". . . I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki."

-Kurt Vonnegut

Troll-repellant: Yes, yes, I know, Truman was a Democrat. But you see, I don't approach politics like a fucking football game . . . I can acknowledge that a Democratic president made a horrible, monstrous decision.

While I'm no fan of nuclear war, I am not sure that the idea that war would have ended by November or December makes dropping the bomb unnecessary or on balance better than conventional warfare. While the Japanese today are peacable world citizens, the Japanese government of 1945 was in an entirely different state of mind. Not only was it completely willing to sacrifice the life of any and all of its citizens in its fruitless cause, but it left massive carnage and destruction in the other parts of Asia it occupied. When it was forced to leave the Philippines, for instance, in addition to killing people, the Japanese made sure to bomb train tracks, schools, libraries, kill every farm animal they could find, and otherwise destroy as much of the infrastructure as they humanly could. This at a time when their navy and air force were almost completely destroyed and their chances of winning the war were almost nothing. Unfortunately, they were lost in a cycle of destructiveness that they couldn't seem to stop, no matter what the cost. I think even the fact that they didn't surrender immediately after the first nuclear bomb is testament to how lost their mindset was.

Furthermore, I'm not sure that getting to Japan before the Russians did was such a bad idea. I think ultimately the Japanese were much better off in the American sphere of influence than they would have been in the Soviet sphere of influence. Japan served as a lynchpin of western influence in Asia. While I think many things about the cold war, including the war in Vietnam, were ridiculous and problematic, I can still believe that modern Japan is a much healthier nation as it is than it would have been as a Soviet satellite.

I have many criticisms to make of the conduct of the war (there was no justification for interning Japanese Americans and that will always be to our shame). I DO think it's extremely problematic to attack civilians. And I think opening the Pandora's box of nuclear war caused many other problems that haunt us today. But I think that a case can be made for why nuclear attacks were justified.

So as not to cause confusion: I am a lifelong Democrat who has never voted for a repugnik and who worked my first campaign for Truman in 1948.

I believe this so-called "monstrous decision" and the other deliterious descriptions provided by Vonnegut are just totally wrong-headed.

Everything that Alexandra wrote immediately above is an unemotional and true explanation. The U.S. had lost an incredible number of Marines and soldiers in the battles of the Pacific, including several that were still ongoing at the time the atomic bomb was dropped. Iwo Jima was no walk-over, and if you don't know then you should definitely read about it. Okinawa and the kamakazi attacks also.

If you had been Truman in the summer of 1945 and your decision had been to not drop the bomb, you would have been reviled for such a decision - and rightfully so. Nobody could predict, at that point, when Japan might have surrendered.

What the debate should point out is the folly of war. Zinn might as well be arguing the linear logic that crop circles are proof aliens visited the earth..

The use of nuclear bombs on Japan was justified. It must be placed within the context of the brutal fighting for every small scrap of land the Japanese occupied, resulting from the Japanese high command ordering soldiers to hold until the death, and the massive American military causalities suffered during each battle with the Japanese. A further consideration must be that President Truman and the joint chiefs knew the bomb was dangerous to the extent that it was the biggest “boom” that could be made at the time, but I doubt they had the understanding of the true nature of nuclear weapons.

Warlords were ruling Japan, and the emperor was largely a figure head used to maintain popular sentiment amongst the Japanese. There is no doubt that if the Americans, or Russians, or anyone, had invaded Japan, those occupiers would have paid dearly for every scrap of land, and the casualties would have easily gone into the millions on both sides.

This is supported by the fact it took two of the most ghastly devices ever devised to make them surrender.

More important than whether atomic weapons ended that war - are you willing to let your country use them again when there might be other ways of dealing with the situation?

I saw a special on the history channel a number of months ago. My impression was that, according to this show, that japan was getting ready to surrender and the major motivation for dropping the bomb was to show the russians we had the capability. I always woundered why we couldn't have dropped the first one on on some atoll in the pacific and given Japan 1 week to surrender.

Deductions of the state of mind of the Japanese people at that time from the diary gossip of an American cabinet minister are insane. (Quite apart from the fact of interservice rivalries -- the Navy wasn't very much in on the atomic bomb project.)

Have any of the people who swallow this crap ever talked to anyone who was living in Japan at that time? I have. I've been told again and again that they WOULD have fought with their bare hands if necessary, because they had been told that the Americans were monsters who would torture, rape, and murder them, and then take a dump on their graves. One of the reasons the American occupation of Japan was so successful was the surprise of the Japanese population that this was not so.

My university Japanese literature teacher was about 12 in 1945. He told us that in the summer of 1945 their head teacher announced to the assembled students that the Americans were going to rape all the little girls. The teacher then dramatically paused and continued, "and the boys, they will...." and made a swipe with a ruler at groin level. My teacher, who was somewhat of a humorist, claimed that he had a sudden intense pain in his crotch at that point. But it wasn't a joke. They all went out of there convinced that the Americans were inhuman monsters, who were going to castrate the men and rape the women to death, and if you'd given them bamboo spears and told them to charge a machine gun post they would have done it.

The only Japanese people I've seen who have stated Japan was ready to surrender are those who have been guilt-tripping gullible Americans. This is relatively easy for them to do -- because of their culture, Japanese people understand how to manipulate feelings of shame and play the victim better than most Americans do.

However, at the same time they want Americans to be ashamed of Hiroshima, they are almost totally shameless when it comes to their own behavior in Asia for fifty years. How many of you know that the Imperial Court set up a temporary battle headquarters in Hiroshima in 1895 for the first war with China? You can be sure the Chinese haven't forgotten. Nor the Koreans.

When the Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe went to Korea and talked about the atomic bombings, the first question he got from the audience was, "Do you know that we in Korea felt that the atom bomb was a gift from Heaven?" To his great credit, this shocked Oe into some rethinking of his own position.

There is no necessary contradiction between considering the atomic bombings reasonable in 1945 and wishing the radical restriction or even elimination of nuclear weapons today. The two situations are different. However, if you entertain fantasies about 1945, you will weaken your case for nuclear disarmament today.

There is a common story peddled that the Japanese were "ready to surrender" in mid-1945. In fact what they were looking for was to negotiate a truce with the Allies. They would get to hold onto some of their mainland conquests, their Army and Navy would not be disarmed and the Home Islands would not be occupied. Their political leadership would be inviolate. Ten or fifteen years later they would be ready for Pacific War Round Two, probably with nukes of their own (they had already established a limited nuclear weapons research program).

At Yalta in early 1945 Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed that the Nazi party in Germany would not be allowed to survive and the same would go for the Japanese War Party. Unconditional surrender was the only option for both of the Axis Powers because the warlike belligerence of their leaders was the proximate cause of tens of millions of deaths over the previous six years and they had agreed that Germany and Japan would have to be remade as well as rebuilt.

When Truman found himself in charge and the Bomb at his disposal it was just another method of destroying a Japanese city, a little less effective than a 500-bomber firestorm raid like the Tokyo raid that killed an estimated 150,000 people in two days, or the Osaka raid that killed close to 80,000 in a single night. The only advantage was that it only took a single aircraft to kill a city. They didn't need the Bomb to crush the Japanese; Boeing at that time were building 300 B-29s a month and the European campaign's B-17 bomber crews were retraining and preparing to bomb Japan flat and kill tens of millions over the course of the next year. There was no guarantee that nukes would cause the Japanese to surrender.

In the end, after the naval city of Nagasaki was hit (the original target was Kokura and its major weapons factories but the weather was poor) the Japanese War Cabinet voted after two days of arguing to continue fighting. It was only the direct intervention of the Emperor that led to them changing their minds. They were ready for the entire Japanese people to be exterminated before the dishonour of surrender.

Steve Gilliard has a great post about this:

It's not just a game: China plays Japan in the Asian Cup finals

http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/

>are you willing to let your country use them again

And there's the rub. The use of the A-bomb was so effective that the US has this belief that they can build some perfect weapon system that allows immediate victory without the death of US military personnel. The problem with that idea is that of all of the actions we have had since WWII, none have required these unique and perfect weapons. Instead, we depend on humans, ergo, what we see happening in Iraq. Troops on the ground, prosecuting an action in a manner for which the force was neither designed nor trained for.

To pile onto the commentators before:

People sometimes find it hard to understand why the Japanese would fight to the death against hopeless odds. What people often forget --and what Japanese textbooks until recently chose to promote a forgetting of-- is what the Japanese themselves did during, for example, the occupation of China. It was entirely reasonable for the Japanese to expect the Americans to do to Tokyo what the Japanese themselves had done some years earlier to Nanjing and Shanghai. Or, for that matter, to expect the Americans to do what they had done decades earlier at places like Sand Creek.

If you reasonably expect your babies to be tossed on bayonets and your women to be pressed into sex camps --both well-documented atrocities, among countless others, commited by the Imperial Japanese Army-- then why *wouldn't* you fight to the very last man, as long as you were convinced you could take the enemy out with you? What the atomic bombs did was to make it clear to the Japanese, in a theoretical sense, that we could, in fact, kill them without risking more than a bomber group of our own. And even then, history records that it was a close vote.

The Japanese didn't fight to the death on Okinawa because they were monsters --they were human, very human, having very human expectations that what went around, would come around. And if you reasonably expected your families to be gruesomely slaughtered and turned into sexual slaves, wouldn't *you* fight to the very last?

Years ago I remember reading a book describing some early targeting discussions. There was a suggestion put forth to explode the device out over Tokyo bay while simultaneously delivering an ultimatim requiring full surrender to forestall further weapons raining down on major cities. Some thought it may take a dozen or more devices. It is hard to reconstruct the psychic matrix of that time as the corrosive effects of years of brutal worldwide warfare is difficult to reproduce.

But what of the newly irradiated? It would be a shame not to acknowledge that radiological weapons are being used today and the number of victims is growing. According to he use of depleted uranium munitions in the current theaters of war constitute a broad use of radiological weaponry that clearly results in a sudden rise of cancers, birth defects, and a host of radiation sicknesses first studied. According to Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, "DU is mutagenic and transforms human osteoblastic cells into a tumorigenic phenotype. It alters neurophysiological parameters in rat hippocampus, crosses the placental barrier, and enters fetal tissue." I share a concern with others that we are currently using heavy metal warfare in areas where there is a concentrated civilian population and that this may well be considered an attack using a weapon of mass distruction.

Had our government proposed a pre-emptive nuclear attack against Iraq, most Americans would not have sanctioned it. The distinct possibility that we have irradiated a good portion of Iraq with the widespread use of DU is unsettling. Is this just a new form of nuclear warfare?

You got the message, obelus!