Notes on Japan: 6

In my last post I raised the question of how nations could become psychopathic. Why take this despicable, cruel alternative rather than a more benign route? Each year, on the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb, the Mayor of Hiroshima sends a telegram to every head of state, reminding them of that appalling crime and pleading for peace and an end to nuclear testing. He does the same whenever a nation joins the elite club of nuclear protagonists. Hiroshima, after a sentence of death for over a hundred thousand of its citizens, chose the humanitarian, route of peace and love. One of the handful of buildings that survived, stood beneath the hyper centre of the blast and is now a preserved, gutted skeleton, an epitaph to that appalling day. Around it is a tranquil Peace Park. The museum is a paean to human sorrow. In it the citizens of Hiroshima, still ongoing victims of the great obscenity of a weapon of mass destruction seek restitution for the whole human race.

Why have the Jews of Israel, sufferers on an unimaginable scale from man’s inhumanity to man, developed their own nuclear bombs? Why have they become one of the world’s cadre of inhuman military aggressors? Why did Hiroshima go down one road and Jerusalem, another?