Dear Colleagues,
As my ‘Foreign Gaze’ had turned into a ‘Sleepy Gaze’ ( annex sore throat) by the end of the week at the 8th global HSR symposium in Nagasaki, I hope you don’t expect a three-page blog on HSR 2024 in this intro 😊. But a few quick thoughts nevertheless.
Russia and NATO are increasingly playing ‘Russian roulette’ in the Ukraine war (with Vlad largely to blame, in my opinion), but Nagasaki provided a poignant reminder of how horrible nuclear weapons really are. A visit to the Atomic Bomb museum here taught us everything you need to know about this: that hopefully never again, mankind will resort to these weapons (by now hundreds of times as ‘powerful’ as back then). The shocking contrast between the normal, peaceful start of that fateful day (9 August 1945) and what happened then in just a few split-seconds (and the horrific aftermath), in combination with the sheer ‘coincidence’ that on August 9 the ‘Fat Bomb’ was thrown on Nagasaki (and not another target)...
