Killing For Peace
by pessimist
The common belief is that the use of atomic weapons on Japan at the end of WWII were necessary to prevent the huge causalties that an invasion would cause.
But was there another option? And was there another reason?
According to this article, the answer to both questions is: YES.
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to December 31 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”- The United States Strategic Bombing Survey
“most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.”- diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes
Japan was finished, and only the most blindly indoctrinated refused to face the facts (Like the Bu$h wing of the Republican Party today!). What few ships they still had were easy prey for US planes and subs, and without them they could no longer supply themselves to fight. They were, in fact trying to surrender, but like US Grant at Fort Donnelson, Harry Truman (whose ancestors were Confederates!) insisted on unconditional surrender. It is felt that the Japanese would have surrendered had Truman guaranteed that Emperor Hirohito would not be harmed in any way - something Douglas MacArthur insisted upon when the details of the Japanese surrender were worked out.
So why was the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima?
Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described Truman as a man on a toboggan, the momentum too great to stop it.Or was it, as British scientist P.M.S. Blackett suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?
The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan.
But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan.
In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.”
World War II wasn't even over yet, and here we were deciding that the Soviet Union - the real reason Hitler was defeated in Europe - was now an enemy! And we didn't trust the Russians??? Stabbing an ally in the back, like we just did to Tony Blair's British Secret Service by exposing a Pakistani agent working undercover against an active Al Qaeda plot, isn't how a nation should be going about earning respect and trust if it expects to leave in a peaceful world!
Yes, I know! Just because Uncle Joe was fighting the Axis like we were didn't mean that he would be a trustworthy friend afterwards. The Communist plans for world domination ... Communists in the State Department ... Communists under your bed - yeah, I still remember all of that Cold War mind-manipulation.
But by using atomic weapons on Japan as a message to Stalin, all we did was hasten Joe's plans to have such weapons himself. Even if, as has been alleged, the Rosenbergs had not assisted with Manhatten Project secrets being sent to Moscow, Stalin had captured enough of the German physicists who worked on the project for Hitler to be know the possibilities and to be able to initiate his own progam. Thus, in 'solving' a problem in the short term, we caused a much bigger problem in the long run.
You kids out there don't know what it's like to be huddled in your basement, listening to the local Civil Defense radio station, awaiting the word that the missiles were on the way - I do. We knew more about Hiroshima and the Bomb's power than most kids today care to know, so we had an idea of what was coming. We also knew what was going to happen afterwards, assuming we were still alive. (If you care to know, John Hersey's Hiroshima is still in print). So with the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation in October of 1962, no one I know of was in a big hurry to toss a few nukes around like Owwer Leedur is so keen to do today!
Back in 1945, considering how ugly that war was, it would be understandable if the major players on the Allied side were for the use of this weapon. But they weren't.
When the papers of the Manhattan Project — the project to build the atom bomb — were released years later, they showed that General George Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its official report: “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population.”
“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” — President Herbert Hoover
In 1963 President Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled that in July 1945 he had opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan during a meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “... I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
The very day after the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, the personal pilot of General Douglas MacArthur, commander of Allied forces in the Pacific, recorded in his diary that MacArthur was “appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster.” [He had more personal reasons than most for revenge against the Japanese, having fought them from the beginning of the Pacific War]
John Foster Dulles [Whose brother Allen would head the CIA in the Cold War] and Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam together urged President Truman to forgo additional use of the new weapon, saying they opposed the bomb’s indiscriminate obliteration of human beings.
Within days of the Hiroshima bombing, David Lawrence, the editor of what is now U.S. News & World Report, wrote that Japanese surrender had appeared inevitable weeks before the bomb’s use. The claim of “military necessity,” he argued, rang hollow. Official justifications would “never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations ... did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.”
No one should easily discount these views. These men were all respected public figures. With the exception of Oxnam, all were conservatives. None was a pacifist. None of those who survived into the 1960s publicly opposed the war in Vietnam. Their dissenting opinions were not based on hindsight. They voiced their beliefs even before the war ended. These men considered the use of the atomic bomb to have been militarily unnecessary and morally repugnant based on the information available to them in the summer of 1945.
Keep this in mind when, on Hiroshima anniversaries, you hear claims that opposition to the bombing emerged only in the 1960s, or that critics must, necessarily, be liberals or pacifists.
It wasn't just Japanese who suffered from the Bomb - American POWs did as well:
1st American POW Added to Hiroshima Gallery of Dead
Near where the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, the faces of the victims silently appear and fade on a wall of television monitors in a relentless display of the attack's human toll. Amid the thousands of faces, one stands apart: that of Cpl. John Long Jr., U.S. Army Air Force.Long, who died in the blast while being held by the Japanese, is the first American serviceman to be enshrined at a memorial here, throwing light on the little-known story of U.S. prisoners of war who perished at Hiroshima. Long bailed out of his B-24 bomber as it was shot down near Hiroshima days before the Aug. 6, 1945, bombing. The 27-year-old steelworker from New Castle, Pa., was among at least 10 American POWs killed in the attack.
Long's 35-year-old great nephew, Nathan Long, says the portrait [photo of his great uncle] is a "small story" compared to the catastrophic suffering of Japanese victims. The bombing killed some 68,000 people instantly, 140,000 by December. Thousands of Koreans brought to Japan as forced labor died, as did Americans of Japanese descent who were trapped after war broke out.
But the POWs are among the least remembered casualties--their fate wasn't widely known until researchers digging through archives began to document the story in the 1970s.
This wouldn't have mattered one whit to the planners of these raids. As was documented in the first linked article:
The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped.Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?
Martin Sherwin says that among the Nagasaki dead were probably American prisoners of war. He notes a message of July 31 from Headquarters, U.S. Strategic Air Forces, Guam, to the War Department:
“Reports prisoner of war sources, not verified by photos, given location of Allied prisoner of war camp one mile north of center of city of Nagasaki. Does this influence the choice of this target for initial Centerboard operation? Request immediate reply.”
The reply: “Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged.”
Ask The Atomic Veterans how they feel about being used as Guinea pigs in weapons development. [Scroll down below the shrine to Owwer Leedur to see their information]. There are also Canadian atomic veterans, Australian atomic veterans, New Zealander atomic veterans, French atomic veterans, and certainly British atomic veterans, although I wasn't able to locate a link easily. Ask them if they want to see their sons and grandsons have to deal with radiation sickness like they have all these years. Ask them if the symptoms are anything like those reported by those in Iraq and Afghanistan received through exposure to depleted uranium bullets. Ask them if maybe there isn't a better way to deal with disputes than to use the Bomb to 'kill them all and let Allah sort them out!'
“The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.” — General Omar Bradley (Eisenhower's field commander)
It's like the Soldier's General was speaking out from his Arlington grave about today's BFEE/PNAC Petroleum Pirate Posse and their insane plans to use nuclear weapons.
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