Latest news with #IsorokuYamamoto
New Indian Express
02-07-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
The world's only mega-bomber
There is a quote often attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour, that it might have 'awakened a sleeping giant'. A similar simile is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, albeit with a few variations: 'China is a sleeping giant/ dragon/ lion.' That the quotes are apocryphal is beside the point. They indicated directions in which the countries were likely to go. In the event, America got there first: it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, becoming the first and only country in the world to have deployed nuclear weapons. China took a half-century more to get to a place where it can use nuclear weapons—but has refrained, as a matter of policy, from even hinting at the possibility of ever using them. The US went on to design other big bombs: the 6,800-kg 'daisy cutter', which it used in Vietnam, the Gulf War and outside the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan in 2001. When it was 'retired' in 2008, it was replaced with the 9,850 kg Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, or 'mother of all bombs') first used in 2017 in Afghanistan and still in stock. And in 2011, the US made the 'biggest bomb of them all'—the 12,304-kg Massive Ordnance Penetrator or 'bunker buster'. After 14 years of aggregating 20 of these gigabombs, the US used them on Iran. In effect, in order to escape proscriptions in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons or NPT, to which the US is a founder-signatory, America went the way of non-nuclear devices with the explosive output of a small, tactical nuclear bomb. In her 2007 book, The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, Nina Tannenwald wrote about the 'four critical instances where US leaders considered using nuclear weapons—Japan 1945, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War 1991'. That they did not was because of the so-called 'nuclear taboo', a moral construct that exists and, going by the number of nuclear weapon-owning countries that have not signed the NPT, despite the prevalence in governmentalmilitary quarters of the rationalist deterrence theory (or MAD, mutually assured destruction). But the way around the albatrosses of the 'nuclear taboo' and the NPT is building bigger and more destructive non-nuclear bombs. This is the route the US has taken.
Washington Post
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
On Trump and Iran: But then what?
In much of life, but especially in foreign policy, a three-word question is crucial: But then what? That is approximately what Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto said when Japan's government asked if he could stealthily take a fleet across the northern Pacific and deal a devastating blow to the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Yomiuri Shimbun
09-05-2025
- Yomiuri Shimbun
AI Turns Obscure Handwriting from Japan's Wartime Documents into Readable Text
The Yomiuri Shimbun Naoki Kanno, chief of the Center for Military History, explains a copy of a letter written by Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the navy's Combined Fleet during World War II, in April, in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo. The National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS) has decided to convert its vast collection of Japanese military records into text data with the help of artificial intelligence, after which the records will be made available online. Many prewar and wartime records are handwritten in cursive, often requiring an expert to decipher. Once the documents are transcribed, it should be possible for anyone to easily trace the movements of individual units during the war and see how decisions were made. The project could contribute to new historical discoveries. In a letter addressed to senior naval officials after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the navy's Combined Fleet, expressed his frustration over the 'mood of victory' prevailing at the time. The letter reads: 'It seems that the United States is finally ready to launch a serious operation against Japan, and the frivolity at home is truly degrading. If things continue on this way, I fear that a single strike on Tokyo will instantly cower them.' The NIDS' Center for Military History in Tokyo's Ichigaya district holds about 100,000 historical documents related to the Japan's former Imperial military. Some of these have been digitized as images and made available on the center's website, where they can be searched by document title. However, the content of the documents has not been transcribed, preventing users from doing keyword searches. Moreover, the cursive style of the texts presents a challenge to the average reader. In the transcription project, the NIDS will use a technology called AI-OCR (optical character recognition). OCR can recognize text in documents that have been made into image files, and can transcribe this text. This technology will be paired with AI that has been trained to read the cursive characters. AI-OCR will be fed sample documents, and any errors in the output will be corrected by humans. This learning process will be repeated until the accuracy improves, at which point the institute will begin transcribing the entire collection. The Defense Ministry has allocated ¥70 million in its initial budget for fiscal 2025, the first year of the project, and will contract out the project work. The NIDS is aiming for over 90% accuracy, and the data used for machine learning will eventually be made public, contributing to the advancement of AI technology. Once the documents are transcribed and made available online, people will be able to easily search documents using keywords, such as gyokusai (heroic death), and will no longer have to struggle to read indecipherable handwriting. It will also be possible to search all the documents at once, increasing the odds that researchers will uncover new historical facts or new methods of analysis. Many people visit the NIDS to research their relatives' wartime experiences. 'Transcription has been a long-standing goal, but doing it manually would have required an astronomical amount of time,' said Naoki Kanno, chief of the Center for Military History. 'We will create an environment where people can access documents that allow us to reflect on the war.'
