After their 1945 victory over Nazi Germany, Allied forces shifted their focus on forcing to Japan to surrender.
That effort culminated in the first and so far only use of nuclear weapons, which killed more than 200,000 civilians when they were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the world may never have witnessed the horror of the atomic bomb if the US had pressed ahead with a far more bizarre plan: to drop bats fitted with incendiary devices onto Japanese cities.
The idea was dreamed up by amateur inventor and dentist Lytle Adams, who happened to know Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the then US President Franklin.
Yoshio Nagaoka, center, head of Kinoko Kai, speaks of the effectuation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at a news conference on Jan. 22 at Hiroshima city’s office in the municipality’s Naka Ward. (Jun Ueda)
HIROSHIMA Yoshio Nagaoka never forgot the question his older brother once casually asked him: “What do you think it would be like if I had not been affected by the atomic bombing?”
His elder brother had microcephaly since birth. Their mother, Chizuno, was pregnant and near ground zero when the blast occurred on Aug. 6, 1945.
Today, Nagaoka, 71, touches on this story as he campaigns for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
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The court then contradicted itself by stating that while it would generally be contrary to the principles of international humanitarian law to use nuclear weapons, the Court was unable to decide whether such use would be unlawful under what it termed “extreme circumstances where survival of a state is at stake.”
The International Court of Justice did not offer any more clarity but did reaffirm that the general principles of the law of armed conflict would apply to the use of nuclear weapons.
It is important to note that these discussions mostly revolved around the use of relatively low-yield weapons according to McNamara’s vision of a controlled, managed, limited nuclear war involving the deployment of a relatively small number of low-yield weapons that would presumably result in limited collateral damage and destruction. It would undoubtedly be challenging to argue for the legality of the use of high-yield nuclear weapons on the modern, mostly urban, battlefield or to argue