I'm 94 years old, I fought in the Second World War and I have a serious warning about where 2017 is headed
I am an old man in the apogee of my days and that’s why I know we are on the cusp of war – if not in North Korea then somewhere else – simply because of the way we have allowed society to become. As a young man in uniform, I witnessed destruction, and I can't stand impotently by while it happens again
In August 1945, Europe was still smouldering from the effects of years of total war on its continent, when the United States Air Force dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Over 100,000 residents in those two cities were incinerated immediately by the power of each atomic blast. In the months that followed those atomic attacks, tens of thousands more would die horrifying deaths from radiation sickness.
When those nuclear bombs fell on Japan and evaporated people into shadows that stained the sides of shattered buildings as if their souls had been turned into charcoal stencil drawings, I was 22 years old and part of the allied occupation army stationed in Hamburg. It was a city that had seen more than its fair share of ruin, because it was estimated that 50,000 of its inhabitants had been extinguished by conventional aerial warfare during the battle against Hitler. But I remember that the news of the creation and use of the atomic bomb alarmed me.
I’d seen what ordinary bombs could do to a city and so realised that there was no escape for anyone if this new type of weapon of mass destruction were to be used ever again. However, I was also calmed by the fact that, at the conclusion of the Second World War, all across the democratic world governments were paying out the dividends of peace to their citizens by building just societies held firmly together with a social safety network, fair wages and a proper taxation policy.
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