They'd never have dropped it on Christians' Tom Uren on US Nagasaki Nuclear Bombing

 First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on August 5, 1995

'They'd never have dropped it on Christians'

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...

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.