"TOKYO Hiroshima and Nagasaki will set up a joint committee to consider bidding to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, the two cities' mayors announced Sunday.

The two cities, which were annihilated by U.S. atomic bombs in the final days of World War II, hope hosting the Olympics would help spread their message of peace to the world, officials said.

The announcement by the cities came only days after Tokyo failed in its bid to host the 2016 Olympics, which were awarded to Rio de Janeiro. Associated Press"

Read more here:

Hiroshima, Nagasaki to consider joint bid for Summer Games - CharlotteObserver.com

__________________


"If you want peace work for justice" -Pope Paul VI

Jon

amazing to think of it back then jon,and the way it looks today...ray..

Hiroshima and Nagasaki - then and now | MillionFace

This is sort of off topic as per the Olympics, but I was reminded of it when looking over the "then and now" photos. It was the twisted steel frames of the buildings which brought it back to mind, that and my Dad was a Chrysler/Mopar fan until the end of the fifties, and five terrible cars in that time-frame.

Remember that the Japanese economy was still recovering from the war and a deal was made to allow low cost shipments of recycled steel to the states. This recycled steel came in large part from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the remains of the building frames and whatnot.

The recycling process was shown by test to remove the radioactivity but left the steel with a high iron content, with iron being a well known natural oxidizer. The largest users of steel were given special purchase rates, and Chrysler was at the front of he line for this low cost steel, and as a consequence its cars began to earn a reputation for poor corrosion resistance in the 1950s.

Remelted iron and steel returns to normal, without radiation, but it contained high levels of iron since the alloys were "siphoned" off or lost in the process; and adding nickel or chromium into the molten steel to resist oxidation was prevented due to cost. This was US government-subsidized imported steel. Unfortunately, this subsidized steel was sold to the then-largest consumers of steel--the American automotive industry, and of the then "Big Three" it was Chrysler who really needed an inexpensive source of steel sheets.. Chrysler bought the bulk of the recycled steel from Japan, and their reputation for quality suffered with many automotive historians and enthusiasts.

The use of that poor quality steel, along with the lack of rust resistance methods on the line, garnered Chrysler a poor reputation for corrosion and poor quality that lingered on long after that time frame.

Just a memory I had of his last Mopar (a '60 Dodge Matador) rusting away before his very eyes, and not being able to get any trade-in value at all on the first Pontiac he bought in the fall of '62. The Pontiac dealer told him he would give him $1000 off the price if he DIDN'T bring it onto his lot! So Dad bought the '63 Bonneville, and sold the two year old Dodge on the private market for $1200, and really got $2200 by doing it that way.

We never bought another new Mopar product from then on.

__________________
Happy Trails,
Clint.

I remember in elementary school my teacher showed us this book where it basically implied Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still unsafe because of the radiation, more specifically when it came to growing foods and such.

If this is indeed true, how would that impact this decision?

I suspect your elementary teacher was attempting a "scare" tactic to support his/her anti-nuclear prejudice. And that is unsupported by research, if done honestly.

Atom bombs like the ones dropped on Japan produce two types of radiation: initial and residual. (I'm getting this from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, an exhaustive Japanese study, published in English in 1981.) Initial radiation is released by the explosion itself. Residual radiation comes later from radionuclides, radioactive isotopes either generated by the explosion or else induced in soil, building materials, bodies, etc, by neutron bombardment unleashed by the blast.

The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced their share of residual radiation, but it didn't stick around long, for two reasons. First, both bombs were detonated more than 500 meters above street level so as to wreak maximum destruction (surrounding buildings would have blocked much of the force of ground-level explosions). That limited surface contamination, since most of the radioactive debris was carried off in the mushroom cloud instead of being embedded in the earth. There was plenty of lethal fallout in the form of "ashes of death" and "black rain," but it was spread over a fairly wide area.

Second, most of the radionuclides had brief half-lives--some lasting just minutes. The bomb sites were intensely radioactive for the first few hours after the explosions, but thereafter the danger diminished rapidly. American scientists sweeping Hiroshima with Geiger counters a month after the explosion to see if the area was safe for occupation troops found a devastated city but little radioactivity. Water lilies blackened by the blast had already begun to grow again, suggesting that whatever radioactivity there had been immediately following the blast had quickly dissipated.

U.S. military authorities touted these findings to an apprehensive world as proof that A-bombs really weren't so bad. A rumor widespread among Japanese civilians--evidently based on comments made by an American science writer in an interview published shortly after the bombings--held that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be uninhabitable for 70 or 75 years.

To quell such talk, American military leaders held a press conference at which they suggested that the explosions had been massive but otherwise ordinary, denied any lingering danger, and predicted there would be no further deaths.

None of this turned out to be true. Although residual radiation was a relatively minor threat, many of those who survived the blasts had already absorbed the initial radiation doses that would eventually kill or cripple them. (neither the doom sayers nor the optomistic predictions were totally right)

Radiation deaths subsided after seven or eight weeks but latent effects continued to appear for a long time. Fetuses irradiated in the wombs of their mothers were subject to high rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, and birth defects--many kids were retarded or had unusually small heads (microcephaly), stunted growth, or other afflictions. Cases of leukemia surged in 1947 and peaked in the early 1950s. Additional problems included other cancers and blood disorders, cataracts, heavy scarring (keloid), and male sterility. However, no genetic damage was detected in children conceived after the blasts. Oddly enough, notwithstanding all the calamities visited on the Japanese by the bombs, the two things everybody now expects to happen in a nuclear war, mutant kids and the land glowing blue forevermore, didn't.

— Cecil Adams

See:

The Straight Dope: If nuclear fallout lasts thousands of years, how did Hiroshima and Nagasaki recover so quickly?

__________________
Happy Trails,
Clint.

Interesting, thanks for sharing! The pre drop controversy is usually the one that people talk about the most, rarely the post drop, perhaps that is why so many misconceptions "run free"?