THE HAGUE —
Japan announced on Monday that it would turn over to Washington a large cache of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium, a decades-old research stockpile that is large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons, according to American and Japanese officials.
In a joint statement by the United States and Japan, the two countries said that Japan had agreed to “remove and dispose” of hundreds of kilograms of nuclear material from the Fast Critical Assembly at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.
The statement said the elimination of the uranium and plutonium would “help prevent unauthorized actors, criminals, or terrorists from acquiring such materials. This material, once securely transported to the United States, will be sent to a secure facility and fully converted into less sensitive forms.”
The statement did not specify the amount of the material to be eliminated. American and Japanese officials said it would include 700 pounds, or 320 kilograms, of weapons-grade plutonium. The amount of highly enriched uranium has not been announced but is estimated at 450 pounds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/w...tes-assume-control-of-nuclear-cache.html?_r=0
I should have posted Iris Chang's 'The Rape of Nanking'. It was a NY Times #1 nonfiction best seller. She committed suicide, you know. She was writing another book about American POW's in Japanese POW camps. She'd been driving around the US interviewing former POW's who were held in those camps. Her friends and husband said she'd begun to fall into a deep depression over this work. They found her car along a farm road 40 miles west of San Francisco. She'd shot herself in the head.
Iris Chang's book was not historically accurate and it was a collection of wartime horror stories still told in the Chinese community. The book became an instant bestseller in the US but academic historians pointed out serious flaws of the book, which was not based on proper historical research as expected from first-class authors. Her suicide may have something to do with harsh criticisms she received after the publication of 'The Rape of Nanking'. We know now that the 300,000 figure she cited from Chinese sources is too high and a number of Europeans set up the Nanking Safety Zone, by which up to 250,000 Chinese people were saved, while 50,000 to 60,000 civilians were killed, according to John Rabe who also appeared in Chiang's book.
Plot: A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.
Joshua A. Fogel, at York University,[38] argued that the book is "seriously flawed" and "full of misinformation and harebrained explanations."[3] He suggested that the book "starts to fall apart" when Chang tries to explain why the massacre took place, as she repeatedly comments on "the Japanese psyche", which she sees as "the historical product of centuries of conditioning that all boil down to
mass murder" even though in the introduction, she wrote that she would offer no "commentary on the Japanese character or the genetic makeup of a people who could commit such acts". Fogel asserted that part of the problem was Chang's "lack of training as a historian" and another part was "the book's dual aim as passionate polemic and dispassionate history".
[3] David M. Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at
Stanford University, also pointed out that while Chang noted that "this book is not intended as a commentary on the Japanese character," she then wrote about the "'Japanese identity'—a bloody business, in her estimation, replete with martial competitions, samurai ethics, and the fearsome warriors' code of
bushido", making the inference that "'the path to Nanking' runs through the very marrow of Japanese culture." Kennedy also suggested that "accusation and outrage, rather than analysis and understanding, are this book's dominant motifs, and although outrage is a morally necessary response to Nanjing, it is an intellectually insufficient one."
[39] Roger B. Jeans, professor of history at Washington and Lee University, referred to Chang's book as "half-baked history", and criticized her lack of experience with the subject matter:
In writing about this horrific event, Chang strives to portray it as an unexamined Asian holocaust. Unfortunately,
she undermines her argument—she is not a trained historian—by neglecting the wealth of sources in English and Japanese on this event. This leads her into errors such as greatly inflating the population of Nanjing (Nanking) at that time and uncritically accepting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and contemporary Chinese figures for the numbers of Chinese civilians and soldiers killed. What particularly struck me about her argument was her attempt to charge all Japanese with refusing to accept the fact of the 'Rape of Nanking' and her condemnation of the 'persistent Japanese refusal to come to terms with its past.'
[40]
The Rape of Nanking book - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia