We lost our moral compass.

世界唯一の核被爆国になった日本を縦断している映画監督 オリバーストーン氏のことば。説明はいらないでしょう。記銘したい表現です。（UG）

Film director Stone dismisses U.S. A-bomb claim as 'tremendous lie'

HIROSHIMA (Kyodo) -- American film director Oliver Stone has challenged the commonly-held U.S. perception that the 1945 atomic bombing of Japan ended World War II -- saving a huge number of American lives in the process -- as "a tremendous lie" during his visit to Hiroshima through Wednesday.

"It's easy to look at the issue simply that Americans dropped the bomb to end World War II because Japanese militarists would not give up...(but) that would be the surface explanation," Stone, 66, said in a recent interview as part of his Japan trip to attend a series of peace events commemorating the 68th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, respectively.

"But those people who looked deeper will find out there is a much more cynical explanation," he said, adding that the Soviet Union's war on Japan, begun on Aug. 9, was "a strong factor" behind Tokyo's surrender six days later.

"The United States was able to get away with it because we were the winners. But as a result, we lost our moral compass," he said. "We were able to use nuclear threats against Vietnam, against the Soviet Union, against whoever we had to get our win."

Stone, who went to the Vietnam War as "a young man, as a believer I was fighting communism," said that for decades he used to take as a given the justification for the atomic bombings.

But his view changed after he started research with U.S. historian Peter Kuznick, with whom he produced a 10-part documentary series and companion book, "The Untold History of the United States."

Coming to Hiroshima, western Japan, for the first time, Stone visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, met atomic bomb survivors and attended the city's memorial ceremony held Tuesday morning near Ground Zero at exactly at the same moment when the atomic bomb codenamed Little Boy was dropped by a U.S. B-29 bomber 68 years ago.

The blast, fire and radiation from the world's first atomic bombing devastated the city, with the temperature on the ground at the hypocenter rising as high as 3,000 to 4,000 C.

By the end of 1945, the bomb is estimated to have killed 140,000 people.

"All of us could have been here that day in the morning. All of us could have been victimized," Stone said. "It's a terrible thing."

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130808p2g00m0dm036000c.html

cf. moral compass "a natural feeling that makes people know what is right and wrong and how they should behave" (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)