WHILE many citizens of Nagasaki believe the atom-bombing shortened the war and may have saved lives,one Australian eye-witness says this is bunk.
Boxer turned peace activist Tom Uren - a minister in the 1972-1975 Labor government of Gough Whitlam - was one of about 50 Australians captured at the fall of Singapore who were in prison camps around Nagasaki that fatal day.
"We thought that an enormous ammunition dump or something like that had blown up..." The aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki,August 1945.J. Norman Ingram/Cox News Service Photo
Uren,who had suffered on the notorious Burma"railway of death"- where one prisoner was said to have died for every sleeper laid - had been transported to a gritty little coal- mining town called Omuta,80 kilometres (as the crow flies) across the Ariake Sea from Nagasaki.
"I will never forget (it) as long as I live,"he writes in his autobiography Straight Left (Random House).
"The sky was crimson. We didn't see the mushroom cloud,but we saw the complete discolouration of the sky ... we were mystified ... we thought that an enormous ammunition dump or something like that had blown up."
Uren didn't see the human effects of the bombing until he returned to Japan in 1960,to attend a world conference against nuclear weapons.
"Until I saw the burns and the genetic effects I didn't understand the implications. I now believe it was a crime against humanity,"he said,at his Balmain home.
Uren is unswayed by the argument that the bombing cut short the war,saving many lives - including his own.
The Japanese high command had given orders that every prisoner of war,some 30,000 of them,was to be murdered the day the Allies landed on the Japanese home islands.
"Japan was on its knees and they would have surrendered anyway,"he says."The Americans had complete control of the air - they burned the whole town of Omuta in a single night - and the Russians had entered the Pacific war."
Neville Wran and Tom Uren (third from left) at a nuclear disarmament rally in Sydney on March 23,1986.Peter Solness
Stalin,in fact,brought his attack forward after Hiroshima because he believed Japan was defeated and wanted to gain territorial advantage before the surrender.
Tom Uren believes - as some scientists involved in the Manhattan Project argued at the time - that it would have been enough to drop a"demonstration"nuclear weapon over Tokyo Bay.
President Truman's advisers considered,but rejected,this idea because they didn't believe it would convince the Japanese and were afraid the bomb might not work.
Uren also thinks the decision was racist.
"If they had been Europeans or Christians instead of Asians,the Americans would never have dropped it."
Fourteen thousand Japanese Christians,in fact,were killed.
Uren admits that most of his former comrades would not agree with him.
He doesn't see much of them,anyway:"I've been anti-war all my life. I never march on Anzac Day,only on Palm Sunday."