Nagasaki

According to the blog where I grabbed this arresting photo, it was snapped moments after impact. Morbid character that I am, I've been staring all day, mesmerized, reflecting on just how profound Nagasaki remains for us today.

Sixty-five years ago, three days after Hiroshima, an act of merciless aggression at Nagasaki ended the Second World War. I spoke to a professor in Budapest who was a young boy at the time and he described what it was like when the news got out, the deep hush that seemed to fall over the world. It was the kind of peace no one could have anticipated, a shadow we've lived in ever since.

Fidel Castro timed his re-emergence into the spotlight to coincide with this anniversary and foretells nuclear disaster if we keep pushing Iran. The merit of these claims will bear out. Meanwhile Israel builds up a nuclear stockpile while denying its very existence, the US and Russia averting their gaze, diplomats on each side assuring the other that everything will be fine.

Sixty-five years. That's a long time, right? Too bad we can't look at that dark episode as if it were so removed from our lives today that it could be forgotten.

A portion from today's broadcast of Democracy Now! talks about the first journalist to visit the destruction and what he found and how subsequently he was silenced by General MacArthur. Worth watching: