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75 Years After Hiroshima, Real Peril, Real Hope
Seventy-five years ago, the United States waged the world’s first nuclear war. Since then, eight nations have detonated 2,056 nuclear weapons, a shocking number. As one analyst warns, nations seem “willfully blind to the peril.” Will humanity survive?
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Jesus foretold a time of great upheaval that only the use of nuclear weapons could bring about—a time shortly before He returns!
As the world marks the 75th anniversary of the ending of World War II with the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, what have we learned?
Consider this disturbing account concerning a nuclear test explosion nine years after Hiroshima. On the open Pacific Ocean, it resembled a mystical apparition arising opposite the morning sun. Roused from sleep, the Japanese crew of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru tuna boat crowded on deck to witness a bizarre fireball expanding over the western horizon. A short time later, as the radiant cloud billowed higher into the morning sky, a puzzling fine chalky material began raining all over the ship and the crewmen. The baffling precipitation lasted three hours, sticking to human skin and piling up on deck.
The fine dust, known later as shi no hai (“ashes of death”), was highly radioactive coral debris, which had been pulverized and blasted into the atmosphere by the then-secret 15-megaton Castle Bravo test (America’s largest thermonuclear weapon at the time).
Covered with the deadly ash, the entire crew fell ill with radiation sickness. Seven months later, the ship’s chief radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died of complications from the radiation, becoming the first victim of a next-generation hydrogen bomb. Nine years after Hiroshima, a Japanese citizen was again the victim of atomic weapons.
Since the first test explosion in July 1945, an astonishing 2,056 nuclear devices have been detonated by nine nations. What has this produced?
The Castle Bravo nuclear detonation described above caused the worst radiological disaster in U.S. history—worse even than the former Soviet Union’s Chernobyl accident—raining radio-active debris nearby and in lower levels over much of the world.
In 1961, Soviet military nuclear scientists exploded the largest device in history—the incomprehensible 50-megaton “Tsar Bomba”—chilling even the hardiest of people at the height of the Cold War. Test after nuclear test has blasted massive earthen cavities and heaved multiple tons of radioactive debris into the atmosphere.
Today some 15,000 nuclear weapons exist, with about 9,400 in military arsenals (the remainder are retired or technologically obsolete, awaiting dismantling). Russia holds the most at 4,300, with the United States not far behind at about 4,000.
And what about other nations with operational nuclear weaponry? Besides Russia and America, publicly known nuclear weapons are held (or capable of being produced) by the United Kingdom, China, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea and possibly Iran.
All this raises the specter of the unthinkable happening—a worldwide nuclear holocaust. Experts estimate that between 100 million and 270 million people would horrifically die within the first hours of a full-scale mutual thermonuclear exchange between Russia and the United States—to be followed by the complete extinction of humanity within a few years.
This leads us to consider: How in the world did we get here? And, more importantly, where do we go from here? Do we face the future with despair or with hope?
Technology arms race—75 years ago
Here’s a short history.
The sailors who caught a glimpse of the enigmatic metal box being welded to the deck of the U.S.S. Indianapolis on July 16, 1945—the same day an atomic bomb was first successfully tested 1,100 miles away in New Mexico—had no idea what its mysterious contents held. As they sailed out of San Francisco Bay, few knew that onboard was a high-tech weapon that would instantly incinerate some 70,000 people in Hiroshima 20 days later.
The weapon was the result of an unprecedented technological, industrial and manufacturing leap. Six years earlier, a letter written by Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein changed the course of human history. In early 1939, German scientists had formally confirmed the discovery of nuclear fission. By literally “splitting the atom” in a sub-atomic chain reaction, enormous energy could be released.
Alarmed, several European and American physicists and other scientists were deeply concerned. After a delay caused by the German invasion of Poland, the now-famous Einstein letter finally made its way into the hands of President Franklin Roosevelt on Oct. 11, 1939.
Roosevelt understood the gravity of the situation immediately. The Nazis could not be the first to develop an atomic weapon.
The president promptly set in motion what became known as the “Manhattan Project,” eventually employing more than 120,000 people, to build the first operational nuclear weapon.
Nearly six years later, the New Mexico test with a dense sphere of 13.6 pounds of plutonium-239 heralded in the nuclear age. On July 16, 1945, the “Gadget,” as the test device was called, produced a destructive 22-kiloton blast that shattered windows more than 100 miles away in America’s sparsely populated Southwest.
20th-century nuclear war
The first use of an atomic weapon in warfare commenced a few weeks later on August 6. A modified B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped the first such bomb (named “Little Boy”) on Hiroshima, a Japanese city of some 340,000 people with industrial and military significance.
At 8:15 a.m., 141 lbs. of uranium-235 explosively slammed together, blazed supercritical and detonated at 1,900 feet above the city. Around 30 percent of the populace, 70,000 people, were instantly killed by the blast and radioactive fire. About 70 percent of the city’s buildings were annihilated, even though only a fraction of the uranium (1.7 percent) actually reached critical mass. Thousands more later died painfully of radiation poisoning, burns and related injuries.
The next day President Harry Truman confirmed both America’s new nuclear capacity and the bombing. In a radio broadcast, the president said: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima … We knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first … We won the race of discovery against the Germans.”
“The danger of total destruction”
Yet, even then, the American president recognized the deadly threat such weapons posed to all of human civilization. He warned: “The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction” (emphasis added throughout).
Two days later, loaded with the plutonium-fueled “Fat Man” bomb, a second B-29 flew over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The 11 lbs. of plutonium went supercritical at 1,650 feet. At least 35,000 Japanese civilians died instantly in blazing radioactive horror.
Japan formally surrendered a few days later. In his broadcast of capitulation, Emperor Hirohito recognized the new nuclear threat’s potential of the “total extinction of human civilization.”
The Soviet Union then quickly accelerated its nuclear research program, aided in part by Soviet spies who had infiltrated U.S. top secret research facilities. Four years later, the world reeled in shock on Aug. 29, 1949, at the first successful Soviet nuclear test. Three years after that, the United Kingdom, as a joint participant in the American Manhattan Project, independently detonated its first nuclear weapon in a remote area of Australia.
The deadly nuclear arms race was on.
Importantly, ominous words from the Bible now powerfully came to life. Jesus Christ had foretold a “time of calamity” so destructive that, if not stopped, “not a single person will survive” (Matthew 24:21-22, New Living Translation). The potential expressed in these ancient words had now become reality!
What now?
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many were gripped by anxiety over the threat of nuclear devastation. Millions of school children practiced survival drills. Public “Fallout Shelters” were stocked and openly marked. Families built bomb shelters. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev almost daily threatened potential atomic war. The United States and Soviet Union faced down each other in a war of words and of nuclear deployment. Missile sites with operational nuclear weapons were established in Turkey by America, then in Cuba by the Russians. Nerves were frayed. Live nuclear exchanges were barely avoided.
Today, the perceived threat of nuclear war has faded. Even the fabled Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been shifted in some of its focus to the threat of climate change.
Even though many express grave concern about the potential threats of nuclear terrorism and atomic saber-rattling by small nations like North Korea, others seem more worried by pandemics like the coronavirus or economic recovery. As Foreign Affairs magazine recently declared, people seem “willfully blind to the peril” of nuclear-fueled extinction.
But the threat certainly remains. The international Union of Concerned Scientists issued a new call for peace for the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima. It formally reads in part: “Nuclear weapons are the ‘weapons of the devil.’ They could wipe out the human race and all other creatures. They could destroy the environment and turn the globe into a dead planet.”
The short-term threat is real
Nearly 2,000 years ago, Jesus was teaching His disciples from the Mount of Olives overlooking the Kidron Valley and the magnificent Jerusalem temple. As He presented His longest recorded prophecy (Matthew 24), He had much to say about our present age.
He outlined a critical sequence of events that would lead to global disruption and cataclysmic upheaval, as noted earlier. But it certainly wasn’t all bad news. This coming traumatic time, rendered in some English translations as “the great tribulation,” would be resolved by the spectacular establishment of the long-awaited Kingdom of God.
Indeed, this Kingdom, the ultimate hope of all humanity, will be ushered in with the open triumphal return of Jesus—then as King of Kings and Lord of Lords—to the very mountaintop from which He was then speaking.
The events Jesus described, as well as many other dramatic statements throughout the Bible, tell of tumultuous and massive upheaval, even the death of billions of people. Only the use of nuclear weapons matches the horrific scope of what is often described.
Why is this important? These times are ahead of us. If trends continue and nations and people continue to move away from the revealed truth of God, life will grow very difficult—even to the point of literal human extinction. But you and whole communities, even whole nations, can seek to turn their lives around, focused on what God has revealed. (See “Can a Nation Turn Back to God?” on page 26.)
Difficult times lie ahead. But there is real hope—hope beyond a nuclear doomsday. May God speed His coming Kingdom!” From: https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-magazine/75-years-after-hiroshima-real-peril-real-hope
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Repentance: What Does Repent Mean?
“A major message of the Bible is a call to repent and change. This isn’t popular, but it’s vitally necessary. What is repentance? Why does God require it?
According to the apostle Paul, God “now commands all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30 ).
Repentance is not a popular subject in most of the religious community. Seldom is a modern-day religious audience exhorted to repent.
Yet Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, vigorously preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and told his audience to “bear fruits worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:2, 8). Soon after John’s martyrdom, Jesus Christ continued the same theme by preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17).
Within weeks following Jesus’ crucifixion, the New Testament Church was founded. Peter’s inspired words to an audience of thousands of devout Jews were, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).
What does repentance mean? Is it required for salvation? How important is this subject to you? Read more about what the Bible says about repentance in the related articles.” More at: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/change/repentance/
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Update.
We are still like the Lone Ranger, or bank robbers, with our masks on when out in public. The lady who lived in the apartment across from me was taken to hospice. It is such a shame when folks take chemotherapy (chemicals) for cancer when there are better ways with more quality of life. It’s all abut the money.
My health insurance nurse came for her annual visit and declared me fit as a fiddle, and wished all her patients my age (85 this month) were as healthy.
On Tuesday the apartment manager designated me Official Cat Wrangler and I have their trap. All the tenants are now faced with eviction if we feed these stray cats. Some of the adult cats were born here and they are not about to leave home. I have permission to feed them so that they can be trapped, and I caught a silver grey cat that first night. But Navasota Animal Control wouldn’t take it, they said to take it to a vet and have it PTS at my expense, or dump it in the country.
Neither option sounded right to me, so I found that one a home as a barn cat. I also have my own trap here, but I don’t dare set the traps because what to do with the cats? The next few days were taken up with the usual chores and writing to every local rescue and shelter that I could think of. Finally, I think I have found places for all the cats, so I will start trapping again next week.
The real skinny white one won’t need to be trapped as he will come to me, and I managed to get some Revolution (for fleas, ticks, ear mites, mange mites, heartworm, etc), on him. I hope that it will make him more comfortable. I think he must have been someone's pet at one time, such a shame.
On Friday my church neighbor, Cherry, and I studied this week’s Bible study as usual, even though we will not be going to the church for the Bible study on the Sabbath. I have also been studying with the TV program “Through The Bible” each weekday morning for the last 10 years. Never can have too much studying, and my main interests are the Bible and nutrition. “You are what you eat, and what it ate” and “Let Food be Your Medicine.”
Then I got a phone call from my granddaughter saying that my daughter, Wendy, was in an accident and had been thrown off her golf cart. Because of this Covid thing, no one can go see her in the hospital. She is basically OK, cuts, bruises and sore head, no concussion, but will have surgery on her mouth today.
Few times in U.S. history have we witnessed such an explosion of turmoil, anger and division. A nation that has proudly presented itself to the world as the “land of the free” finds itself reeling in shock at the nightly displays of mayhem, rioting, looting and wanton destruction.
