WEAPONS PROGRAMME
How SA’s nuke cloud became a global silver lining
Despite possessing six Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs, the apartheid war chiefs stopped short of a ‘Hiroshima solution’, writes Michael Schmidt
A colour photograph for sale in a Johannesburg store shows an eerily calm scene. A sleek silver aircraft parked on a sandy field, with an identical aircraft in the background, stands under a beautiful deep blue sky. The photo was taken on Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean group of the Marshalls and the plane — a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber — has Enola Gay written prominently on its nose. The image is signed in blue pen: "Dutch Van Kirk Navigator Hiroshima – Enola Gay – 6 Aug. 1945." The aircraft in the background is Bockscar, which dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. As US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un trade threats of nuclear annihilation, a new exhibition in Johannesburg recalls the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a loss of 226,000 lives. The Atomic Bomb and Human Rights Exhibition at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre has at its epicentre the story of Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old when Hiroshima was incinerated and who died of resulting leuka...
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