bringing pressure on those fanatics to leave us alone.

But unlike most of the Israelis at all levels who want the IDF to make ordinary Gazans suffer and die, believing that this will force Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop their terrorism against us, I recognize that such a policy is itself terrorism. Deliberately targeting civilians for a political purpose is textbook terrorism.

It’s not true what the cliche says - that terror is terror is terror. When Israeli fighter jets and cluster bomb launchers act with deliberate disregard for “collateral damage” in Lebanon following a deadly, unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, or when Israel chokes off the delivery of basic supplies to Gaza in response to steady, unprovoked rocketing by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, that’s terrorism. That’s punishing and killing civilians to force the enemy leadership’s hand.

Spreading his wings - Haaretz, December 8, 2007

…a Channel 1 reporter asked: “Brigadier General Spector, are you a ‘refusenik’?”

Though he did not initially grasp its full significance, the question itself was enough to make him queasy. He asked the reporter to repeat it. “At the time I was not proficient enough … I was not effective enough at responding, I hadn’t yet completely organized things in my head. I admit that what bothered me most then was not the moral aspect of the IAF, but its combat level. I asked myself why it was necessary to kill 15 children in order to liquidate one terrorist.”

And what about the moral angle?

Spector: “With regard to the moral aspect, I thought at first that there had been a mistake - that maybe the pilots and their commanders didn’t know there were civilians there, even though it’s not so logical to expect that in a densely populated area like Gaza, Shehadeh, of all people, would be in civilian-free surroundings,” Spector notes, referring to the July 2002 operation in which the IAF bombed the apartment building in which Salah Shehadeh, the head of the Hamas military wing in Gaza, resided with his family.

Gideon Levy, London’s burning for Dichter - Haaretz, December 9, 2007

Avi Dichter will not be going to London. The Israeli dream of taking in year-end sales, the new production of Othello or the sights of Oxford Street vanished before the public security minister’s very eyes. The Foreign Ministry advised Dichter not to participate in a conference there, because he could be arrested for involvement in the assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, when he was Shin Bet security service head. The one-ton bomb used to target Shehadeh in 2002 left 15 people dead.

The day after the horrible assassination, in late July 2002, I visited the homes that were destroyed in the Al-Darj neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces tried at the time to claim they were “huts,” to explain why it was unaware that people lived there. But they were apartment buildings housing dozens of families. The person who dropped a one-ton bomb on them in the dark of night knew it would kill many innocent people.

Among the ruins, I met Mohammed Matar, a Palestinian laborer who had worked in Israel for 30 years, lying in the rubble of his home, his arm and eye bandaged. In the “targeted killing” planned by Dichter’s Shin Bet, Matar lost his daughter, his daughter-in-law and four toddler grandchildren. The pictures of the horror from the Gazan neighborhood have haunted me ever since. Someone, I thought, must pay for this. Could it be that no one is to blame or responsible for such an act?

Shehadeh’s assassination became a seminal event for Israel’s critics the world over. It was not different from many other liquidation operations the Shin Bet had planned for the IDF. In July 2006, for example, Israel assassinated nearly all of the Abu Salmiyeh family - Dr. Nabil Abu Salmiyeh, a lecturer in mathematics, his wife and seven of their children - because wanted man Mohammed Def was visiting their home at the time. In the past seven years, 368 Palestinians were killed in liquidation operations of which Dichter was the founding father.

Dichter cancels U.K. trip over fears of ‘war crimes’ arrest - Haaretz, December 6, 2007

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter canceled a trip to Britain over concerns he would be arrested due to his involvement in the decision to assassinate the head of Hamas’ military wing in July 2002.

Fifteen people were killed in the bombing of Salah Shehade’s house in Gaza, among them his wife and three children, when Dichter was head of the Shin Bet security service. He is the first minister to have to deal with a possible arrest.

Dichter was invited to take part in a conference by a British research institute on “the day after” Annapolis. He was supposed to give an address on the diplomatic process.

Dichter contacted the Foreign Ministry and sought an opinion on the matter, among other reasons because of previous cases in which complaints were filed in Britain and arrest warrants were issued on suspicion of war crimes by senior officers who served during the second intifada.

The Foreign Ministry wrote Dichter that it did not recommend he visit Britain because of a high probability that an extreme leftist organization there would file a complaint, which might lead to an arrest warrant. The ministry also wrote that because Dichter was not an official guest of the British government, he did not have immunity from arrest.