War! What is it good for?

[SoBeIt]

and that's why romantic love never lasts forever !! :wink:

It does!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :evil:

[CiaranM]

and that's why romantic love never lasts forever !! :wink:

It does!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :evil:

NO IT F**KING DOESN'T !!! :twisted: :twisted:

[Admin_2]

and that's why romantic love never lasts forever !! :wink:

It does!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :evil:

It does, but it's VERY rare. It's more of a fantasy or dream for most people rather than a reality. Couples that are too cuddly or cute are usually destined to fail.

[eagle]

and that's why romantic love never lasts forever !! :wink:

It does!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :evil:

It does, but it's VERY rare. It's more of a fantasy or dream for most people rather than a reality. Couples that are too cuddly or cute are usually destined to fail.

It seems to turn into war more then last but Love can last forever !

[zeusbheld]

and that's why romantic love never lasts forever !! :wink:

It does!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :evil:

It does, but it's VERY rare. It's more of a fantasy or dream for most people rather than a reality. Couples that are too cuddly or cute are usually destined to fail.

i'll say it's VERY rare... can't happen unless at least one of the parties involved is immortal, arguably both...

[iBatch]

Some wars were/are pointless and some were/are absolutely essential.

WW1 and WW2 were both essential to stop German european rule in different ways. Although I hate the Taliban's ideology with a passion, I don't give a sh*t what they do IN that country to THEIR own people. IF the war in the Stan gets women educated I guess that's something, but having been there and lived in other ideologically similar countries, it is my opinion that it won't change much in the short term (100 or so years).

The war in Bosnia was essential to one group and not to another. Same in Ireland. Israel's 6 day war was essential. They were about to be attcked by multiple enemies.

There have been a few worth fighting and a load not worth fighting.

War doesn't decide who's right, only who's left.

[Bruce551]

Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban

By Aryn Baker

29 July 2010, TIME

The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the Aug. 9, 2010, print and iPad editions of TIME magazine.

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn't run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Aisha's brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. (See managing editor Richard Stengel's message to readers about this week's cover.)

This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women's shelter in Kabul, Aisha listens obsessively to the news. Talk that the Afghan government is considering some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban frightens her. "They are the people that did this to me," she says, touching her damaged face. "How can we reconcile with them?" (See pictures of Afghan women and the return of the Taliban.)

In June, Afghan President Hamid Karzai established a peace council tasked with exploring negotiations with the Taliban. A month later, Tom Malinowski from Human Rights Watch met Karzai. During their conversation, Karzai mused on the cost of the conflict in human lives and wondered aloud if he had any right to talk about human rights when so many were dying. "He essentially asked me," says Malinowski, "What is more important, protecting the right of a girl to go to school or saving her life?" How Karzai and his international allies answer that question will have far-reaching consequences, not only for Afghanistan's women, but the country as a whole. (Watch TIME's video on photographing Aisha for the cover.)

As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, the need for an exit strategy weighs on the minds of U.S. policymakers. Such an outcome, it is assumed, would involve reconciliation with the Taliban. But Afghan women fear that in the quest for a quick peace, their progress may be sidelined. "Women's rights must not be the sacrifice by which peace is achieved," says parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi. (Comment on this story.)

Yet that may be where negotiations are heading. The Taliban will be advocating a version of an Afghan state in line with their own conservative views, particularly on the issue of women's rights. Already there is a growing acceptance that some concessions to the Taliban are inevitable if there is to be genuine reconciliation. "You have to be realistic," says a diplomat in Kabul. "We are not going to be sending troops and spending money forever. There will have to be a compromise, and sacrifices will have to be made." (Watch TIME's video "Portraits of the Women of Afghanistan.")

For Afghanistan's women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous. An Afghan refugee who grew up in Canada, Mozhdah Jamalzadah recently returned home to launch an Oprah-style talk show in which she has been able to subtly introduce questions of women's rights without provoking the ire of religious conservatives. On a recent episode, a male guest told a joke about a foreign human-rights team in Afghanistan. In the cities, the team noticed that women walked six paces behind their husbands. But in rural Helmand, where the Taliban is strongest, they saw a woman six steps ahead. The foreigners rushed to congratulate the husband on his enlightenment — only to be told that he stuck his wife in front because they were walking through a minefield. As the audience roared with laughter, Jamalzadah reflected that it may take about 10 to 15 years before Afghan women can truly walk alongside men. But once they do, she believes, all Afghans will benefit. "When we talk about women's rights," Jamalzadah says, "we are talking about things that are important to men as well — men who want to see Afghanistan move forward. If you sacrifice women to make peace, you are also sacrificing the men who support them and abandoning the country to the fundamentalists that caused all the problems in the first place."

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007238,00.html

Portrait of Pain Ignites Debate Over Afghan War

By ROD NORDLAND

4 August 2010, N.Y. Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?_r=1&hp

KABUL, Afghanistan — She cannot read or write and had never heard of Time magazine until a visitor brought her a copy of this week’s issue, the one with the cover picture of her face, the face with no nose.

On Wednesday, the young woman, Bibi Aisha, left Kabul for a long-planned trip to the United States for reconstructive surgery. Earlier in the day, as she prepared to leave the women’s shelter at a secret location here that has been her refuge for the past 10 months, the 18-year-old was unaware of the controversy surrounding the publication of that image.

“I don’t know if it will help other women or not,†she said, her hand going instinctively to cover the hole in the middle of her face, as it does whenever strangers look directly at her. “I just want to get my nose back.â€

Reaction to the Time cover has become something of an Internet litmus test about attitudes toward the war, and what America’s responsibility is in Afghanistan. Critics of the American presence in Afghanistan call it “emotional blackmail†and even “war porn,†while those who fear the consequences of abandoning Afghanistan see it as a powerful appeal to conscience.

The debate was fueled in part by the language that Time chose to accompany the photograph: “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan,†pointedly without a question mark.

“That is exactly what will happen,†said Manizha Naderi, referring to Aisha and cases like hers. An Afghan-American whose group, Women for Afghan Women, runs the shelter where Aisha stayed, Ms. Naderi said, “People need to see this and know what the cost will be to abandon this country.â€

As Ms. Naderi would be the first to concede, however, things are already bad enough for women in Afghanistan without a return to a government run by the Taliban. Noorin TV in Kabul has been running what it has called an investigative series suggesting that the shelters, all operated by independent charities, are just fronts for prostitution. The series has offered no evidence, and the station never sent anyone to visit the principal shelters.

President Hamid Karzai, once seen as a champion of women’s causes until he failed to deliver on promises to appoint many women to cabinet posts, convened a commission to investigate complaints against women’s shelters. A report is expected soon. The panel’s chairman is a conservative mullah, Nematullah Shahrani, who has publicly bandied about the prostitution claim.

Even in the absence of a government run by the Taliban, Afghan women suffer from religious extremism, although they have enjoyed a great deal of progress. Thousands of girls’ schools have opened since the fall of the Taliban, and women are active in the Parliament and the aid community, where an estimated half a billion dollars in international assistance is now destined for gender-equality programs.

“Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy,†wrote Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian, a liberal British newspaper, on Wednesday, “and the Time cover already stands accused of it.â€

BagNews, a left-leaning Web site about the politics of imagery in the media, saw the matter in conspiratorial terms. “Isn’t this title applying emotional blackmail and exploiting gender politics to pitch for the status quo — a continued U.S. military involvement?†wrote Michael Shaw.

Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, said he thought not. “The image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us,†he wrote in a statement on Time’s Web site.

Bibi Aisha (bibi is an honorific; Aisha asked that her family name be withheld) makes an apt symbol of the excesses of the Taliban, and of Pashtun tribal society in remote parts of Afghanistan more generally. Her face, aside from the disfigurement, is as beautiful as that of the Afghan refugee girl whose cover photograph in National Geographic in 1985 became an iconic image of the country’s plight.

At age 12, Aisha and her younger sister were given to the family of a Taliban fighter in Oruzgan Province under a tribal custom for settling disputes, known as “baad.†Aisha’s uncle had killed a relative of the groom to be, and according to the custom, to settle the blood debt her father gave the two girls to the victim’s family.

Once Aisha reached puberty, she was married to the Taliban fighter, but since he was in hiding most of the time, she and her sister were housed with the in-laws’ livestock and used as slaves, frequently beaten as punishment for their uncle’s crime.

Aisha fled the abuse, but her husband tracked her down in Kandahar a year ago, took her back to Oruzgan, and on a lonely mountainside cut off her nose and both ears and left her bleeding. She said she still did not remember how she managed to walk away to find help.

In Pashtun culture, a husband who has been shamed by his wife is said to have lost his nose, Ms. Naderi explained; from the husband’s point of view, he would have been punishing Aisha in kind.

American aid workers in Oruzgan Province took Aisha to the Women for Afghan Women shelter in Kabul, where at first she was too traumatized even to speak. They introduced her to a psychologist and gradually she recovered, learning to do handicrafts, but showing little interest in school work. Even before the Time cover appeared, the organization had found a benefactor in the Grossman Burn Foundation in Calabasas, Calif., which agreed to underwrite eight months of reconstructive surgery.

Once during Aisha’s stay at the shelter, her father visited to try to persuade her to return home to her family, but she refused to do so. “I am still angry that they did this to me,†she said. Still, she had hoped to call home to tell them that she was going to America, she said, but there was no cellphone coverage in the Taliban-dominated area she comes from.

Aisha dressed up for her last day in Kabul in a bright pink pantsuit with tassels and beads, and she hugged the other girls and women in the shelter. She said she was happy and excited to be going to America.

She changed into a more somber black gown for the trip to the airport and arranged her veil just below her eyes. Ms. Naderi lifted her 14-month-old baby onto her shoulder and they headed for the plane, Aisha holding her shirt as they walked. It is not, Ms. Naderi pointed out, a happy ending.

“Her 10-year-old sister is still there and we have no idea how she is,†she said. “They’re probably taking all of their anger out on her now, or even demanding another girl from her family to replace Aisha.â€

War sucks, but letting the Taliban re-gain control of Afghanistan and torture women is a crime against humanity.

[English_Bob]

What I can't for the life of me understand is how the non-Taliban public allow these atrocities...

Where are the fathers, brothers and husbands of these girls? Why aren't they defending their honour?

I don't know that girl, but if I saw that being done to her, I would have no compunction about killing them... none at all. In fact, I'd go home and feel pretty smug about it.

[drlovelife8]

What I can't for the life of me understand is how the non-Taliban public allow these atrocities...

Where are the fathers, brothers and husbands of these girls? Why aren't they defending their honour?

I don't know that girl, but if I saw that being done to her, I would have no compunction about killing them... none at all. In fact, I'd go home and feel pretty smug about it.

I don't mean to offend you with the following comment.

Your responce comes from that of decently leveled English culture.

You lack the understanding of Pushtun cultue and Wahabism iodelogy.

I totally know why they act that way as I have lived in such cultures and the stan2 is even more hardcore than most places, Somalia might be about to over take it.

If you had been raised there you might just join them.Whatever and however strongly you go against this, your initial answer showed that greatly you just don't know enough about life there.

They are wrong to do this of course. But for the record, if you did go and kill people for defending family honour in the stan2, you wouldn't make it home to feel smug!

And this comes from a man who REALLY hates the ideology which produces this **** and begs for it's complete removal from this earth.

Allah FUBAR

Peace

[English_Bob]

I think I already said that with the line, "What I can't for the life of me understand is...."

[CiaranM]

What I can't for the life of me understand is how the non-Taliban public allow these atrocities...

Where are the fathers, brothers and husbands of these girls? Why aren't they defending their honour?

I don't know that girl, but if I saw that being done to her, I would have no compunction about killing them... none at all. In fact, I'd go home and feel pretty smug about it.

a lot of the time it is their own family members who carry out these punishments to restore "family honour" !!

all main religions have had these type of punishments in the past ... the problem is places like afghanistan, somali, remote parts of pakistan etc r probably a hundred years or more behind the developed world in regards things like human rights !!!

the problem isn't just religion .... it's poverty, inequality and ignorance !!!

[English_Bob]

Well... it's ignorance... linked to religion.

You can't say it's poverty or inequality - there are plenty of equally poor countries that don't practice barbarism.

[CiaranM]

Well... it's ignorance... linked to religion.

You can't say it's poverty or inequality - there are plenty of equally poor countries that don't practice barbarism.

it's a lot easier to convince poor and unfairly treated ppl that they barbarism they r carrying out is in some way justified !!! i'm not saying it's an excuse, but it is definitely part of the problem !!!

[English_Bob]

Well... it's ignorance... linked to religion.

You can't say it's poverty or inequality - there are plenty of equally poor countries that don't practice barbarism.

it's a lot easier to convince poor and unfairly treated ppl that they barbarism they r carrying out is in some way justified !!! i'm not saying it's an excuse, but it is definitely part of the problem !!!

Then the person who is doing the convincing is simply evil... and it has nothing to do with poverty, ignorance or inequality.

As I mentioned, there are other equally poor countries that don't practise barbarism, and the difference is, there's no-one telling them it's justified.

[adel]

fugcking hell........ :evil:

[drlovelife8]

Well... it's ignorance... linked to religion.

You can't say it's poverty or inequality - there are plenty of equally poor countries that don't practice barbarism.

nice :wink:

[Bruce551]

Lucy Walker

Director, Countdown to Zero

Posted: August 7, 2010 12:34 PM

Thoughts on the 65th Anniversary of Hiroshima Day

"At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed about Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk..."

On August 31st, 1946 the New Yorker devoted its entire issue to 'Hiroshima', John Hershey's account of six survivors of the first atomic bomb attack, which began with that sentence.

On September 11th, 2001, at 8:46am I was in my loft waiting for a conference call when I heard a plane flying overhead, too low. I told myself that it must be just my imagination, because if I was hearing a plane crashing the next sound I would hear would be a crash. The sound of the plane ended abruptly in an impact. I told myself that it must be just my imagination, because if I had just heard a plane crash in Manhattan, the next thing I would hear would be sirens. The next thing I heard were sirens. So I looked out of the window and saw one of the towers on fire. I called my father, with whom I had planned to see Apocalypse Now Redux that night. I told him that a plane had just crashed into the world trade center, and he told me that he was in a meeting. I looked at the tower and saw people jumping out. People who had just gone to work that morning. People like me, who might be my friends, or might not but could have been, but certainly hadn't expected to have to jump out of the towers when they had taken the elevator up to their office a few minutes ago. A plane had flown in and changed everything.

And I wondered: could a nuclear weapon ever attack New York, could the Manhattan Project ever boomerang back upon us to incinerate Manhattan?

And that is why, on October 11th, 2007, when I received a phone call from Participant Media, I told them that I wanted to make the movie about nuclear weapons now called Countdown To Zero, which premiered at Sundance film festival on January 25th, 2010 at Sundance Film Festival, screened in Official Selection at Cannes on May 17th, and opened wide in movie theaters across the USA on July 23rd, 2010.

On July 16th, 1945 the first ever atomic explosion was detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico -- the Trinity test. In a TV broadcast in 1965 Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project and so-called "the father of the atomic bomb," recalled feeling that "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another."

By 9am on the morning of August 6th, 1945 the Tokyo control operator of the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation noticed that the Hiroshima station had gone off the air. He tried to re-establish his program by using another telephone line, but it too had failed. About 20 minutes later the Tokyo railroad telegraph center realized that the main line telegraph had stopped working just north of Hiroshima. From some small railway stops within ten miles of the city came unofficial reports of a terrible explosion in Hiroshima. All these reports were transmitted to the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff. Military bases repeatedly tried to call the Army Control Station in Hiroshima and were puzzled by the complete silence. A young officer of the Japanese General Staff was instructed to fly immediately to Hiroshima to survey the damage and report back to Tokyo. It was generally felt that nothing serious had taken place and that the explosion was just a rumor. The staff officer went to the airport and took off and after flying for about three hours, while still nearly 100 miles from Hiroshima, saw a great cloud of smoke from the bomb. A great scar on the land still burning and covered by a heavy cloud of smoke was all that was left.

Early on August 6th, 1945 General Leslie Groves called Robert Oppenheimer to congratulate him. Groves told him "Apparently it went with a tremendous bang" and Oppenheimer asked "When was this, was it after sundown?", knowing that people would be least exposed while inside their houses. "No, unfortunately it had to be in the daytime on account of security in the plane and that was left in the hands of the Commanding General over there" replied Groves.

At 11am, eastern standard time on August 6, 1945, President Truman was at sea a thousand miles away from the White House, returning from Potsdam, while his assistant press secretary Eben Ayers read the president's press statement to a dozen members of the Washington press corps, in an atmosphere so casual that the reporters didn't initially grasp it. It began: "Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East."

On the night of August 6th, 1945 there was a party at Los Alamos. These scientists had ensured that Hitler didn't beat us to "harnessing the basic power of the universe" and that was something to celebrate. But the party fizzled. The scientists, famous for letting off steam on the dance floor, did not dance that night. Oppenheimer shared a telex he had received with damage reports from Hiroshima and left the party early. Later he often described walking home that night and seeing a young scientist throwing up in the bushes and thinking that the reaction had begun. Frank Oppenheimer, Robert's brother and also a physicist at Los Alamos, said that at first he felt "relieved" that the bomb was "not a dud". But later he said "we had somehow always thought that it would not be dropped on people."

On August 8th, 1945, newspapers in the US were reporting that broadcasts from Radio Tokyo had described the destruction observed in Hiroshima. "Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death," the Japanese radio announcers said.

On the morning of August 9, 1945, the US B-29 Superfortress Bockscar took off from Tinian's North Field airfield carrying the nuclear bomb code-named "Fat Man". By the time they reached Kokura, the primary target, a 70% cloud cover had obscured the city, prohibiting the visual attack required by orders. After three runs over the city, and with fuel running low, they headed for their secondary target, Nagasaki. After initially deciding that if Nagasaki were obscured on their arrival the crew would carry the bomb to Okinawa and dispose of it in the ocean, finally at 11.01am, a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier to visually sight the target as ordered and drop the"Fat Man" weapon, containing a core of 14.1 lbs of plutonium-239, over the city's industrial valley. It exploded 43 seconds later, generating heat estimated at 7,000 °F and winds estimated at 624 mph.

On August 10th, 1945, those in Hiroshima were still not sure what had happened. One theory was that it had not been a bomb at all, but a kind of fine magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a single plane, and it exploded when it came into contact with the live wires of the city power system.

By August 22nd, 1945 a Japanese wire service reported that "because of the uncanny effects which the atomic bomb produces on the human body, even those who received minor burns, and looked quite healthy at first, weakened after a few days for some unknown reason". Tokyo radio described Hiroshima's "ghost parade" of the living doomed to die. A rumor began to circulate that the bomb had dropped some kind of poison that would give off deadly emanations for years to come and there was a mass panic and exodus from the city. Japanese physicists, who suspected the radiation effects of fission, came to the city to measure and triangulate the prints of the shadows of buildings - and the human beings - created by the explosion to determine where the epicenter had been and what the radiation levels were.

On August 24th, 1945 Los Alamos scientists sent a telex to General Groves, saying they were "much concerned about Japanese broadcasts claiming murderous delayed radioactive effects at Hiroshima". Groves dismissed the reports of this feared post-explosion sickness as Japanese "hoax or propaganda".

On September 2nd, 1945 Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett took a morning train from Tokyo to Hiroshima, one of only two journalists to defy travel restrictions. He described Hiroshima as a "death-stricken alien planet" where those who survived the blast were suffering fever, nausea, and gangrene, with their heads framed with halos of hair that had fallen out on the mats on which they lay. He sat on a chunk of rubble and typed the following report: "In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm - from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague... I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning in the world".

By September 11th, 1945, Father Kleinsorge, a Methodist minister living in Hiroshima, had a fever which kept getting worse. His colleagues sent him to the Catholic International Hospital in Tokyo with this message to the Mother Superior: "Think twice before you give this man blood transfusions, because with atomic-bomb patients we aren't at all sure that if you stick needles in them, they'll stop bleeding." When he arrived "he was pale and shaky. He complained that the bomb had upset his digestion and given him abdominal pains. His white blood cell count was three thousand (five to seven thousand is normal), he was seriously anemic, and his temperature was 104'. A doctor came to see him and was most encouraging "you'll be out of here in two weeks," he said. But when the doctor got out in the corridor he said to the Mother Superior, "He'll die. All these bomb people die -- you'll see. They go along for a couple of weeks and then they die."

On January 1st, 2008 I wrote the treatment for Countdown To Zero and at the top I quoted Einstein saying that nuclear weapons have "changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

My intention in making the film was to reverse this drift and avert catastrophe. I wished I had a superhero cape. Einstein said that "the public, having been warned of the horrible nature of atomic warfare, has done nothing about it, and to a large extent has dismissed the warning from its consciousness." I fear that we might all be like the "walking ghosts" of Hiroshima -- having survived the initial attack, we are the walking dead, unaware that we are doomed by these weapons to certain death, and alive only by virtue of a ghoulish time lag between the onset of the nuclear period and the full realization of its horrific consequences.

On October 16th, 1945 Oppenheimer retired from Los Alamos. He was given a pin engraved with an "A" and a picture of a bomb. His speech was troubling: "If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world... then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima."

On October 19th, 1945 Oppenheimer met with Henry Wallace in Washington, who wrote in this diary that "I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent... He has been in charge of the scientists ... and all they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb... The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astonishing things I have ever seen."

In February 1946 the New Republic printed the eye-witness testimony of Phillips Morrison, a young Cornell physicist. "With the fire stations wrecked and firemen burned, how control a thousand fires? With the doctors dead and the hospitals smashed, how treat over a quarter of a million injured? A Japanese official stood in the rubble and said to me: 'All this from one bomb; it is unendurable... Even if the raiders were over Fukuoka, you, in Sendai, a thousand miles north, must still fear death from a single plane. This is unendurable.'"

On April 9th, 2009 President Obama made a speech in Prague calling for "a world without nuclear weapons." I hoped it was possible, and I thought about other intractable situations that had unexpectedly broken through in sudden paradigm shifts my lifetime -- the end of apartheid, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Arriving in Berlin on June 12, 1987, President Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate: "We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan's speech seems prescient in retrospect, as he continued: "As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner, 'This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.' Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom."

On November 9th, 1989, less than two years after Reagan's speech, I was a curious teenager in England when I heard the news that the Berlin Wall had fallen -- or at least that citizens were passing through the gates and chipping away at it without being killed by guards. My student brain tried to grasp what this meant and concluded that it was the most historic and fascinating and unexpected event. My homework for the week did not seem nearly as important or interesting as what was going on in Berlin. I persuaded three friends to join me and we purchased £50 student plane tickets.

So on November 11th, 1989 my friends flew to Berlin to find out for ourselves what was going on, chip off our own bits of the wall, and write about our experiences for the student newspaper. We didn't have any money for accommodation so we tried to stay up all night long drinking coffee in cafés and raving with the art freaks in abandoned soviet warehouses, but on the second night we couldn't stay awake anymore and slept on the subway. We spoke to as many people as we could, on both sides of the wall, and I remember each of those conversations to this day. Images stay with me of the people standing with the guards on top of the wall, the creativity of the graffiti and the samizdat flyers. I wanted to understand this most momentous moments in my lifetime, and to communicate it accurately, and this trip could mark the beginning of the next twenty years of my life becoming a documentary filmmaker.

On October 12th, 1986, in Reykjavik, Iceland, President Reagan and Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev met and proposed all-out disarmament. According to the transcripts Reagan said "it would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons." And Gorbachev responded, "We can do that. We can eliminate them." President Reagan continued to describe his vision of their meeting in Iceland ten years from now. He would be very old by then and Gorbachev would not recognize him. The President would say, "Hello, Mikhail." And Gorbachev would say, " Ron, is it you?" And then they would destroy the last missiles. Ten years from now he would be a very old man. He and Gorbachev would come to Iceland and each of them would bring the last nuclear missile from each country with them. Then they would give a tremendous party for the whole world. Gorbachev said that he did not know if we would live another ten years. The President said he was counting on living that long. Gorbachev said that the President had gotten past the dangerous period and would now live to be 100, and later Reagan remarked that he would not live to 100 if he had to worry every day about being hit by a Soviet missile. Gorbachev replied that they had agreed to eliminate them.

Oh June 11th, 2009 I interviewed Gorbachev in Moscow and he told me that his greatest regret is that he and Reagan were not able to realize their dream on that timetable, and the "tremendous party for the whole world" may not happen in his lifetime.

On August 6th, 2010, 65 years after the first bomb was used in Hiroshima, I hosted a special screening of Countdown To Zero, and I told the audience that if the atom bomb was a human being, it would be the time to think about retiring, 65 years old that it is today. I read on Wikipedia that within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000-166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000-80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day, and of those 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of the dead were civilians.

Today and always I remember them, those in Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki on August 9th, as well as those in Los Alamos and Tinian that day. As a child I feared nothing more than a nuclear attack, the unendurable death from a single plane. I hope our children will have less, and not more, to fear. I hope the atom bomb can retire and that 65 more years, and 650 more years, and 6,500 more years, will pass before another city is destroyed by a single bomb. I think of those in Hiroshima on August 6th and every day.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-walker/thoughts-on-the-65th-anni_b_674429.html

[DANNO]

The object of war is not to die for your country,

but to make the other bastard die for his.

---Gen. George Patton

And, who the heck is he? (I remember this quote from aday magazine .. i love aday)

SBI---George Patton is the originator of the quote --- an American Army General in WW II ....

---> Rent the Movie "Patton"

(the speech it came from is the lead into the movie)

ya might not like the whole film ...I think it won the Oscar the year it came out...

BUTT young --> you---->still about 15 years before you showed up to start your mischief :wink: