      Although Donald Stratton was severely injured after the USS Arizona went down, he worked hard to regain his strength and convinced the draft board to allow him to re-enlist in the Navy.John Anderson was one of a handful of USS Arizona survivors until he passed away at 98 years old in late  At the time, Anderson did not know that Jake did not survive and he ended up taking a small boat back to the wreckage to look for his brother. James Bilotta died at the age of 98 and is one of the few ex-Marines on this list.Bilotta joined the Marines when he was just 19 years old and two years later was eating his breakfast when the first bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. After surviving the attack, Bilotta stayed in the military until he was honorably discharged in at the end of World War II.Bilotta returned to Massachusetts and met his wife not long after. The couple eventually settled in Derry in and raised a family together. I married a wonderful woman and I have wonderful children. What other man can be that blessed? Lonnie Cook was one of the few living Pearl Harbor survivors before he passed away at the end of July  Cook had been facing increased health challenges and he started a GoFundM to help with his continued care. Due to his declining health, Cook no longer attended Pearl Harbor related events and the last time he visited the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii was on the 70 th anniversary of the attack.Cook had just taken a shower on the USS Arizona and made plans to explore Honolulu just a few moments before the first wave of attacks at Pearl Harbor. Initially, Cook and his fellow crew members thought nothing of the rumbling as they were below deck, but chief turret captain informed them that the Japanese were bombing the fleet.Cook rescued as many people as he could as the Arizona sank and immediately volunteered the next day to go back to sea. Lonnie Cook had never received the 12 battle stars he earned from his time in the Pacific, but he was finally presented with them in  Lauren Bruner was one of the oldest and last living survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack before his death in the Fall of , just a few months shy of his 99 th birthday. Bruner and the team were compiling biographies, personal stories, and portraits and hope that one day visitors to Pearl Harbor will be able to access this information.Bruner was only 21 years old when the attack took place and he was known for being the next-to-last man to leave the Arizona.In late , Bruner released his memoir titled Second to the Last to Leave USS Arizona , which is one of the most detailed personal accounts of the events that took place on December 7,  Unlike some of the other survivors, Potts is more reluctant to talk about what happened on December 7,  He also rarely participates in Pearl Harbor memorial events, but did show up for the 75th anniversary because the family of another former survivor, Don Stratton, had worked so hard to organize the event.At the time of the attack, Potts was a coxswain and was transporting goods onto the Arizona when chaos broke out. Potts was later assigned to the diving crew that was tasked with retrieving bodies from the sunken part of the ship. Potts currently resides in California and says that he is still in excellent health and that two members of his family lived to  Marine Corps Hilda Perez.Conter joined the Navy just a few months after high school and was only 20 years old on December 7,  According to an interview from , Conter went to the Arizona right after boot camp. He and 10 other men were detailed to recover the dead on the Arizona, and he recalled seeing ashes blowing off the ship that he realized had been men. Potts was a crane operator on the Arizona, he told the American Veterans Center in a video interview in late  As he was pushed in a wheelchair to see the parked Navy Super Hornet at Provo Airport, Potts was asked whether he was ready to get in and go for a ride.Truly humbled to be with Mr. In Hawaii! Mahalo for supporting Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Enjoy this free story!Read more Mahalo for reading the Honolulu Star-Advertiser! Log in now to continue reading this story. Activate Digital Account Print subscriber but without online access? The attack that turned the Arizona into an inferno killed 1, sailors and Marines, and Stratton barely made it off alive, burned over two-thirds of his body.Born July 14, , Stratton was raised in the small Nebraska town of Red Cloud and joined the Navy in the fall of , he wrote in the memoir, which was coauthored by Ken Gire. Within a couple of months, he was one of the roughly 1, men serving aboard the USS Arizona. On the morning of Dec. At one point, a bomb ignited the forward magazines, causing a catastrophic explosion. When they did, you could hear them sizzle.My legs were burned from my ankles to my thighs. My face was seared.  

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      She still vividly recalls the destruction of her village. I saw the bombing. I saw the bodies. I was born during the Vietnam War in December , so I observed and experienced the bombing when I was starting elementary school.I was in Xieng Khouang province, the most heavily bombed area in Laos. I remember we hid in the bombing shelter underground. Nearly half of Laos is now contaminated with unexploded ordnances UXOs , explosive weapons such as bombs, grenades and land mines. The first resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in established a Commission to deal with problems related to the discovery of atomic energy among others. The Commission was to make proposals for, inter alia, the control of atomic energy to the extent necessary to ensure its use only for peaceful purposes.A number of multilateral treaties have since been established with the aim of preventing nuclear proliferation and testing, while promoting progress in nuclear disarmament. A number of bilateral and plurilateral treaties and arrangements seek to reduce or eliminate certain categories of nuclear weapons, to prevent the proliferation of such weapons and their delivery vehicles.The United Nations Secretariat supports efforts aimed at the non-proliferation and total elimination of nuclear weapons. He also supports extending the norms against nuclear weapons, and in that regard appeals to States that possess nuclear weapons to affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. In the decades after the war, bombs, mines, grenades and artillery shells killed dozens of KMBD technicians and hundreds of civilians.Thousands of unexploded Allied bombs were excavated and defused. But many had been buried in rubble or simply entombed in concrete during wartime remediation and forgotten. In the postwar rush for reconstruction, nobody kept consistent information about where unexploded bombs had been made safe and removed.A systematic approach to finding them was officially regarded as impossible. When Reinhardt started work with the East German KMBD in , both he and his counterparts in the West usually found bombs the same way: one at a time, often during construction work.But the government of Hamburg had recently brokered an agreement to allow the states of West Germany access to the 5. Between and , ACIU pilots flew thousands of reconnaissance missions before and after every raid by Allied bombers, taking millions of stereoscopic photographs that revealed both where the attacks could be directed and then how successful they had proved. Those images held clues to where bombs had landed but never detonated—a small, circular hole, for example, in an otherwise consistent line of ragged craters.Defense Intelligence Agency by an enterprising American intelligence officer based in Germany, who had hoped to sell them privately to the German government for his own profit. When he failed, he sold 60, of them to the teacher for a few pfennigs each. Carls, sensing a business opportunity, snapped them up for a deutsche mark apiece. Convinced there must be more, held somewhere in the United States, Carls established a company, Luftbilddatenbank. With the help of archivists in Britain and the States, he brought to light hundreds of cans of aerial reconnaissance film that had gone unexamined for decades.Supplementing the photographs and the sortie plots with local histories and police records, contemporary eyewitness testimony and the detailed records of bombing missions held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Carls was able to build a chronology of everything that had happened to a given patch of land between and  Examining the photographs using a stereoscope, which makes the images appear in 3-D, Carls could see where bombs had fallen, where they had exploded and where they may not have.He closed in on an L-shaped cul-de-sac in Oranienburg, in the area between Lehnitzstrasse and the canal. On the other monitor, he used the geolocation data of the address to summon a list of more than aerial photographs of the area shot by Allied reconnaissance pilots and scrolled through them until he found the ones he needed.A week after the March 15 raid, photographs and were taken from 27, feet over Oranienburg, a fraction of a second apart. They showed the scene near the canal in sharp monochromatic detail, the curve of the Lehnitzstrasse bridge and the bare branches of the trees on Baumschulenweg tracing fine shadows on the water and the pale ground beyond. Then Kroeckel used Photoshop to tint one picture in cyan and the other in magenta, and combined them into a single image.I put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, and the landscape rose toward me: upended matchbox shapes of roofless houses; a chunk of earth bitten out of the Lehnitzstrasse embankment; a giant, perfectly circular crater in the middle of Baumschulenweg. Yet we could see no sign of a dormant 1,bomb concealed in the ruins of the neighborhood, where, soon after the photograph was taken, a woman would find a home for herself and her family.Kroeckel explained that even an image as stark as this one could not reveal everything about the landscape below. Paule Dietrich bought the house on the cul-de-sac in Oranienburg in  He and the German Democratic Republic had been born on the same day, October 7, , and for a while the coincidence seemed auspicious. At 20, he and the others were guests at the opening of the Berlin TV tower, the tallest building in all of Germany. Over the next 20 years, the Republic was good to Dietrich. He drove buses and subway trains for the Berlin transit authority.He was given an apartment in the city, and he became a taxi driver. He added to the savings the president had given him, and on an abandoned piece of land in Falkensee, in the countryside outside the city, he built a summer bungalow. But in , Dietrich turned 40, the Berlin Wall fell and his Ostmarks became worthless overnight.Three years later, the rightful owners of the land in Falkensee returned from the West to reclaim it. It needed a lot of work, but it was right by the water. Dietrich sold his car and mobile home to buy it and began working on it whenever he could.His girlfriend and Willi, their only son, joined him, and slowly the house came together. By , it was finished—plastered, weatherproofed and insulated, with a garage, a new bathroom and a brick fireplace. Dietrich began living there full-time from May to December and planned to move in permanently when he retired. Like everyone else in Oranienburg, he knew the city had been bombed during the war, but so had a lot of places in Germany. But nobody, not even the dog and its walker, had been seriously injured.Most people simply preferred not to think about it. The state of Brandenburg, however, knew Oranienburg presented a unique problem. In , the state Ministry of the Interior commissioned Wolfgang Spyra of the Brandenburg University of Technology to determine how many unexploded bombs might remain in the city and where they might be. Two years later, Spyra delivered a page report revealing not only the huge number of time bombs dropped on the city on March 15, , but also the unusually high proportion of them that had failed to go off.That was a function of local geology and the angle at which some bombs hit the ground: Hundreds of them had plunged nose-first into the sandy soil but then had come to rest nose-up, disabling their chemical fuses. So bombs had begun to go off spontaneously. In January , Paule Dietrich read in the newspaper that the city of Oranienburg was going to start looking for bombs in his neighborhood. He had to fill out some forms, and in July, city contractors arrived.They drilled 38 holes in his yard, each more than 30 feet deep, and dropped a magnetometer into every one.  

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