Hiroshima

gimmesometruth27

68 years ago today the united states used an atomic bomb on a city full of civilians.

we must never forget today, and we must never forget the awesome power of these weapons.

carry on, because sadly we as a society are more concerned with watching the kardashians...

badbrains

And as far as I know it, the ONLY country to ever use a WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

dimitrispearljam

just for the record those kardasians are in Greece for holidays!

badbrains

dimitrispearljam wrote:

just for the record those kardasians are in Greece for holidays!

You guys can KEEP THEM!

brianlux

badbrains wrote:

And as far as I know it, the ONLY country to ever use a WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

And the last, I hope. What a terrible invention.

tybird

badbrains wrote:

And as far as I know it, the ONLY country to ever use a WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Unless you count use of chemical agents. :?

gimmesometruth27

we actually did it twice, and have the largest arsenal of such weapons in the world.

yet we seem to fear everyone else, and try our hardest to keep other countries from obtaining them...

:fp:

gimmesometruth27

worst invention in human history. bar none.

jasonbouchard88

I actually didn't know until this year that there was a Japanese named Tsutomi Yamaguchi who survived BOTH Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/m ... ivor-japan

Drowned Out

Crimes against humanity. International war crimes.....terrorism.




The Hiroshima Myth. Unaccountable War Crimes and the Lies of US Military History

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-hirosh ... ry/5344436

In the pitiful history lessons that were taught by my uninspired/bored history teachers (which seemed to be mostly jocks) came from patriotic and highly censored books where everything the British and US military ever did in war time was honorable and self-sacrificing and everything their opponents did was barbaric. Everybody in my graduating class of 26 swallowed the post-war propaganda in our history books. It was from these books that we learned about the “glorious” end of the war against Japan.

Of course, I now know that I had been given false information, orchestrated by war-justifying militarists (and assorted uber-patiotic historians) starting with General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur successfully imposed total censorship of what really happened at Ground Zero. One of his first acts after taking over as viceroy of Japan was to confiscate and/or destroy all the photographic evidence documenting the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Back in 1995, the Smithsonian Institution was preparing to correct some the 50-year-old pseudo-patriotic myths by staging an honest, historically-accurate display dealing with the atomic bombings. Following the vehement, orchestrated, reactionary outrage emanating from right-wing veterans groups and other patriot groups (including Newt Gingrich’s GOP-dominated Congress that threatened to stop federal funding of the Institute), the Smithsonian was forced to censor-out all of the unwelcome but contextually important parts of the story.(....)

Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

The Smithsonian historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the melee, the corporate-controlled mainstream media – and therefore the public – failed to learn an important historical point, and that is this: The war could have ended in the spring of 1945 without the summer atomic bombs, and therefore there might have been no Okinawa bloodbath for thousands of American Marines and soldiers. Also there would have been no need for an American land invasion of Japan – the basis of the subsequent propaganda campaign that justified the use of atomic weapons on defenseless civilian populations and meets the definition of an international war crime and a crime against humanity.

American intelligence, with the full knowledge of President Truman’s administration, was aware of Japan’s desperate search for ways to honorably surrender months before Truman gave the fateful order to incinerate Hiroshima.

Intelligence data, revealed in the 1980s, showed that the contingency plans for a large-scale US invasion (planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary. Japan was working on peace negotiations through its Moscow ambassador as early as April of 1945. Truman knew of these developments because the US had broken the Japanese code years earlier, and all of Japan’s military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo said: “Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty, especially deposing the Emperor) is the only obstacle to peace.”

Truman and his advisors knew about these efforts, and the war could have ended through diplomacy by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor Hirohito – who was regarded as a deity in Japan. That reasonable concession was – seemingly illogically – refused by the US in their demands for unconditional surrender, initially demanded at the 1943 Casablanca Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and reiterated at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill and Stalin. Still, the Japanese continued searching for an honorable peace through negotiations.

Even Secretary of War Henry Stimson, said: “the true question was not whether surrender could have been achieved without the use of the bomb but whether a different diplomatic and military course would have led to an earlier surrender. A large segment of the Japanese cabinet was ready in the spring of 1945 to accept substantially the same terms as those finally agreed on.” In other words, Stimson felt that the US had unnecessarily prolonged the war.

After Japan did surrender, MacArthur allowed the emperor to remain in place as spiritual head of Japan, the very condition that coerced the Japanese leadership to refuse to accept the humiliating “unconditional surrender” terms.

So the two essential questions that need answering to comprehend what was going on behind the scenes are these:

1) Why did the US refuse to accept Japan’s only demand concerning their surrender (the retention of the emperor) and

2) why were the atomic bombs used when victory in the Pacific was already a certainty?

Shortly after WWII, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote:

“The Japanese, in a military sense, were in a hopeless strategic situation by the time the Potsdam Declaration (insisting on Japan’s unconditional surrender) was made on July 26, 1945.”

Admiral William Leahy, top military aide to President Truman, said in his war memoirs, I Was There:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

And General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a personal visit to President Truman a couple of weeks before the bombings, urged him not to use the atomic bombs. Eisenhower said (in a 1963 interview in Newsweek):

“It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing . . . to use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime.”

There are a number of factors that contributed to the Truman administration’s decision to use the bombs.

1) The US had made a huge investment in time, mind and money (a massive 2 billion in 1940 dollars) to produce three bombs, and there was no inclination – and no guts – to stop the momentum.

2) The US military and political leadership – as did many ordinary Americans – had a tremendous appetite for revenge because of Pearl Harbor. Mercy wasn’t in the mindset of the US military or the war-weary populace, and the missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were accepted – no questions asked – by most of those folks who only knew the sanitized, national security version of events.

3) The fissionable material in Hiroshima’s bomb was uranium. The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium bomb. Scientific curiosity was a significant factor that pushed the project to its completion. The Manhattan Project scientists (and the US Army director of the project, General Leslie Groves) were curious about “what would happen if an entire city was leveled by a single uranium bomb?” “What about a plutonium bomb?”

The decision to use both bombs had been made well in advance of August 1945. Accepting the surrender of Japan was not an option if the science experiment was to go ahead. Of course the three-day interval between the two bombs was unconscionably short if the Hiroshima bomb was designed to coerce immediate surrender. Japan’s communications and transportation capabilities were in shambles, and no one, not even the US military, much less the Japanese high command, fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima. (The Manhattan Project was so top secret that even Douglas MacArthur, commanding general of the entire Pacific theatre, had been kept out of the loop until five days before Hiroshima.)

4) The Russians had proclaimed their intent to enter the war with Japan 90 days after V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day, May 8), which would have been Aug. 8, two days after Hiroshima was bombed. Indeed, Russia did declare war on Japan on August 8 and was advancing eastward across Manchuria when Nagasaki was incinerated. The US didn’t want Japan surrendering to Russia or sharing the spoils of war.

Russia was soon to be the only other superpower – and a future enemy – so the first nuclear threat “messages” of the Cold War were sent. Russia indeed received far less of the spoils of war than they had anticipated, and the two superpowers were instantly mired in the Cold War stalemate that led to the unaffordable nuclear arms race and the possibility of total extinction of the human race. What did happen was the mutual moral and financial bankruptcies of both nations that occurred over the next couple of generations of military madness.

An estimated 80,000 innocent civilians, plus 20,000 weaponless young Japanese conscripts died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing. Hundreds of thousands more suffered slow deaths from agonizing burns, radiation sickness, leukemias, anemias and untreatable infections for the rest of their shortened lives. Generations of the survivor’s progeny were also afflicted with horrible radiation-induced illnesses, cancers and premature deaths, still going on to this very hour.

Another shameful reality that has been covered up is the fact that 12 American Navy pilots, their existence well known to the US command, were instantly incinerated in the Hiroshima jail on the fateful day

So the official War Department-approved version of the end of the war in the Pacific contained a new batch of myths that took their places among the long lists of myths that Americans are continuously fed by our corporate, military, political and media opinion leaders, the gruesomeness of war being changed to glorification in the process.

..........................................................................
Chomsky on the bombings, and the 'grande finale': the fire-bombing of Tokyo AFTER the A-bombs were dropped.

Some comments from Noam Chomsky may be apropos in the current discussion
about nuclear and area bombing. These quotes are drawn from Chomsky, "Class
Warfare," Interviewed by David Barsamian (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997),
pp. 189-90:

"... I must say that Nagasaki strikes me as much worse [than Hiroshima].
Nobody's done much research into Nagasaki so I can only speculate, but my
impression is that the Nagasaki bomb was basically an experiment. ... I
think that they basically wanted to discover whether a different mechanism
was going to work and used a city because ... I don't know, why not a city?
If that turns out to be true, even five percent true, it's the most
grotesque event in history, probably. Certainly the most grotesque
scientific experiment in history.

"Whatever you think about Hiroshima, maybe you can give an argument, maybe
you can't (I don't really think you can), but at least it's not in outer
space. I can't conceive of any argument for Nagasaki. And then it doesn't
stop there, of course. There was that event which I wrote about thirty
years ago which I never see mentioned, although it's in the official Air
Force history. It's what the official Air Force history calls the finale.
General Hap Arnold, who was Air Force commander, decided that to end the war
it would be nice to do it with a bang, with a kind of grand finale. What he
wanted to do was to see if he could organize a thousand planes for a raid on
Japan. Getting a thousand planes together was a big managerial achievement
in those days ... But he managed to get a thousand planes, and they bombed
cities, civilian targets, on August 14. This is described in a very upbeat
description in the Air Force history. It was after the surrender had been
announced but before it had been officially received. ... That one didn't
kill as many people as the atom bombs, but in a way it's more depraved.

"... [Recently was] the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Tokyo. That
passed here without a whisper. If you look at the U.S. Strategic Bombing
Survey after the war, it points out that more people were killed during that
bombing in a six-hour period than ever in human history. The bombing of
Tokyo virtually levelled the city. It was mostly wood, so therefore they
started by dropping oil gel, which sets things on fire, then napalm, which
was then just coming in. According to survivors, the planes were just
chasing people. There was no defense. It was a defenseless city. They
used napalm to block the river so people couldn't get to it. People did try
to jump into ponds, but then they just burned to death because the ponds
were boiling. I don't know what the total [of dead] was. It's estimated
somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000, which puts it very much on the scale
of the atom bombs, maybe bigger. They so totally destroyed Tokyo that it
was taken off the atom bomb target list because it would have had no effect
other than piling rubble on rubble and bodies on bodies, so it wouldn't have
shown anything. It's just astonishing."

Thirty Bills Unpaid

Drowned Out...

Nice post.

In particular, I found this quote by Chomsky resonating with me:
I must say that Nagasaki strikes me as much worse [than Hiroshima].
Nobody's done much research into Nagasaki so I can only speculate, but my
impression is that the Nagasaki bomb was basically an experiment. ... I
think that they basically wanted to discover whether a different mechanism
was going to work and used a city because ... I don't know, why not a city?
If that turns out to be true, even five percent true, it's the most
grotesque event in history, probably. Certainly the most grotesque
scientific experiment in history.

There is a long list of shameful incidents countries and human beings need to hang their heads and kick at the dirt for. Most certainly, these two 'incidents' rank high among them.

Incinerated instantly... or living with the disastrous side effects? Hmmm. That's a tough one.

Drowned Out

Thirty Bills Unpaid wrote:

Drowned Out...

Nice post.

In particular, I found this quote by Chomsky resonating with me:
I must say that Nagasaki strikes me as much worse [than Hiroshima].
Nobody's done much research into Nagasaki so I can only speculate, but my
impression is that the Nagasaki bomb was basically an experiment. ... I
think that they basically wanted to discover whether a different mechanism
was going to work and used a city because ... I don't know, why not a city?
If that turns out to be true, even five percent true, it's the most
grotesque event in history, probably. Certainly the most grotesque
scientific experiment in history.

There is a long list of shameful incidents countries and human beings need to hang their heads and kick at the dirt for. Most certainly, these two 'incidents' rank high among them.

Incinerated instantly... or living with the disastrous side effects? Hmmm. That's a tough one.

Ya, as Chomsky points out, there is little justification for Hiroshima, but ZERO justification for Nagasaki. If the intent was to showcase this insane weapon, why wait 3 days then use it again? Didn't the first blow prove the point? I mean....Nagasaki wasn't even on the short list of targets until shortly before the bombing, and was only bombed because Kokura was clouded over....it had very little strategic importance. Talk about sick fucks playing god.

But my reason from quoting Chomsky here was to highlight what was perhaps a bigger crime - the indiscrimminate fire bombing of civilians in Tokyo, (which began before the bombs), and the 1000 plane raids that began AFTER Japan's surrender, killing as many if not more than the A-bombs. Those crimes should be remembered along with the bombs.

brianlux

Drowned Out wrote:

But my reason from quoting Chomsky here was to highlight what was perhaps a bigger crime - the indiscrimminate fire bombing of civilians in Tokyo, (which began before the bombs), and the 1000 plane raids that began AFTER Japan's surrender, killing as many if not more than the A-bombs. Those crimes should be remembered along with the bombs.

Good point. The fire bombings of Tokyo citizens is not something I was taught in school. I had to read about those horrors much later in my adult life.

Jason P

Drowned Out wrote:

Ya, as Chomsky points out, there is little justification for Hiroshima, but ZERO justification for Nagasaki. If the intent was to showcase this insane weapon, why wait 3 days then use it again? Didn't the first blow prove the point? I mean....

They didn't surrender after the first one, so I guess the first one, sadly, didn't make the point intended.

A horrible invention.

Jason P

Drowned Out wrote:

and the 1000 plane raids that began AFTER Japan's surrender, killing as many if not more than the A-bombs. Those crimes should be remembered along with the bombs.

Link to source of info?

I found that 1,000 sorties were flown after the surrender, but for supply drops. I could not find any info on bombings after the surrender that killed 200,000 plus people in my limited search.

lukin2006

War is hell ... atrocities were committed on all sides. I would think if Japan didn't immediately surrender after the first one and they were not going to surrender anytime soon or soon enough.

Godfather.

my mothers boyfriend was a child in japan when that bomn was droped and he told me that many of the people there believed it was the only thing that could have been done to stop the direction japan was headed,he said things would have been much worse for not only japan but other parts of the world as well.

Godfather.

Drowned Out

Jason P wrote:

Drowned Out wrote:

and the 1000 plane raids that began AFTER Japan's surrender, killing as many if not more than the A-bombs. Those crimes should be remembered along with the bombs.

Link to source of info?

I found that 1,000 sorties were flown after the surrender, but for supply drops. I could not find any info on bombings after the surrender that killed 200,000 plus people in my limited search.

Sorry, your quote placement changes the intent of an already poorly structured sentence. I meant the tokyo bombings (beginning before the bombs) combined with the 1000 plane raids (before the surrender was officially recognized), led by Gen Hap Arnold may have killed as many as the bombs did. Hope that suffices for now without links, I'm on my phone.

As for the surrender...sounds like Japanese leadership had only two conditions - no war crimes charges, and retention of the emperor as a figurehead. I can see why both sides would dig in on the former condition. But I've seen accounts claiming only the latter was a condition by the time the bombs were dropped. Either way....they were looking for a way out as early as the defeat at Midway, but definitely after Tokyo...With no attempt at negotiations, its hard not to look at the 4 points listed in the article above as the true reasons the bombs were dropped.

lukin2006

They had a way out ... unconditional surrender ... they had no right to demand anything.

cp3iverson

As someone who is a self proclaimed WWII fanatic, almost every vet I've spoken with (from various Allied countries) felt that the Hiroshima bombing was absolutely a necessary evil. I value their opinion way more than any great writer. When you're right in the middle of it, politics and potential talks don't matter very much.

War is definitely hell when you have to debate if you stooped to someone's level. The Japanese were notorious for executing and torturing innocent civilians in every country that they invaded. Many times in worse ways than Hitler's camps and gas chambers or Russia's POW system. There's a lot of pros and cons for using the bomb. But yes, definitely an awful invention either way.

Blockhead

History lesson for the libtards:
1. We did not look at Japan like we do today. the US saw Japan as little more than vermin that needed to be exterminated. Which, is the same way Japan looked at us...
Japanese were awful people in the 1940's (especially Military) Look up Unit 731, Burning prisoners alive, beheading people, Nanking massacre, the Baatan death march... I guess ignorance is bliss...
2. If Truman had refused to bomb them with a weapon of such power while numerous American military died, he would have been lucky to escape alive. He actually had little choice.
3. To those saying Japan wanted to surrender -
Any military historian will tell you they were offering to buy more time to regroup for the next attack.When a country offers to "surrender" while setting up positions for more combat, it's not a surrender. It's digging in to take you out when your hands are down. These were people that were so dedicated they were literally killing themselves take out a few with them. A surrender involves a pull back of forces. Actions speak louder than words, it took two nukes for them to actually surrender.
4. America's option of not to drop the nuke meant a land invasion to sacrifice which has been calculated as being more than 1 million American soldiers. Japan would have been totally destroyed, and a lot of you wouldn't be alive today since your grandpa would have paid the ultimate price during the invasion.
5. Japan would be another Korea if Nukes weren't used. The US and Soviets would have drawn a line, which would have resulted in more being killed.

A good book on this topic is "X Day"

If Japan had "the bomb" they would have done the same. (research the military atrocities I listed above)

You all are looking at it from a 2013 perspective, not the 1940's.