Today is the 80th anniversary of the US dropping a Uranium bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later we dropped a Plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. There was no military infrastructure in Nagasaki. All of the casualties were civilians.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/8/6/hiroshima

I believe Howard Zinn in his saying that Japan was about to surrender and it wasn't necessary or ethical for us to use these weapons. It was the USSR entering the war against Japan that convinced them to surrender. Saying that countless lives were saved by the dropping of these bombs is a disengenuous lie. While some military lives may have been saved, there certainly weren't any civilian lives saved. -But then, who cared about a few Japs?

I believe the bombings were done partly as an experiment to see how much damage they'd do, and also to prove that we had them, that they worked, and that we'd use them, as a warning to the world, and particularly the USSR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSKLVseJ9Xo

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was at Nagasaki about seven weeks after the bomb was dropped there. What he saw made him a pacifist for the rest of his life.

He said "When we went over to Nagasaki, it was total devastation. It was like a landscape in hell. What was left of bodies had all been cleared away by the time we got there, which was about seven weeks after the bomb had been dropped…. It was acres of mud, with bones and hair sticking up out of it.":
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/p.....asaki-bombing/

Shortly before his death a couple of years ago, He had an exhibit at his City Lights bookstore of photos he shot there.

NASA now plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon:
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/8.....or_on_the_moon
-Would anyone like to imagine what the result of a rocket with such a payload exploding in our atmosphere might be? This is truly insane.

I think we need to decommission and disassemble all nuclear reactors. Not only are they insanely expensive to build and operate, but every aspect of them, from the mining and transportation of the fuel to the disposal of the waste has effects that last practically forever. We have far cheaper and non dangerous green alternatives. Think of the continued effects to the "Downwinders" in places like New Mexico and Hanford Washington, and to the Navajo where uranium is mined on their land. There are still around 15,000 unremediated uranium mines dotted across the West, mostly on Native land.

Nuclear plants are also completely vulnerable to attack by drone. Think about that.

Domestic nuclear power reactors also have deep connections with the "Defense" industry.

We now have AI companies trying to reopen Three Mile Island, and advocating the building of compact modular reactors, -none of which have even been built yet- pushing the lie that nuclear power is a green alternative to fossil fuels. Nuclear reactors also use clean water for cooling, and put out hot water, heating the atmosphere and water sources.

Here in California, we have The Diablo Canyon reactors, which were set to be closed permanently starting right about now. Instead, Gavin Newsom has decided to dump a billion bucks into these uninsured forty year old reactors in an effort to to eke a few more years use out of them , while at the same time backing a PG&E program which will largely kill rooftop solar here.

The Diablo Canyon reactors are built right on top of an intersection of about 12 faults and therefore are extremely susceptible to earthquake damage. Because of their age they're also embrittled. If there were a serious accident there, it could mean the permanent contamination of significant parts of Central and Southern California, and possibly wider, and the poisoning of food growing areas critcal to the whole country. It's just not worth the risk to continue using these reactors.

Also, the great Tom Lehrer died on July 29th. Here's his song about the bomb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw