AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about the atomic age. Sixty-four years ago this weekend, on August 6th and August 9th, 1945, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US military, thus launching the nuclear age. For more on this, we’re joined now by three guests.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physicist and disarmament activist, chair of the Physics Department at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, joining us from Washington, DC.
Here in our firehouse studio is Frida Berrigan, longtime peace activist, senior program associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Previously, she served for eight years at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. Her latest article appears at Tom Dispatch; it’s called “For the Sixty-Fourth Time: No More Nuclear War.”
And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream from California, Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers that exposed the true story behind the US decision making in the Vietnam War. Over the next year, he plans to release segments of his memoir in order to reveal the true history of the American nuclear era. The first part appears at Truthdig and his website last week, called “Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years.”