Pssst. It didn't happen, which makes the whole thing silly

I don't think this film is silly nonsense.
during the Cold war it cam frighteningly close to happening.

It still could happen tomorrow very easily if the US bombs Iran nuclear or otherwise.

Kiwiboy62

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
-george w. bush

Yeah Right!!

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"the scare tactics of the 80s disarmanent movement which led to this film"?!?

Uhh, this was shot in '65, mind you.

"Try to remind yourselves that nothing predicted and dramatized by the film actually happened."

Does the name Hiroshima ring a bell?

"the bad guys lost"

Bad Guys? Like the ones starting two proxy wars (namely Korea and Vietnam) resulting in the loss of millions of lives? Like the ones who granted amnesty to Japanese and German war criminals in trade for the results of the experiments they conducted on concentration camp prisoners?

"Well folks, you'll be delighted to know that the Cold War is over"

And I'm pretty sure you're delighted to know that there is quite possibly a nuclear bomb aimed right at your sorry ass this very minute. But hey, no worries!

"It's a little disturbing watching people call this nonsensical scare scenario "visionary" and "prophetic"."

Obviously, you know as little about filmmaking as you know about history and global politics (and that's saying something!).

Talk about missing the point. Geez.

There is a lot of emotion about this topic: Atomic/Nuclear war.

And that's as it should be. Because unlike any other weapon, nuclear weapons have lingering effects that are unparalleled in our history.

As long as there are nuclear weapons, this COULD happen. Granted the dates would be different from the film. 1980 came and went. The names would change, but it COULD happen. Will it? Who knows? No one certainly wants it to happen. Nuclear war or a nuclear accident would be a horrific situation that would most likely be far worse than any film could portray.

But there are some points that get misplaced in all the emotion, if they were ever even taught in the first place:

1. The U.S. used atomic weapons on two Japanese civilian cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not exactly correct. Neither city was strictly 'civilian'. Both were industrial, armament, military producing centers.

Japan was a cottage industry culture. Businesses that you or I might think of as 'war industry' Ford, GM, Boeing, etc, were unheard of in Japan. Small shops built everything. Well, most everything. Some large conglomerates, family Samurai holdovers, "Zaibatsu", they were called, did exist.
Mitsubishi, yes, the same one, was/is one of them. They made many of their aircraft in Hiroshima.
Nagasaki was used as a center for other industrial construction items by other Zaibatsu.
Basically, munitions.

2. There were tens of thousands of POWs in Hiroshima. Many of them Korean slaves used as labor in these factories. None are mentioned in the casualty numbers for that city, nor on any plaque in Hiroshima Peace Park. The city won't permit it. Those killed are unmentionables. Like the 'comfort women', they don't exist, even in death according to the Japanese government until recently.

3. The use of the then-new atomic bomb on a city, was an absolute last resort for the Americans.
To have to use it on two cities was beyond last resort. However, it became an option after the Battle of Okinawa demonstrated that the Japanese would not only fail to surrender, but would execute civilians as well, as they did with impunity on Okinawa. (to this day, the only military the Okinawans despise more than the U.S. military is the Japanese military, and that's after several rape incidents involving American military on local Okinawan girls. Okinawans still despise the Japanese military more. That should tell you something.)

The Battle of Okinawa demonstrated in stark relief what Guadal Canal and Iwo Jima earlier had hinted at. That it would take Operation Olympic, a total land invasion by Allied troops, planned and readied by hundreds of thousands to millions of new troops in staging areas across the Pacific, to stop the Asian nation. The total deaths at the Battle of Okinawa have never been fully studied. But estimates already show that more died there than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

4. It is a sad and strange truth that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (after Japan refused to surrender more than a week after Hiroshima), actually, in the end, SAVED JAPANESE LIVES. For if Operation Olympic was to proceed, millions and millions of Japanese would have died, along with millions of Allied soldiers all in the name of getting the Emperor to surrender.

No. 4 is a hard pill to swallow. Because of the images of nuclear war, and the effects of it, we tend to regard it as the complete and utter end of the world.

But it did not end the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, leveled, incinerated. But in previous wars, whole populations were decimated, entire nations were removed from existence. But there were no cameras to record such horrors, no witnesses to give any heart wrenching accounts. Because nothing lived.

I have met with and spoken to the last sole survivor of the Army Motion Picture Unit which went in days after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to record and film what was left. Any footage you have seen, is the footage that group took.

Those cities were sacrificed, perhaps, you can look at it that way, to save the world from further nuclear death. It is their example which can remind us, in this age of media, what horrors are possible in our time if we allow them. Don't you think it's possible, that we might have had another Holocaust if we had no pictures or film of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald to shock us, to remind us, what we as humans are capable of?

Let them be reminders, not propaganda, but reminders of the horror of war. Any war.

But don't forget that there are equally horrible deaths and destruction, though you haven't been able to see them, because there were no film cameras used, or no film made available to the public.

The image is a remarkable thing. None of us would be commenting here if images didn't move us, didn't sway us. IMDB exists because images move us. This we all know. But we must remind ourselves that there are many horrors, different, but perhaps equally horrible to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but which we have no image to relate to, to recoil from, to get sick looking upon.

If you have seen someone's head explode from pressure as they are talking to you, or an armless woman stumbling down the street with her forced-birth child dangling behind her, still attached by its imbilical and dragging on the road screaming, or a naked man, standing in the sub zero temperatures, having water poured on his arm, freezing it like stone, then having it smashed off like glass with a hammer, or children hung on poles and flayed, their skin peeled of them as they try to scream but can't because their vocal chords were removed, then you have seen war BEFORE the nuclear age, you have seen the Japanese in China.

War is horrible. All forms of it. Whether it is nuclear or non nuclear. It is horrible. Human beings can be the most horrible creatures on the planet. We have proven this time and again.

If you ask an older Chinese, Indonesian, SE Asian about whether or not the A bomb was necessary to stop the Japanese, you will get a very different answer than the one usually given by modern Western college students. Very different, indeed.

I've taken many people on tours through Hiroshima, to Okinawa. I do this with a survivor of Hiroshima, an old Japanese gentleman, who was a small boy then, and who has seen things, horrors, none of us could dream up in our wildest imagination. Many of the people who come to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park and other places like it, are Japanese and many are Westerners. They all arrive thinking one way. Much like the way I've seen on this board and other places. They all leave knowing another.

In the film, do you recall the street interviews? Were they informed? Hardly. We are the same as they were. We think we are not, we think we have tons of data because of the internet, because of this or that, we read this book or that book, we think we have reams of inside information. But we don't. We are the same as they who were depicted in The War Game.

The worst thing is to continue to blame people, including our leaders, who are just like us, trying to prevent war the best way they can with the information they have.

The best thing is to educate yourself and to not stop and always remain open in your thinking, and to do what you can to help others. Blaming achieves nothing, and most likely WILL lead to further aggression, sooner or later, either by you or your offspring.

And to remember, whatever information you think you have, there's always another side, another aspect you have no concept of yet. Keep that option open. You'll need it, if you are to remain a rational human being. And that's exactly what we need right now, and always.

Good luck.

Peace, everyone.


-hs

By your "logic", rlange-3, almost EVERY film/TV show ever shot on camera, every book ever written (comic books are included here), every song ever played/sung, every picture painted, and every radio show ever broadcast are nonsenses because the events depicted didn't and haven't happened for real.

You may as well just go live in a cave with no TV, no books, no music, no pictures, and no radio. QUICK MARCH!

A nuclear war did not occurr in the 1960's. Remarkable discovery. Good of you not keeping it to yourself. Thanks.

Here's another reveleation; it's called fiction, friend. Cavemen apparently invented it millenia ago. They would gather about and tell stories that had not occurred but could forseeably happen. Check it out at you local library establishment. As much as an entire half of the material there is devoted to it.

( Unbelievable. )

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