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The U.S.-Russia “phony war”: How Washington warmongers could bring us from stalemate to catastrophe
One of two outcomes is likely: Another long Cold War, or a great power conflict

The Ukraine crisis and the attendant confrontation with Russia assume a “phony war” feel these days. As in the perversely calm months between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the Blitzkrieg into the Low Countries the following spring, nothing much seems to be happening.

No one took comfort then—a fog of anxiety suffused everything—and no one should now. One almost prefers it when Washington politicians and other temporarily important people are out there grandstanding and warmongering. At least part of what is occurring is visible, even as the whole never is. Now one sees almost nothing, and we get an idea of what the historians mean when they describe the queasiness abroad during the phony war period.

A formidable file of political, diplomatic and military reports has accumulated by drips and drops of late, and it strongly suggests one of two things: Either we are on the near side of open conflict between two great powers, accidental or purposeful and probably but not necessarily on Ukrainian soil, or we are in for a re-rendering of the Cold War that will endure as long as the original.

Christianity and the Nagasaki Crime

Seventy years ago, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki City, Japan, instantly vaporizing, incinerating or otherwise annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including a disproportionately large number of Japanese Christians. The explosion mortally wounded uncountable thousands of other victims who succumbed to the blast, the intense heat and/or the radiation.

At the time of the Nagasaki bombing – following the first use of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima just three days earlier – the United States was regarded as the most Christian nation in the world. But it was a form of Christianity in which most churches were proponents of eye-for-an-eye retaliation, supported America’s military and economic exploitation of other nations, or otherwise failed to sincerely teach or adhere to the ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount.

In a cruel irony, prior to the bomb exploding nearly directly over the Urakami Cathedral at 11:02 a.m., Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan. The massive cathedral was the largest Christian church in the Orient.

The Christian U.S. airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently. They accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with an astonishing number of near-fatal glitches along the way.

Hiroshima Series

Hiroshima Series, Part I — Hiroshima/Nagasaki: Atomic Devastation Hidden for Decades

Dozens of hours of film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the fall and winter of 1945-1946 by an elite U.S. military unit was hidden for decades and almost no one could see it. The raw footage, in striking color, languished in obscurity. As the writer Mary McCarthy observed, the atomic bombing of Japan nearly fell into “a hole in human history.”

Hiroshima Series, Part 2 — How They Hid the Worst Horrors of Hiroshima

On the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow, the vast majority women and children. Three days later, the U.S. exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the U.S. readied plans for occupying the defeated country—and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.

Hiroshima Series, Part 3 — Death and Suffering, in Living Color

In the mid-1970s, Japanese activists discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki existed in their country. Many of the images had been seized by the U.S. military and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the true human effects of the bomb as had most Americans. Activists, led by Tsutomu Iwakura, tracked down hundreds of photographs in archives and private collections, published them in a popular book and, in 1979, mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York.

How the Hiroshima Bombing Got a Hollywood Makeover

This is a cautionary tale, one that has only recently seen the light after being buried for decades. It exposes the official censorship—by the Truman White House—of a major Hollywood film on the bombing of Hiroshima. And the tale goes beyond censorship: it involves the outright falsification of major historical facts.

Speed of Glacier Retreat ‘Historically Unprecedented’

The world’s glaciers are in retreat. The great tongues of ice high in the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps and the Rockies are going back uphill at ever greater speeds, according to new research.

And this loss of ice is both accelerating and “historically unprecedented”, say scientists who report in the Journal of Glaciology.

In the past year or so, researchers have identified rapid rises in meltwater and alarming cases of glacial retreat in Greenland, West Antarctica, the Canadian and Alaskan coastal mountains, in Europe and in the Himalayan massif. They have also watched glaciers pick up speed downhill. One satellite-based study, confirmed by on-the-ground measurements, of the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland, confirms that the river of ice is now moving at the rate of 46 meters a day, 17 kilometers a year, which is twice the speed recorded in 2003, which in turn was twice as fast as measured in 1997.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service, based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and with partners in 30 countries, has been compiling data on changes in glaciers over the last 120 years. And it has just compared all known 21st century observations with data from site measurements, aerial photography and satellite observations and evidence from pictorial and written sources. Altogether, the service has collected 5,000 measurements of glacier volume and changes in mass since 1850, and 42,000 records of variations in glacier fronts from records dating back to the 16th century.