Inheriting the Fireballs of Hell: The Hiroshima Challenge

Bee Z. Bendigedig
Bombshelter.org
August 7, 2007

As the world teeters on the brink of total Armageddon, thanks to a global network of war profiteers, multi-billionaire weapons manufacturers, corrupted politicians, apathetic and sociopathic mobs of industrial consumers, we once again cross the memorial marker of the first atomic bombing of civilian populations on our planet at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Every year, as an American military brat who grew up in Japan, I feel compelled to attempt to remind other Americans that it wasn’t Nazis, it wasn’t aliens from outer space, it wasn’t "the enemy" who committed this horrific crime against nature (not once, but TWICE!)— it was the political predecessors of the current politicians in Washington, DC who allowed this genocidal event to happen, changing the face and self-respect of humanity for all time.

Somehow, Americans have been conditioned to blank out the brutal, stinking facts of war— pushing aside maimed veterans, new technologies like Predator drones, and the Strangelovian psychosis we know as "the Pentagon"— so as to keep going to our jobs, being entertained, waving our flags and other "normal" activity. Confronting the full impact of the U.S. military machinery on the world is not for the faint of heart, and will likely lead to social crisis, depression, and a disturbing tendency to take extreme action of conscience.

Now that we have allowed George Bush, Richard Cheney & Co. to direct the complete devastation of the nation of Iraq, causing the horrific deaths of women, children, civilians who had nothing at all to do with "terrorism" in numbers far dwarfing the casualties of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, using our advanced air weaponry, mass-death cluster bombs, uranium weapons & other such genocidal technologies, how can any aware American individual even begin to claim we have made progress since the American atomic bombings?

Hell, Bush & his military contractor cohorts are even trying sell us on new "mini-nuke" weapons, concocting ever-more extreme terroristic scenarios to keep the millions of profits flowing into his benefactors’ Swiss acounts. And we’re all going along with the insanity, day by day. Just yesterday, Congress (allegedly sworn to uphold a shredded Constitution) passed another authorization to give Bush further spying powers. This after it is apparent to anyone with a brain that the Bush-Cheney team belongs behind bars for outrageous crimes against humanity.

Well, like I said, I am obligated to deliver this reminder to any American that still has any shred of belief in a "Republic" of the people, democratic process, humanitarianism, peace and other such idealistic principles which now appear crushed beneath the treads of Strykers and bombed out buildings, lost among the bodies of young, snuffed-out soldiers, Iraqi children and oil-soaked beaches, riddled with machine gun fire. All to make a bunch of criminals more powerful & wealthy.

I would love to once again get my hopes up (which has happened occasionally in the past 40 years), but since the day Bush Jr. was appointed President (after the Florida vote fraud), all seems to have been sliding wickedly, tragically down into the pits of hell, filling our social sphere with lies & complete corruption— to the point where few young people can have any faith in the recovery of the American "democracy," let alone any shadow of a "dream." It’s all a nightmare, a freaking horrorshow, folks. Intentionally so.

What Hiroshima reminds, or questions us is: how long ago, exactly, did we lose it? Was there ever any truth to the propaganda ideals of America, except for privileged Euro-colonials & warlords? If so, how do we explain the fact we have yet to face our reflection in the fireballs of hell which our forefathers have unleashed?

But antiwar activist Steven L. Leeper says that since his April appointment as the first foreigner to be chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation — which operates the museums and memorials — residents of the world’s first city to experience nuclear warfare have welcomed him.

Interview by Japan Times:

Do you, without qualification, denounce the view that there was any military purpose to the bombs?

I completely reject that it was necessary. All of the top military people of the United States at the time, from (U.S. Fleet Admiral William Daniel) Leahy and [then Gen., and later Pres. Dwight D.] Eisenhower (1890-1969) on down, everyone was against the use of that bomb at that time. The top brass thought it was unnecessary and a heinous act. I’m talking about the American military. The ones pushing for it were some civilian leaders and some of the military people actually involved in making the bomb. They really wanted to use it.

There are some who say it was not the last bombing of World War II; it was actually the first bombing of World War III, and that it was aimed at Russia and not at Japan. It was to warn Russia that we can do this to you if we want to — it was a threat, an effort to establish dominance in the postwar world. I am not enough of a historian to judge.

But as I imagine how people were thinking back then, the Japanese were the enemy. It’s perfectly natural to kill the enemy; you want to kill as many as you can. We had already totally bombed out, firebombed, 66 other cities in Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. So another bomb and another 100,000 civilians was not a big deal for us at that time.

And I think we had gone to all the trouble to make this incredible new device, and the people who did that really wanted to use it and see what it would do. And they saved Hiroshima, they protected Hiroshima from any other bombing so they could really see what happened as a result of the bomb. They saved Hiroshima for an experiment.

It was totally unnecessary to win the war. Japan was defeated, had no ability to fight back, was running out of everything. We had them totally embargoed. There was no need to invade. There was no need to lose a million people in an invasion of Japan. All of that is myth that grew up around the bombing because we didn’t want to feel we had killed 100,000 people for no reason.

I understand you are planning a tour of the United States — each state, two locations — to take the Hiroshima exhibit there before . . .

We’re going to do 101 exhibitions, but it’s not that we’re taking one exhibition, or even one of the major exhibitions to all these 101 locations.

What we’re doing is sending out our poster exhibitions plus some CDs and DVDs. And at least for 50 percent of them, we’re hoping to send an A-bomb survivor to the opening ceremony or an associated event.

By Dave Shiflett
Bloomberg News

Fear of a nuclear strike is a powerful weapon, as the public-relations campaign to launch the Iraq invasion — "We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" — reminds us.

A new HBO documentary, "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," graphically illuminates what that fear is all about. Though viewers have undoubtedly seen many shows about the bombings, this one, which airs at 7:30 p.m. Monday, will make a deep and disturbing impression.

This is not a political tract. Filmmaker Steven Okazaki presents interviews with survivors of the Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, blasts as well as Americans involved in the bombing runs. He also makes devastating use of contemporary footage.

Be warned: This material is ghastly and will not quickly be forgotten. In a flash, modern science turned humans into primordial-looking monsters.

Footage of victims being treated in makeshift hospitals — their faces burned to the bone, arms and legs blown or burned off and eyeballs melted in their sockets — is in fact unforgettable.
It is augmented by survivors’ recollections of what they and family members were doing at the moment of detonation: reading the newspaper, hanging clothes on the line, playing with toy boats. Two women, then orphans at a Catholic compound, were in church.

Then came an "enormous flash," recalls one survivor. "The light streamed in and filled the room." One man recalls flying 150 feet through the air, while another, some distance from ground zero, said the resulting cloud did not look like a mushroom to him but "a huge pillar of fire" — literally a holocaust.

After which came a profound stillness. "The only things that moved in Hiroshima were the flies circling over the dead," another survivor recalls.

The show, which runs 90 minutes, supplies context for the attacks that sounds eerily familiar. In another wartime film clip, Joseph C. Grew, who had served as ambassador to Japan, warns that while "their weapons are modern, their thinking is 2,000 years out of date."

Harry Truman makes a few appearances, as do members of the flight teams that delivered the bombs, including Enola Gay navigator Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, who says the mission — to end the war as quickly as possible — was accomplished. The Aug. 15 announcement of Japan’s surrender sent 2 million celebrants into Times Square.

Yet there was a sense of horror among the Americans.

The survivors are inspiring and surprisingly good-natured, as they cope with physical and mental pain.

"Even now, I can’t say my sister’s name aloud," says one woman. Another, the only survivor in a school with 620 students, says she has "come to realize the reason I’m alive is to tell people what happened."

Many have already forgotten, if they ever knew. Okazaki sent his crew around asking young Japanese what important event occurred on Aug. 6, 1945. None had any idea.

We are left with a chilling statistic. The world’s current storehouse of nukes is 400,000 times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima, underscoring the opening quotation from Albert Einstein:

Two years ago, Michel Pomarede, a French journalist working for France Culture, a French national radio station, visited Japan for the first time. He came with the aim of making a mammoth, 17-hour program about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, to accompany the 60th-anniversary commem- orations scheduled to be broadcast during the first week of August 2005.

Never before had such a lengthy radio program been aired on the subject.

This radio program is currently being made available online at http://franceculture.com and coincides with "Hiroshima, le souffle de l’explosion," a series of events taking place at l’Institut Francais in Tokyo’s Iidabashi district.

These events include the screening of 14 movies and documentaries, round-table discussions and also the showing of two significant collections of photographs.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
By Hugh Gusterson 2 August 2007

"I’ve come to realize that the reason I’m alive is to tell people what happened, so they’ll understand," says Kiyoko Imori, the only one of 620 students in her school to survive the Hiroshima bombing. Steven Okazaki interviewed more than 100 survivors of the bombing for his haunting film White Light/Black Rain, which premieres Monday, August 6, on HBO. The film features clips from interviews with thirteen of the survivors as well as four Americans on the planes that dropped the bombs.

The two bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 had a destructive force that stretches the limits of human imagination. Creating temperatures of 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit and winds of 1,000 miles per hour, they killed about 210,000 people immediately. Another 160,000 are estimated to have died over the years from illnesses caused by the radioactive "black rain" that followed. That adds up to about the population of Miami today. Gone.

After the war, the survivors, one of whom bitterly describes herself as a "guinea pig," were studied but denied treatment by U.S. doctors, though a handful were brought to the United States for free plastic surgery. Many worry that they have passed on genetic mutations to subsequent generations. Sumiteru Taniguchi, a teenage mail carrier on August 6, 1945, takes off his shirt and matter-of-factly invites the viewer to look closely at the burns on his arm and back, the ribs fused to skin, and bones so brittle they break if he coughs too hard. As a child being treated for burns, the pain was so awful that he begged the doctors to kill him. "I’ve shown you my wounds because I want you to know this can’t happen again," he says.

Okazaki’s film, made with a Japanese-U.S. production team, evokes the atomic bombings and their aftermath by interweaving such interview material with newsreel clips, survivors’ paintings of the firestorm, and long-suppressed archival footage of the aftermath. There is no narrator, but there is a moodily atmospheric soundtrack in the style of "This American Life." Some of the images in the middle of the film are very hard to look at, unless you’re a pathologist, but it’s important we not look away from what was done in our name.

"I can’t describe what I witnessed. I don’t have the words. It’s like when you burn a fish on the grill. That’s what they looked like," a survivor recalls. One of the burned fish, a woman now reconstructed by plastic surgery, describes her father peeling her charred face away from her head with scissors. Another recalls looking at a woman whose body had been burned beyond recognition and realizing from the gold tooth that it was her mother. As she and her sister reached out, their mother crumbled to ashes before their eyes. "This happened 60 years ago, but I’ll never forget it," she says quietly.

Okazaki slips between such survivor accounts and the testimony of four Americans on the planes that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese and Americans in the film—victims and executioners—are irrevocably linked by the bombings, but their narratives of what connects them are surreally divergent. The disconnection between their perspectives is as unsettling as the images of dead and disfigured bodies. While the survivors tell deeply personal and cinematically vivid stories of indescribable destruction on the ground with an arresting stillness, the Americans seem never to have descended psychologically from the altitude at which they overflew the cities they destroyed. (The one exception is the Enola Gay copilot who tears up when he meets a Hiroshima survivor in a 1950s TV show clip.)

Harold Agnew, who went on to become director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the Bomb was developed, laughs slightly as he says, "I wrote in my notebook, ’It went off. It really did!’" Explaining that he simply wanted to win the war, he adds, "No sympathy, no regrets." Theodore Van Kirk, the navigator, saying he was proud "we dropped it on time, on target," tells the viewer he "never had a nightmare, never had a dream on this particular subject. Never had a nightmare, period." Such banal serenity is disturbing.

White Light/Black Rain comes at an opportune moment. Arms control experts are newly concerned that, at a time when 400,000 Hiroshimas wait in storage in today’s nuclear stockpiles, a U.S. city will go the way of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed by nuclear terrorists. Meanwhile the last Hiroshima veterans—both those who dropped the Bomb and those who endured it—are passing from this world, leaving behind only the archival shadow of their experience. All this at a time when our ability to think about Hiroshima feels stuck: In 1995, the last time the United States tried to think seriously about Hiroshima, outraged veterans, politicians, and pundits forced the cancellation of a Smithsonian exhibit on the atomic bombings in Washington, D.C., rather than allow the public to know what professional historians have to say on this matter; and only last month, Japanese Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma was forced to resign for speaking the unspeakable in Japan—that the bombing of Hiroshima might have been justified.

White Light/Black Rain dramatizes the feeling of being stuck through an inventive visual device: Many of the survivors are shown standing immobile in a public place, clutching a photo of themselves shortly before the Bomb split their life in two, and the camera slowly zooms in on the juxtaposed images of the person that was, now miniaturized, and the person that is, while pedestrians stream by all around. This posed immobility amidst the flow of life conveys as much as any verbal testimony that, for the survivors, it is always August 1945.

In their own way, Americans are frozen in time with the survivors. If the survivors are inexorably pulled back, as if by a force of historical gravity, to that moment when the splitting of the atom split history, Americans seem to be frozen by a refusal to look afresh at what was done in their name. The 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, timed for the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings, was scrapped because it included a Japanese schoolgirl’s charred lunch box, photographs of cooked and disfigured bodies, and a window into the discussions of professional historians. Some of these historians argue that it is not true that a million U.S. soldiers would have died in a land invasion of Japan, as Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson later claimed; that the Japanese would have surrendered soon without either invasion or the Bomb; that the second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was gratuitous and unnecessary; that the bombing was as much a message to the Soviets to behave themselves as a way to end the war with Japan; or that the architects of the Bomb pushed for careerist reasons to see their invention used.

Critics have accused these historians of "revisionism." This is a curious accusation, since revisionism is the job description of the historian. If revisionism were not allowed, what would historians do? As new documents become available, and as the distance of time enables new perspective, historians are supposed to enrich our national conversation by asking new questions and revising the past. Otherwise our memory of the past, and thus our understanding of the present, is cryogenically frozen and the heartbeat of national conversation falters.

Filmmakers, like historians, work to help us see anew. White Light/Black Rain neither explains nor judges the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okazaki, an American of Japanese descent, simply asks us to look closely, unflinchingly at what was done, and to accept the witness of the survivors in the twilight of their lives. "All this pain we carry in our hearts and in our bodies, it must end with us," says Sakue Shimohira. Until we can look at the schoolgirl’s charred lunch box, until we can take in the suffering of the survivors, our defense of Hiroshima—if we still want to make one—will be dishonest. And until we look at what these weapons do as unflinchingly as Okazaki’s survivors look into his camera, they will not be able to die in peace, knowing that their message was heard.

The following is from an eyewitness account by a middle school student who was in a classroom during the bombing. The student managed to escaped the collapsed school building but suffered injuries.

"I’ll never forget that day. After we finished our morning greetings in the schoolyard, we were waiting in the classroom for our building demolition work to begin. Suddenly a friend by the window shouted ’B- 29!’ At the same instant, a flash pierced my eyes. The entire building collapsed at once and we were trapped underneath. I don’t know how long I remained unconscious. When I came to, I couldn’t move my body. Cuts on my face and hands throbbed with pain. My front teeth were broken and my shirt soaked in blood. As I crawled along, encouraging myself, I somehow managed to poke my head out of the wreckage. The school that should have appeared before my eyes was nowhere to be seen. It had vanished and only smoldering ruins remained. Beyond the school toward the center of town, all I could see was a sea of flames. I was so terrified I couldn’t stop shaking. Moving my body a little at a time, I was finally able to work free of the collapsed structure. Making sure to head upwind to escape the fires, I made my way staggering haphazardly through the rubble of the city and escaped."

Shigeru was a first-year student at the Hiroshima Prefectural Hiroshima Middle School #2 and was mobilized everyday with his classmates to work on clearing demolished buildings. He was exposed to the A-bombing on August 6 in Nakajima Shinmachi (currently Peace Memorial Park), approximately 500 meters from the hypocenter. His mother walked around the A-bombed city looking for her son, eventually finding him with a lunch box strapped around his stomach. The body was unidentifiable, and the lunch box, with its contents that he never ate, was burned black. (Approximately 500 meters from hypocenter. Courtesy of Shigeko Oremen) City of Hiroshima

By DAVID BAUDER
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 5, 2007; 12:08 PM

NEW YORK — It’s hard to imagine HBO’s disturbing documentary on survivors of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan appearing on an American TV network 10 or 20 years after the event. Filmmaker Steve Okazaki tried and failed to make it for the 50th anniversary.

There’s apparently enough emotional scar tissue built up to allow HBO’s premiere of "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" on Monday (7:30 p.m. Eastern), exactly 62 years after the United States detonated the first-ever nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. The second, and so far last, atomic bomb was dropped three days later. It ended World War II.

Why is the time finally right?

"History is always worth recording and if there is a moment in history that hasn’t been recorded and you’re in a place where you have the resources, you should do it," said Sheila Nevins, head of HBO’s documentary unit. She hopes it becomes a document of record shown in schools.

The uncomfortable footage of cities reduced to rubble and grotesquely deformed survivors has received relatively little circulation because _ unlike the well-recorded Holocaust _ this was something done by Americans, Nevins said.

HBO and Okazaki also felt the same urgency experienced by "The Greatest Generation" author Tom Brokaw and Ken Burns, maker of PBS’ epic series on World War II coming this fall. People who fought and survived World War II are dying quickly now, and soon there will be no more eyewitnesses.

The film is built on stories told by 14 survivors, with childrens’ pictures depicting the bombing and footage of the injured that was banned from the public for 25 years. The American-born Okazaki interviews crew members who dropped the bombs and wondered whether they would escape before their planes were engulfed in the mushroom cloud.

The project dated back to the early 1980s, when Okazaki agreed to accompany his sister to a San Francisco area meeting of bomb survivors for a school project she was doing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She dropped the class, but he went to the meeting anyway. At its end, one man stood up and said that everyone who agreed Okazaki should make a film about their stories should raise their hands. They all did and turned to him.

He made a short film and others that showed his interest in the era, including the Oscar-winning "Days of Waiting," about one of the few white Americans held in custody with Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Okazaki wanted to make a comprehensive documentary about the experience of living through the bombings and began doing it for PBS in the mid-1990s. But the project fell through, with the filmmaker believing PBS didn’t want to risk angering World War II veterans. He instead made a more personal film, "The Mushroom Club," and figured his dream was dead.

That’s when he heard from Nevins.

"I was shocked when they called and said they wanted to do this film and when they described it, I realized it was the film I had wanted to do for 25 years," he said.

When he attended a festival of bombing-related films in the 1980s, Okazaki was struck by how little survivors were heard from. People had an aversion; it was much easier to debate whether dropping bombs that instantly killed more than 200,000 people was right or wrong.

That debate continues today. Many believe that a potential U.S. invasion would have killed many more people if the Japanese hadn’t been shocked by the bombs into surrender. Some think Japan’s war effort was near an end anyway, and that the bombs were partly meant to intimidate Russia.

Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, navigator of the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, is among those who believe it was necessary to end the war.

He saw Okazaki’s film and didn’t seem overwhelmed.

"The story about the survivors of this has been told many, many times," Van Kirk, 86, told The Associated Press. "It doesn’t change. And this is just another story about survivors. I don’t think there will be much reaction to it at all."

There were no advance protests. Nevins is curious about how it will be received after what she thought was a strangely dry-eyed reception at a Sundance Film Festival screening. "It was well-received intellectually but it wasn’t well-received emotionally," she said.

Other than documenting the horror of war, the film carefully takes no sides on the morality of dropping the bomb. Okazaki even refuses, in an interview, to say how he personally feels about it.

"I do have strong opinions and feelings about it," he said. "But I have a stronger motivation to get these stories out. There was this empty space on the shelves under `H.’"

That’s not entirely true. The 1970s film "Hiroshima Mon Amour" contained post-detonation footage. The 1989 Japanese film "Kuroi ame (Black Rain)" was about the aftermath. Reporter John Hersey’s book "Hiroshima" has received wide circulation.

Something Okazaki found mystifying, and a barrier to his research, was the lingering stigma faced by bomb survivors in Japan. Perhaps it’s because they remind Japanese of a time they’d rather forget; it was never fully explained to him. When he sought to interview the "Hiroshima Maidens," girls who came to the United States in the 1950s for surgery on disfigurements, the only one who’d talk was a woman who now lives in the U.S.

Okazaki also found a plaque where the Nagasaki bomb detonated that said everyone within a one kilometer area was killed instantly _ except an 8-year-old girl who had fallen asleep in a bomb shelter.

He tracked her down and she refused a meeting.

HIROSHIMA, Japan: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged Monday to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons as Hiroshima marked the 62nd anniversary of the world’s first atomic bomb attack, which killed more than 140,000 people in the Japanese city.

Survivors, residents, visitors and officials from around the world observed a minute of silence at 8:15 a.m. Monday (2315GMT Sunday), the moment the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped its deadly payload on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

An estimated 140,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months after the bombing. Three days later, another U.S. airplane dropped a plutonium bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing about 80,000 people.

"Japan has been taking the path toward global peace for 62 years since World War II. The tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never be repeated in any place on earth," Abe said in a speech at Hiroshima Peace Park, near the bomb’s epicenter.

"We will take an initiative in the international community and devote ourselves wholeheartedly toward the abolition of nuclear weapons and realization of peace," Abe said.

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Abe also said Japan will remain committed to the country’s three principles of not possessing, developing or allowing nuclear weapons on Japanese soil.

His remarks followed the resignation last month of Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma amid a public outcry over his having suggested that the U.S. atomic bombings may have been justified.

Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba urged the central government to should stick to its war-renouncing Constitution.

"The Japanese government should comply with the nation’s pacifist Constitution and clearly say no to wrong and outdated policies of the United States," Akiba said, without elaborating.

There are about 252,000 survivors of the attacks, according to the health ministry. Many have developed various illnesses caused by radiation exposure, including cancer and liver diseases.

Ceremonies will also be held on Thursday’s anniversary of the Nagasaki attack.

Dangers pile up in deadly drifts
as the train plows blindly into night
following the flow of neon and pavement
toward the rim of a Grand Canyon

Speeding up rather than slowing down
even as wildfires rage all around
the conductor jams the crank ahead
warning sirens screeching by

We loaded the 15 tons of fuel with tax
what did we get- another day of shame
and deeper in debt to a corporate game
smash and grab our last glimmers of hope

Storm clouds roll in with thunder
carrying a clinging stench of decay
from the south and the oceans
yet the train races into oblivion

Madcap flickers of figments in windows
prove the passengers preoccupied
watching pretend people acting heroic
as they fly by trenches full of bodies

This train was bound for glory
once upon a time in a book
now it’s full speed toward hell
the demon driver a silly crook

“Americanism” may in the future be described as a pathological syndrome, much as we now attempt to unravel the ideology and cruelty of Nazism. The two are not unconnected. A few hard truths for Americans to work their teeth on: We are a relatively recent colonial expansion of European empire, molded on a Roman model of expansion. We are only 5% of the world’s population, 75% white, controlling over 50% of the resources of the rest of the world. There are 1.2 billion Islamic people in the world, 5 times the number of Americans. The vast majority of those people live in sub-poverty conditions, ruled over by wealthy dictators armed by the United States (as Saddam and the Taliban were).

One final little fact which festers at the root of all of this Strangelovian insanity and psychosis: if only 1% of the nuclear arsenals on our planet are deployed in a "limited" nuclear exchange, we will be living in a mutant nuclear winter and most of the species on Earth will go extinct, including ourselves quite possibly. The Bush regime has made nuclear weapons a very real first-strike option, tossing aside all treaties signed over our lifetimes. But you won’t hear about that on the 6 o’clock news, unless you happen to have a TV system in your fallout shelter. By then ratings won’t matter so much…