Nuclear horrors still resonate

■ There is unease about whether US President Donald Trump would use a nuclear missile on North Korea. He wouldn’t be allowed by protocols in place.

North Korea is developing its first nuclear weapons and fired one test missile into the Pacific. It was reported President Trump asked advisers why nuclear weapons were not used in wars. It was probably explained it would be catastrophic. Death and immense suffering for hundreds of thousands of people from one missile attack.

Former US president Harry Truman was the first world leader to use an atom bomb; first on Hiroshima to force Japan to surrender in World War II and to prevent an invasion and brutal land war in Japan. When there was no surrender, he approved the second atom bomb on the city of Kokura, with large military stores. Smoke cover from a nearby conventionally bombed city meant the anxious bomb crew, with a dangerous cargo, and time and fuel running out, released it on Nagasaki. The emperor of Japan announced a surrender and the end of World War II in the Pacific.

Japanese civilians who were soon to die from the effects of the atom bomb had intense pain and a non-stop thirst for water, and burns of the skin which hung off the most wounded, exposing raw flesh. Many were killed or vaporised instantly, leaving maybe their shadow on the pavement. They were cooked alive by the heat or their internal organs smashed by shockwaves. Others had radiation sickness the rest of their lives. Many got cancers.

The founder of Cork-based Chernobyl International, Adi Roche, recently said that 31 years after an accident in 1986 at a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, babies continue to be born with heart defects.

President Truman wanted the bombs used so that military objectives were the target and not women and children. He was very disturbed when told most killed were civilians. After the second bomb, he said there would be no more: “The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible.” He now knew, for real, what it could do.

When his secretary of the army said to him in 1948 to use an atom bomb again to break the Soviet Union siege of Berlin, Truman refused: “You have got to understand this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military use. So we have to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”

It is 72 years since the first nuclear weapon was used and I hope it won’t be used again.

Mary Sullivan