Murdering civilians to protect soldiers!

I cannot understand the logic behind John J. Mercieca's argument November 18, that the genocide of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in June of 1945 was necessary to save American soldiers. Were the lives of those 500,000 innocent Japanese civilians who died therefore less valuable than those of American soldiers?

Or does he consider the Japanese to be an inferior race to the Americans? Again, how can he pretend to know better than the people directly involved in establishing whether the use of these horrendous weapons of mass destruction was necessary or not?

But to dispel all doubt about the subject, here are the facts directly from the horse's mouth: Gar Alperovitz: "... the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945... if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the (atomic) bombs".

General Douglas MacArthur: "The war might have ended weeks earlier, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor".

Brigadier General Carter Clarke: "... we didn't need to do it and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it. We used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs".

Mr Mercieca should also know that the sources I have are reliable enough to make me anticipate as early as March 2002 that, after Afghanistan, George Bush's next target would have been Iraq and that the blatant fabrication that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was no more than a ploy to take possession of Iraq's oil riches and "to create business opportunities for American companies", as Richard Pearl described it at the time.

Readers should be reminded that even then, Mr Mercieca tried to ridicule my assertions based on fact which time and again have and are being proved true.

As to how powerful "Tall Boy" and "Fat Boy" really were, let us for a moment give Mr Mercieca the benefit of the doubt and establish that these first "nukes" had indeed a yield of 15 kilotons.

That would mean that nuclear bunker buster bombs, with a yield of five kilotons, would be one third as powerful as those two terrific bombs that killed 500,000 people. This means that bunker buster nuclear bombs are powerful enough to exterminate a third of 500,000 people, which is equivalent to almost 200,000 individuals, or half of Malta's population! How reassuring!

As for confirmation that nuclear bunker buster bombs were indeed deployed in the Iraq aggression, Mr Mercieca is advised to read the interview which ex-British Premier John Major gave to the Daily Star on September 17, 2002, the articles on the Daily Mirror of September 24 and 25, 2002 and that on the Sun of March 12, 2003 with the title "We will nuke Saddam".

Finally, Mr Mercieca's assertion that limited yield nuclear devices like bunker busters and depleted uranium ordinance are "harmless" is contradicted by shocking pictures like that of seven-year-old depleted uranium victim Huthaifa Ghanim Mohammed Sultan of Mosul! Or maybe he ought to consult the relatives of those 5,000 American soldiers who have died of the so-called Gulf War syndrome!

What is most worrying, however, is Mr Mercieca's acceptance of the method of deliberately targeting innocent civilians to achieve a military goal. This same Nazi-style policy of retaliation against innocent civilians each time the US military is attacked has now become the norm both in Iraq and Afghanistan, in what has been dubbed as "a change in strategy", but which, in fact, is the continuation of the policy which General Tommy Franks unashamedly revealed to journalists on, March 14, 2003, that: "Targets that provide for civilian casualties are targets. Iraqi schools, mosques and hospitals are legitimate targets" (See the Daily Mirror of March 15 - page 6).

If Mr Mercieca believes that the attack on the Twin Towers was a barbaric act, as indeed it was, then he should join us and a host of American war heroes in affirming that: "The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages" (William Leahy).

"The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul" (Herbert Hoover).