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Dave Lindorff discusses the nukes of August—1945 and 1949. He is the author of “August 6 and 9, 1945: Two Days that Shook the World…and the Earth” (Counterpunch) and “One Brother Gave the Soviets the A-Bomb. The Other Got a Medal” (The Nation).
In 1945 the US infamously dropped nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9). The massacres served no military purpose. They were designed to send a message to the USSR: stand up to us, and the same thing could happen to you.
Sure enough, the US then drew up plans to annihilate the USSR in a massive nuclear first strike. According to Dave Lindorff, that crime—the biggest mass murder in human history by orders of magnitude—would likely have happened if American physicist Ted Hall hadn’t passed on nuclear secrets to the Soviets, allowing them to build a nuclear deterrent, which was first tested on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.