Press TV has conducted an interview with Linh Dinh, writer and political commentator, from Philadelphia over the US atomic attack on Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Linh Dinh, your response [to the guest of the program Lawrence J. Korb].
Dinh: Well, US has never apologized for any war, so it is no different here. Even then there was disagreement about how justified dropping of the atomic bomb was, even American military officials thought that Japan was already losing and would surrender anyway.
It is not at all clear that even the first bomb was justified, much less second bomb. So to this day the general feeling among the American public, just as Lawrence has articulated, is that, you know, the bomb was necessary to save lives but I think that is a very dubious logic.
Using that logic that the atomic bomb is used to save lives, continued threat of the atomic bomb is seen as a positive, you know, it is not seen as something that threatens the extinction of human kind but something that preserves peace. I think that is a very problematic justification for the atomic bomb.
Press TV: I am getting the feeling from Lawrence Korb that at points he is trying to justify why there has been a use, he says there has not been a substantiated report in the Iraq example, but I have seen for the Nagasaki, Hiroshima example, for example that America was going to use, lose millions of lives in the case of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was a threat.
It does not seem to justify the reasons why the US continuously seems to be using this in different wars and I would like to ask your reaction to..., why is this going on like this?
Dinh: There is a pattern here. The US is denying the effects of depleted uranium just as it denied that Agent Orange was harmful.
American soldiers had to sue the Pentagon and it took them forever to win very minor compensation for the health effects that American soldiers suffered; much less what happened to the Vietnamese.
So, the Pentagon has always denied basically genocidal effects of its weapons until it cannot argue any longer; so the same issue with depleted uranium.
They would deny there is a problem until 10, 20 years down the line, after so many people have died, it will finally have to admit that yes, it is causing serious health effects for generations, for hundreds of years down the line.
Press TV: And yet we here have the United states, Linh Dinh, who has not signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, also the International Nuclear Disarmament efforts, they are not part of that. Why is that?
Dinh: Everyone talks about peace and wanting to eliminate nuclear weapons but the Big Boys meaning the USA; the USA is not serious about that, because by its strategic encirclement of Russia and China, it is pushing the world closer to nuclear war than ever, because it is doing all these provocations of Russia and China. In a sense it is resuscitating the Cold War all over again.
Just recently, there was a military war game between Mongolia and the USA. It sounds bizarre; why would we have these military exercises with Mongolia? What is the justification for that?
But of course Mongolia lies between Russia and China and that is another incident of provocation of these two rivals and the US is consistently provoking these two countries, so it might just get what it wants, a nuclear showdown.
Press TV: Let’s look at this study that I am going to read off to you. This is done by a professor by the name of Dr. Asaf Durakovic, he is a professor of nuclear medicine and radiology and he is a former science adviser to the US military.
He has studied on British and Canadian troops and civilians for depleted uranium poisoning over the past few years and his findings have confirmed significant amounts of this depleted uranium in the subjects urine as much as nine years after exposure.
What is this finding leading you to believe that even the US soldiers is a consequence? I mean that is one of the reactions I get from the findings of this Dr. Asaf Durakovic.
Dinh: Since the atomic bomb, the US has been involved in one war after another; it is somewhat impossible to keep tracks of how many wars the US is fighting at any moment in time, so the US is in the war business.
Conflicts is how it makes money; even Lawrence, who I don’t think would agree with me on too many things, would agree that the Pentagon wastes a lot of money and it is not just that these boys can’t let go of their toys. There is a lot of money to be made.
So destruction, mass destruction, is how this country makes money; so depleted uranium is just another detail, another cost of doing business and the US does not really care about the people it kills or even its soldiers, because there is a lot of money to be made.
So, yes, the soldiers suffer health consequences and of course the people who are invaded by the American military machinery, like the Syrians right now.
They are suffering, there is a hundred thousand dead over there already in the last two years. That is a lot of people and no one is really talking about the tremendous suffering unleashed by the American military machinery.
Press TV: And of course when we talk about war which we have talked about it in different examples here, I believe you, If I heard you correctly, you mentioned Syria and here we have what has been a proxy war that is happening on the ground there.
I am going to name two countries which is pretty obvious the United States on one side and Russia on the other. Of course the US has a host of a lot of countries behind it.
I mean it is a very scary situation when we are looking at that country, especially giving the fact that the chemical weapons as been alleged to be used by the insurgents. There are some facts that back that up.
So very scary situation; do you think there needs to be more done for this reduction of nuclear weapons and of course for the US to be in the lead and perhaps Russia to go long with it?
Dinh: Well, the US still has the most nuclear warheads in the world. No country would give up its nuclear stockpile, because it is a kind of leverage that the nuclear bomb has; that is why North Korea is so anxious to have nuclear bombs.
But the threat is not going to come from these little states, these rogue states, so-called, North Korea, but it’s gonna come from the bigger countries like the USA, China and Russia; because North Korea will not use its nuclear bomb, because as soon as it uses it, it is suicidal.
It is the big players that we have to worry about. So all this talk about nuclear bomb reduction, it is not serious, because no country would give up that advantage that it has. That is what makes the US a superpower. It's that it has all these nuclear bombs.
MM/HN
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