I understand why America did it.
But you won't apply the same logic to other sovereign nations?
I think you understand what you've been told was the truth- the "official narrative".
There was no discussion of Japan’s near collapse weeks before the attacks. In the summer of 1945, the country was suffering under a full blockade. Increasingly desperate surrender feelers were being communicated by Japanese diplomats, of which Truman was well aware, but you would never know that from the program.
We also do not learn that the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Japan would have likely surrendered, even without the atomic bombings, before the US invasion planned for late that autumn.
Instead we’re told that the “enemy showed no willingness to surrender,” and “few doubted that defeating the Japanese could drag on for another 12 to 18 months.” In fact, by July 1945, many American military analysts, including leading generals, doubted this.
Nor did we hear in the documentary that several top Truman advisers believed that Japan would quit the war if the United States modified its “unconditional surrender” demand by signaling that the emperor could remain on the throne. There was no admission in the program that after dropping the bombs we allowed the emperor to stay on anyway. What if we had done that earlier?
The Truth About Hiroshima and Nagasaki
What Chris Wallace didn’t tell you on the Fox News special adapted from his new bestseller.
Gen. George Kenny, who commanded parts of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific, was asked in 1969 for his opinion and said, “I think we had the Japs [sic] licked anyhow. I think they would have quit probably within a week or so of when they did quit.” Alperovitz notes further that Adm. Lewis Strauss, an assistant to WW II Navy Secretary James Forrestal, wrote to historian Robert Albion in 1960: “[F]rom the Navy’s point of view, there are statements by Admiral King, Admiral Halsey, Admiral Radford, Admiral Nimitz and others who expressed themselves to the effect that neither the atomic bomb nor the proposed invasion of the Japanese mainland were necessary to produce the surrender.”
In
Mandate for Change, President Dwight Eisenhower admitted that when Sec. of War Henry Stimson told him atomic bombs were going to be used, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary….”
President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Adm. William Leahy, agreed. As Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell, report in
Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial, Leahy said, “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.…” Even official histories have debunked the fiction. “[T]he US Strategic Bombing Survey published its conclusion that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion,” Alperovitz recounted in
The Decision.
Still, the myth that the mass destruction of 200,000 was necessary to save lives is believed by millions in the US who refuse to consider or accept the historical record. This greatest of the “greatest generation’s” yarns may help some sleep at night, and to think better of killing civilians than does the rest of the world, but it doesn’t help abolish nuclear weapons.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Fictions and Facts
