Fuel Cell Motorbike
A British company will begin selling their fuel cell powered motorcycle in 2006. It's called ENV ("envy") and is nearly silent, emits nothing but air and water, can range for 100 miles on one tank that costs under $4 to fill up, and looks pretty bad-ass to boot. Check it out here, from National Geographic.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Nuclear War
August 6 marks the 60th anniversary of the date the Allies dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. We should all spend a few minutes contemplating this history.
When Germans and Italians began bombing civilians in Ethiopia and in Spain during the opening phases of WWII, the world was outraged. In these attacks, tens and even hundreds of people died. After the Allied leaders met at Casablanca in July 1943, under Churchill's urgings, a plan was agreed upon to destroy the German military, economy, and people's morale through a program of bombing civilian cities and targets without pretense to their military value. Churchill convinced the others that the best way to do this was to drop bombs on workers housing and factories.
We went from feeling horror at the atrocities of our Axis enemies to not only adopting their tactics but also greatly amplifying them. The RAF flew their missions at night and released their bombs at 6 miles, while the US planes flew bombing raids in the daytime to at least, ostensibly, avoid "civilian" casualties. In the bombings of Hamburg, Essen, Cologne, Frankfurt and other cities, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, culminating in the firebombing of Dresden (which was chronicled by Kurt Vonnegut in "Slaughterhouse Five") resulting in the immediate immolation of at least 100,000 civilians.
There were similar bombing campaigns on Tokyo, with sorties of 400 and 450 bombers dropping munitions from several miles above the targets, negating any pretense of "aiming" or avoiding civilian deaths. On March 10, 1945, Tokyo was bombed by 300 B29s which killed an estimated 100,000 people instantly.
There are several facts one should remember about the nuclear attacks on Japan. First, there has been repeated assertions that the Allies dropped leaflets on the Japanese cities prior to the attacks urging the population to flee. This has been proven to be demonstrably false. The leaflets were dropped after the second bombing. Also, Hiroshima and Nagasaki hardly qualified as "military" targets in the traditional sense of having troops, armaments, bases, or factories creating munitions. Hiroshima deaths numbered around 140,000. Another 130,000 died within 5 years from radiation poisoning and cancer. In the smaller city of Nagasaki, 70,000 people were killed. There were even Allied POWs north of Hiroshima, a fact known to the military brass. The oft-repeated phrase that the attacks "saved a million Allied lives" was created by a newspaper columnist who admitted later to pulling that number out of the air.
WWII was supposed to be a war to end Fascism and as such is viewed as a just war, a moral war. Is it possible to pursue a just cause (the end of Fascist aggression) using techniques that we abhor in our enemies? No one asserts to question the fact that the German Nazis needed to be stopped and that their program of exterminating Jews was incompatible with the world as we want it. Over time, the story of WWII has been told that there were no other option and that any enemy deserves whatever retaliation or revenge we can give them. I would advance the argument that if we are in pursuit of a moral justification that we need to make moral choices ourselves. Torturing prisoners, bombing civilians, rape, public executions - all these things and more can be useful in prosecuting a war, in bringing about a hastened end to the conflict, but should be abhorred by all humanity, not the least being those who profess a belief in Christianity or in any god.
Think about what it means when armies intentionally try to kill large numbers of civilians to weaken the enemy's morale. Instead of Frankfurt and Cologne and Essen, imagine if Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle were firebombed by an army opposed to Bush's war party in Iraq. Recall how in this country the rhetoric has been "if you don't support Bush's war you're a traitor" - sentiments echoed by Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and countless others hectoring people on talk radio. We are not even technically at war and are not allowed to voice dissent or question tactics like torturing prisoners, bombing neighborhoods, and so on. The average American today is as powerless to stop the Bush juggernaut as the average German was to stop the Nazis. Killing civilians is an atrocity, period.
The argument in favor of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki runs something like, we were attacked and so we are justified in visiting whatever death and destruction upon our attackers as was necessary to bring about the end of the war. Are those assertions really true? If we had invaded Japan and rounded up 140,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima and then lined them up and shot them, would those civilian deaths be any less abhorrent than the 140,000 killed by flicking a button and releasing an atomic bomb? Those were not 140,000 soldiers, but ordinary men, women, and children. The technology allows us some remove, some distance from the actual killing, and the further we can get away the more palatable the killing becomes. We now have unmanned aerial drones flown via remote by soldiers back in the USA. We had already participated in bombing non-military cities, so it was a short step to dropping one really great big bomb instead of the thousands of little ones. How did we incrementally step towards such a fate? Perhaps the surrender of the Japanese would only have happened after a long, bloody, casualty-ridden battle for mainland Japan. It's academic, but worth considering.
What happens now, when an enemy of the USA, or of one of our allies, decides that they want a quick end to whatever grievance (real or imagined) they have, and they decide to use a nuclear bomb on an American city? Will we be able to claim that nuclear weapons should not be used on civilians? Will we use the caveat that they should not be used "in wartime," or will we split even more hairs?
So here we are 60 years later, marking the date when the only country to ever use nuclear weapons in war used them on civilian targets. Yes, the war ended but Japan was already suing for peace (albeit with conditions). What did we unleash, what new paradigm did we create by showing the world that political and military goals can be achieved through nuclear war, through attacking cities? The nuclear arsenal we maintain today at a cost of billions of dollars every year has weapons at least 2,000 times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Who are we going to use these on and why were they created? We saved Allied lives by not invading Japan but we inherited a world where nuclear war is considered moral and just. Maybe it's time to again question the validity of nuclear weapons ever being used in a "just" war, especially in light of the fact that the Bush administration has started new programs to develop smaller tactical nuclear weapons to be used on battlefields.
The actor Richard Burton once wrote a column in The New York Times about his experience playing Winston Churchill in a BBC drama. He wrote:
"In the course of preparing myself... I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, 'We shall wipe them out, everyone one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth'? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity."
For more information on this, please refer to Howard Zinn's chapter "Just And Unjust War," pp. 229-266, in The Howard Zinn Reader. Note: Zinn himself was a bombardier in WWII and bombed cities himself.
August 6 marks the 60th anniversary of the date the Allies dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. We should all spend a few minutes contemplating this history.
When Germans and Italians began bombing civilians in Ethiopia and in Spain during the opening phases of WWII, the world was outraged. In these attacks, tens and even hundreds of people died. After the Allied leaders met at Casablanca in July 1943, under Churchill's urgings, a plan was agreed upon to destroy the German military, economy, and people's morale through a program of bombing civilian cities and targets without pretense to their military value. Churchill convinced the others that the best way to do this was to drop bombs on workers housing and factories.
We went from feeling horror at the atrocities of our Axis enemies to not only adopting their tactics but also greatly amplifying them. The RAF flew their missions at night and released their bombs at 6 miles, while the US planes flew bombing raids in the daytime to at least, ostensibly, avoid "civilian" casualties. In the bombings of Hamburg, Essen, Cologne, Frankfurt and other cities, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, culminating in the firebombing of Dresden (which was chronicled by Kurt Vonnegut in "Slaughterhouse Five") resulting in the immediate immolation of at least 100,000 civilians.
There were similar bombing campaigns on Tokyo, with sorties of 400 and 450 bombers dropping munitions from several miles above the targets, negating any pretense of "aiming" or avoiding civilian deaths. On March 10, 1945, Tokyo was bombed by 300 B29s which killed an estimated 100,000 people instantly.
There are several facts one should remember about the nuclear attacks on Japan. First, there has been repeated assertions that the Allies dropped leaflets on the Japanese cities prior to the attacks urging the population to flee. This has been proven to be demonstrably false. The leaflets were dropped after the second bombing. Also, Hiroshima and Nagasaki hardly qualified as "military" targets in the traditional sense of having troops, armaments, bases, or factories creating munitions. Hiroshima deaths numbered around 140,000. Another 130,000 died within 5 years from radiation poisoning and cancer. In the smaller city of Nagasaki, 70,000 people were killed. There were even Allied POWs north of Hiroshima, a fact known to the military brass. The oft-repeated phrase that the attacks "saved a million Allied lives" was created by a newspaper columnist who admitted later to pulling that number out of the air.
WWII was supposed to be a war to end Fascism and as such is viewed as a just war, a moral war. Is it possible to pursue a just cause (the end of Fascist aggression) using techniques that we abhor in our enemies? No one asserts to question the fact that the German Nazis needed to be stopped and that their program of exterminating Jews was incompatible with the world as we want it. Over time, the story of WWII has been told that there were no other option and that any enemy deserves whatever retaliation or revenge we can give them. I would advance the argument that if we are in pursuit of a moral justification that we need to make moral choices ourselves. Torturing prisoners, bombing civilians, rape, public executions - all these things and more can be useful in prosecuting a war, in bringing about a hastened end to the conflict, but should be abhorred by all humanity, not the least being those who profess a belief in Christianity or in any god.
Think about what it means when armies intentionally try to kill large numbers of civilians to weaken the enemy's morale. Instead of Frankfurt and Cologne and Essen, imagine if Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle were firebombed by an army opposed to Bush's war party in Iraq. Recall how in this country the rhetoric has been "if you don't support Bush's war you're a traitor" - sentiments echoed by Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and countless others hectoring people on talk radio. We are not even technically at war and are not allowed to voice dissent or question tactics like torturing prisoners, bombing neighborhoods, and so on. The average American today is as powerless to stop the Bush juggernaut as the average German was to stop the Nazis. Killing civilians is an atrocity, period.
The argument in favor of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki runs something like, we were attacked and so we are justified in visiting whatever death and destruction upon our attackers as was necessary to bring about the end of the war. Are those assertions really true? If we had invaded Japan and rounded up 140,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima and then lined them up and shot them, would those civilian deaths be any less abhorrent than the 140,000 killed by flicking a button and releasing an atomic bomb? Those were not 140,000 soldiers, but ordinary men, women, and children. The technology allows us some remove, some distance from the actual killing, and the further we can get away the more palatable the killing becomes. We now have unmanned aerial drones flown via remote by soldiers back in the USA. We had already participated in bombing non-military cities, so it was a short step to dropping one really great big bomb instead of the thousands of little ones. How did we incrementally step towards such a fate? Perhaps the surrender of the Japanese would only have happened after a long, bloody, casualty-ridden battle for mainland Japan. It's academic, but worth considering.
What happens now, when an enemy of the USA, or of one of our allies, decides that they want a quick end to whatever grievance (real or imagined) they have, and they decide to use a nuclear bomb on an American city? Will we be able to claim that nuclear weapons should not be used on civilians? Will we use the caveat that they should not be used "in wartime," or will we split even more hairs?
So here we are 60 years later, marking the date when the only country to ever use nuclear weapons in war used them on civilian targets. Yes, the war ended but Japan was already suing for peace (albeit with conditions). What did we unleash, what new paradigm did we create by showing the world that political and military goals can be achieved through nuclear war, through attacking cities? The nuclear arsenal we maintain today at a cost of billions of dollars every year has weapons at least 2,000 times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Who are we going to use these on and why were they created? We saved Allied lives by not invading Japan but we inherited a world where nuclear war is considered moral and just. Maybe it's time to again question the validity of nuclear weapons ever being used in a "just" war, especially in light of the fact that the Bush administration has started new programs to develop smaller tactical nuclear weapons to be used on battlefields.
The actor Richard Burton once wrote a column in The New York Times about his experience playing Winston Churchill in a BBC drama. He wrote:
"In the course of preparing myself... I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, 'We shall wipe them out, everyone one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth'? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity."
For more information on this, please refer to Howard Zinn's chapter "Just And Unjust War," pp. 229-266, in The Howard Zinn Reader. Note: Zinn himself was a bombardier in WWII and bombed cities himself.
