Wilfred Burchett Quotes

In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets - but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.

In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.

I did not want to be labelled 'the designer who survived the atomic bomb,' and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima.

Without Pearl Harbor there would not have been Hiroshima.

Pearl Harbor was not as cruel as the atomic bombing. The atom bomb wiped out everything: people in church, children in kindergarten, even their dogs and cats. Pearl Harbor was terrible, but not as bad as that…. I think that the atomic bombings rank with the Holocaust as the greatest crimes against humanity in this century...

The world has gone back a half a millennium in its conduct of international relations in time of war…. no nation has to bear a greater blame for this than our own ….As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of us think it was shameful. Are we Christians? We act like pagans.

… the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped.

The atomic bomb ended the war. Therefore, it's use was justified.

World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.

I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.

When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.

'Hibakusha' is an animated docu-drama that Choz Belen and I are directing, and it will take you through the earliest memories of a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor named Kaz Suyeishi.

We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

We had news this morning of another successful atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. These two heavy blows have fallen in quick succession upon the Japanese and there will be quite a little space before we intend to drop another.

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.

Japan is the only country in the world to have suffered the ravages of atomic bombing. That experience left an indelible mark on the hearts of our people, making them passionately determined to renounce all wars.

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.

The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably.

Japan is the only country in the world which suffered from the scourge of nuclear weapons.

In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.

What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that the terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars.

Had President Truman not gone ahead with the dropping of the atomic bomb, I think he would have been impeached.