Slashdot Mirror
Censored Nagasaki Bomb Story Found
EccentricAnomaly writes "In 1945 journalist George Weller snuck past the American occupying forces and became the first American Journalist to see the devastation left by the atomic bomb that fell on Nagasaki. His story infuriated MacArthur, who had it quashed. The Japanese paper, Mainichi, has now published Weller's account. CNN has a story discussing how it was found." From the Mainichi article: "As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation."
A lot of people go "OMG! teh nukes!" like Fallout is what would happen after a nuclear war :)
Nuclear myths
---
European zine. Guns, hacking, survival
by the Slashdot effect.
Actually, no.
He died in 2002, a whopping 57 years after his "walk in the atomic park".
Actually, he died 3 years ago having lived probably longer than you or me: he was 95.
"The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be."
Certainly disagree with the choice of words here. Selective and proper ? Maybe. Merciful ? definitely not !
-- Ravi
This isn't meant to be flamebait, and only meant to be a serious question.
Why did MacArthur give Japan only three days to respond after Hiroshima? Why not at least a week?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
And like today people are prepared to measure moral conduct on a relative scale. Sure we torture people...but they are bad people and we are good so that makes it OK. This story shows that the world is a better place with full disclosure. How can one make intelligent policy decisions if with an awareness of conscequences.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Which makes sense as the bomb was a small one (for a nuke) with a yield of approx 15 kiloton and was detonated at an altitude of 500 meters. This would have prevented the fireball from actually touching the ground and contaminate the ground. Thus only neutron activation would have created any lasting radioactivity on the ground below the bomb, and that was also reduced due to the distance.
The only permanent radioactivity would be trapped in the fireball and would have been deposited downwind by the 'black rain' (which would be dangerous).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Don't you think it's Ironic that a Hammer was used to bang something?
It's not Ironic. A bomb that is designed to be dropped from altitude being dropped from an Airplane is... logical.
I know Irony is a hard thing to grasp, but let's put forth some effort, shall we?
Irony would be something like, "They spent years designing their plane for safety during takeoff, but never thought to do something to stop it from crashing during landing."
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
we dropped it within a mile of a prisoner of war camp, although I suppose it makes sense when combined with the knowledge that the pow camp existed so close to many manufacturing plants. Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
Has to be asked- was it entirely a coincidence that the camp was situated near the manufacturing facilities?
I doubt it; it seems a logical tactic to discourage bombing of the most likely targets. If so, the Japanese were likely not the first, and certainly not the last to use prisoners as hostages in this manner.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
While slightly OT, the Dresden bombings was the biggest _blind and useless_ destruction during WWII, Hiroshima and Nagasaki included.
Why? Simple. While the japan A-bomb attacks can be justified in some twisted way by the reasoning that it forced Japan to capitulate, the Dresden bombings' target was to destroy the railway infrastructure nearby. The bombings killed a lot of people there and the railway was operating at full capacity just 3 days after the attack.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
It's really easier than you think - it's all about dilution of responsibility. During the Vietnam War someone noted that while in theory nobody would accept burning children alive, some children are being burnt alive due to decisions made in a long chain of command where everyone is responsible for just a tiny bit of the whole process - from workers in plant making napalm bombs, to the pilot who is "just following orders", to Robert McNamara, who deals just with abstract figures, maps, tables etc. So you would be just the guy who draws an arrow on the map. Or the guy who is just pressing the button. In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
One thing I remember from history classes is that pictures of survivors of the atomic blasts were censored.
Makes me wonder what else has been censored within the last century, particular for historically significant events. Was there anything censored that could have been historically significant had it not been censored?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
No matter how often you say it, it still doesn't make it true.
...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
i roshima_and_Nagasaki
The argument that it save a million lives has been refuted time and time again. First of all the casualty figures are far from certain and it's far from certain that these were indeed that casulty figures the US had to expect had an invasion taken place.
Further, there are rather strong arguments for the assumption that Japane would have surrendered without an invasion and without the use of atomic bombs.
Finally, you discard all the eveidence that has been brougth to light by historians that suggests that the US did indeed have at least some additional reasons for using the atomic bombs, namely the begining confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Just one quote for you:
""...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so 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, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63 "
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
Finally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_H
How about going there and learn yourself...
Don't you read Comic Books Man! Radiation only has positive effects on people. I am sure the reporter had super powers after that and lived to a rip old age of 95.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If i had any mod points and hadn't already commented I would have totally modded you up for that comment.
.. for that matter anyone charging off to war or helping 'the machine' should give a long hard thought to that statement.
very well put and it is a thought that perhaps more americans charging off to war in hopes of financing college should think of
If? The United States "conventionally" bombed Japan mercilessly during WW2. Read up on the bio of Curtis LeMay to get a sense of what that was all about. (He was the Strategic Air Command General who ordered and executed the firebombing of Tokyo, which destroyed about half of Tokyo, a city the size of New York, in one night.)
Cheers,
Richard
I believe the actual quote is Speak softly and carry a big stick.
. html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/tr26
This Like That - fun with words!
It certainly should never have been used on a civilian target , At-least this quash shows that perhaps they had a little shame about it
I don't know that 'shame' enters into it when dealing with the military. My best guess is that they figured they had a job to do, realised the tactical advantage atomic weapons would bring, and realised that an adverse public reaction would possibly rob them of this advantage.
Quite frankly, I'd assume that the high-ups in the US military saw the general public as little more than a hindrance to their objectives; at best, viewed in a patronising, paternalistic manner.
That having been said, was the target bombed because it was civilian, or was it bombed because of its manufacturing facilities?
Of course, the irony is that, whilst the US military may have been zealous in concealing unpalatable information, the Japanese regime were 100 times worse, and continue to deny or obfuscate their actions during WWII to this day.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Nagasaki wasnt the primary intended target. The intended target was Kokura, but the spotter planes that went ahead found it to be completely socked in with clouds, so the bomb plane diverted to their secondary target, Nagasaki.
If you found this interesting you might want to read John Hersey's account of the Hiroshima bomb. Published in 1946 and still in print, it's pretty much the definitive version.
It's written in an extraordinarily calm style, almost without emotion, but is strangly fascinating and moving.
Try a search for 'Hiroshima John Hersey'.
It's very easy to go back 60 years into the past and play armchair quarterback using your own "modern" moral compass.
The fact of the matter is that Japan was fully prepared to fight an invasion of Japan to the last man/woman/child. The people who decided to pull the trigger on the atomic bomb had just seen firsthand what that kind of scenario was like in Germany.
Do I like the fact that those bombs were dropped on cities? No. Do I think it saved millions of Allied soldiers' (and Japanese soldiers/civilians) lives? Absolutely.
Does the military censor news? Absolutely.
Realistically speaking, what other options did the US have in the Pacific theater in WW2?
Japan had attacked us first. Japan indeed had brought us into the war. The fighting in the Pacific had been extremely bloody, with countless islands and other places won with much bloodshed and cost--and we weren't even to the Japanese mainland yet.
Kamikaze--divine wind--took a pretty rough toll. On the Japanese too for sure, but us as well. It's rather indicative of the extreme lengths to which some Japanese soldiers and commanders were willing to go to win.
Would you have rather we performed a manned ground invasion of the Japanese islands and subdued the entire place by force? The Japanese leaders PROVED by ignoring the nuclear bomb not only before it was detonated but more to the point, AFTER it was detonated, that they would not easily surrender.
Estimates I've read (and common sense as well) have point casualties and destruction on both sides from a ground invasion much higher than the nuclear bombings.
No side can be completely innocent in war. Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Tokyo for that matter were horrible. So too was the rape of Nanking, and the Japanese push throughout the Asia Pacific.
What choice did we have? This was not a war of our choice, or one that would end without a decisive victory or defeat. What better outcome could there have been?
General Patton once said something like 'no dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country--the trick is to make the other dumb bastard die for his.' Somewhat egalitarian if you really think about it.
Showing the effects of just about any weapon of war will sicken a normal person. And yet, somehow, we keep on managing to figure out ways to dehumanize opponents enough to justify in our minds waging war on them.
Japan got what they had coming to them. Looking at the effects of the atomic bombings in isolation and going "Oh, how awful" is worthless. You have to look at the whole war and take actions like the atomic bombings in the context of the time.
I live in Japan currently, my wife is Japanese and my children are half-Japanese (I am American). I enjoy Japan and I like the Japanese people. It's hard to imagine now how a war like WWII could have been fought by them.
My landlord, at 80+, was in the Army and served during WWII. He's a nice old man who likes to garden and play with my kids. I've never had a conversation with him about what he did during the war though it wouldn't surprise me if he had been running around with a bayonet through Nanking or poking POWs along the Bataan trail. It was what you did at that time and somehow there is a collective insanity that sweeps men up and gives them license to run amok.
My grandfather drove landing boats in the Pacific during WWII. He never talked much about it, but my grandmother told me he used to wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night after he got back. I knew other men from his generation who had been to war and must have been through and done terrible things. Yet they came back and went back to normal lives and did normal things and we sat and ate dinner with them. And we, as a society, condoned what they had done and dreamed up ways to kill more people faster and easier while still being concerned about what kind of car to drive and what kind of school the kids should go to.
Death comes to us one at a time. Each life lost is a tragedy. Atomic weapons changes these tragedies into statistics but make no mistake, each death is still a tragedy. And each life lost to a bullet is just as much a tragedy as one lost to a nuke. War is terrible and destructive and to be avoided. Let's not pretend that some ways of making war are better than others.
The Rest of the World will not deal with our stupidy much longer.
Much of this 'overgrown bully' stuff is true. The trouble is that the rest of the world is no better, indeed much of it is undeniably even worse. Don't expect that when America's luck runs out the next big kid will be nicer.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Disobeying orders in war time can get you shot. If I where to be ordered to kill someone else (an enemy) or get shot myself I know what I would choose.
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
There is a difference between media making us aware of something we should know about, and media making us obssessed with something that is going to make it money.
Too often media focusses on the latter, and we wring our hands about the deaths of 5 in location X, while ignoring the deaths of 5 million in location Y.
When it comes to the deaths of people, Math Matters. Just because something pulls at our heart strings does not make it a a significant effect. Yes, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bad and the victims suffered terribly, but they were a drop in a huge bucket of human misery that resulted from that war. And there were far larger atrocities that were glossed over completely.
Starvation, for example, is probably a worse way to go than radiation sickness. And when things go bad, it often happens by the 10's of millions, not 10's of thousands.
We should have just bombed the entire country into the stone age with conventional weapons, and then invaded. Sure, several times as many Japanese civilians (and 100K+ more Allied soldiers) would have been killed that way, but at least we wouldn't have used nukes.
Best Slashdot Co
America always has been, and still is, nothing more than an overgrown bully.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
I look around the world, and I see a lot of dead Americans buried in a lot of graves on foreign soil, and I'm afraid I don't see how most of those dead could possibly be construed as the result of the actions of nothing more than an overgrown bully.
Perhaps you could explain this to me.
The Former Soviet Union used to have a technical word, called, 'Neutral.' 'Neutral' was anyone who could not possibly hurt the Soviet Union.
Nations like Hungary and Czechoslovakia?
The Rest of the World will not deal with our stupidy much longer.
I'm more concerned about having to deal with yours.
I can't believe they call it an "atomic attack"
Yeah! They should have called it a "kitten parade"! Or possibly a "neutron-assisted aliveness readjustment"! Or a "celebration of freedom"!
I like "kitten parade" best.
You _do_ realize that it was, actually, an attack? Using an atomic weapon? Hence 'atomic attack'? With no big evil liberal conspiracy? If they'd called it an 'unneccessary atomic attack on a civilian target' _that_ might have been slanted. Just referring to 'the U.S. atomic attack' is simply a handy way of, well, referring to the U.S. atomic attack.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The Museum in Hiroshima holds that 40,000 of the Hiroshima victims were POWs - but that they were POWs from Asia, rather than European or US.
Of the 5 shortlisted targets for the two bombs, none of them would have been particularly free from collateral damage, however.
What's more interesting is the whole question of whether the atomic attacks were necessary to end tha war - I shall say no more on this here but I invite all readers to look into it - it wasn't as easily justified as you may think.
In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
And you would be lying to yourself. The guy who draws the arrow is as guilty as the guy who presses the button, who is as guilty as the guy who gives the order, and so on.
I agree that that's the way people rationalise it to themselves, but convincing yourself that you're 100% innocent doesn't make it true.
Of course, were I ever to find myself in the same situation, doubtless I would act in the same way; I'm not saying I'm any better. We're all human in the end.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
To know why Japan surrendered to the US, you have to know the following things:
- How many Japanse soldier were situated in China: hundreds of thousends.
- How many Russian divisions were about to engage the Japanse army in China: 3
- Was the *smallest* russian division bigger or smaller than the complete Japanese presence in China: Bigger
- Didn't the Russian have far better equipment than the Japanese: Yes, the Russians had just fought a war against Germany, the Japanese had fought against peasants.
- What would Russia have done after they would have annihilated the Japanese forces in China: Figure that one out for yourself.
The Top Brass have a clue.
The Administration doesn't.
The army gets their orders from untrained civilians (in this case). They knew Iraq was a bad idea and being poorly planned, but they took their orders and executed them like good soldiers ought to.
And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
For instance there are many spas (Bad Brambach, Schlema) in the Ore Mountains in Germany who offer Radon cures. You are basicly sitting in a tub filled with warm, Radon contaminated water. Radon is a radioactive noble gas, basicly a heavy version of Helium and Neon, and most of it is the product of the slow decay of Uranium-238 (via the alpha ray decay of Radium-226). The soil of the Ore Mountains is rich in Uranium, and so there are enough places everywhere, where Radon comes out of the earth. Radon is part of nearly all natural well water, you can even use Radon as a measurement of the relative amount of well water in water sources, because all surface water will loose their Radon within a short period (within 3,8 days half the Radon of a given amount has decayed, and additionally it is gaseous, and a noble gas, so it will leave the water without any chemical reaction), and rain water will not contain any Radon anyway, because it is to heavy to reach the clouds.
Because of its heavy weight cellars in the Ore Mountain may contain a high level of Radon, it enters the cellar through earth rifts and doesn't leave it anymore. It can reach levels where it really starts to be a health risk, leading to lung cancer because of the alpha rays (Helium cores), which destroy the tissue of the lung.
is largely misplaced.
The Japanese occupied China for 12 years. In just one incident, they slaughtered more than a quarter of a million Chinese in retaliation for the Doolittle raid on Japan. Thousands of prisoners were abused, tortured and murdered by the Japanese. They performed experiments with chemical and biological weapons on living people. Chinese are still being injured by leftover stocks of Japanese chemical weapons, yet the Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did.
While the nuclear strikes were terrible things, when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese, it's hard to not think "what goes around, comes around". The Japanese people were treated a hell of a lot better after their surrender than any of the peoples they conquered.
Fat Man was 21 kt yield as I recall.. The fireball ascended into the wind and fallout was not over ground zero. The black rain fell over Nishiyama, to the east.
There is still some residual radiation but surpisingly, the vast majority of radioactive fall-out pollution in the region is due to US atmospheric testing in the 50's, and that was way off in the Pacific!
The neutron radiation is also negligable compared to the background pollution.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Anyone who thinks the nuclear weapons used in Japan were the horrors of that war need to spend a bit more time reading history and a bit less time trying to get themselves read on Slashdot.
Go read up on the firebombing of Japanese cities, or European cities.
The attack on Tokyo killed far more people, destroyed far more of the city than both of the nuclear weapons. There's little evidence to suggest that radioactivity has caused any more deaths in the last 60 years than the release of toxins in normal fires did in other cities. Cancer clusters just are easier to track.
Even ignoring the fact that it stopped the war early, the use of the nuclear weapons both saved American lives, and saved the lives of countless Japanese civilians who would've been killed in the firestorm that followed a mass bombing of those cities.
War is ugly. Spend a little time learning about weapons systems over the last 500 years, learn about their effects, both immediate and long term before passing judgement. Don't mistakenly assume efficiency at killing equates to the level of inhumanity. And definitely don't base your idea of what these wars were like on a few individual-oriented movies like Saving Private Ryan. Wars for the last hundred years were based on the concept of impersonal massive destruction, most of it far more horrifying than a nuclear blast.
Not, just there.
All Bulgarian, Cheh and most Caucasus (Russian and Georgian) SPAs are like this.
Radon containing water works miracles on arthritis, joints problems as well as many forms of eczema. While it usually fails to provide permanent cure it provides 3-4 months of relief or gives medications a better chance to work.
In btw, the feeling is weird... 20 minutes in a warm pool of such water makes you feel like your joints have started to melt. They feel like rubber.
The mechanism is still unclear, but it is not the Radon which is the active agent. It is the way its decay changes water properties.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did one simple service for the entire world, and all of humanity: they gave us all fear.
Imagine that you're a military type, and you've got this brand new, super-powerful toy, the Biggest Bomb in the World. It tooks millions to build, and the biggest aspect of all that work was that nobody really knew if it even could be built. But once it is known that one can be built, it's only a matter of time until others do it.
Further imagine that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened, so the Bomb wouldn't be anything real in the public's mind, just another weapon, just another bomb. Military types are prone to exaggerate their own capability, so without having seen the Bomb used against a real city, it would have remained a bomb, not The Bomb. Seeing pictures of a devastated atoll just isn't the same as hearing reports of death from a devastated city.
Finally, imagine the Cold War, where both sides have the Bomb, but the world lacked the fear generated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine both sides with thousands of Bombs, each. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened during that brief interval in history, when only one side had the Bomb, when there was no issue of retaliation, when Mutual Assured Destruction, wasn't even a possiblity, much less a deterrent policy.
What do you think our chances of surviving the last 60 years would have been, without the Fear from Hiroshima and Nagasaki permeating our culture. Sometimes I fear that that Fear is fading, but I hope that enough is left to keep us alive until we hopefully mature as a species.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Dresden would have been over run by the Russians,
There's the truth of it, by the time time Dresden happened, Germany had become a political football. The focus had shifted from winning the war, to beating the Russians. Under this time pressure, some slighly unethical decisions were made.
Inflicting unnecessary harm on another country always comes back to bite you in the ass, even when they are "paying the price".
Germany paid the price after WWI, and that basically led to WWII.
It is MUCH stickier than that.
Folks, war is not a simple thing, and trying to make it sound simple is foolish. In war, there are things that happen that undeniably should not--I won't justify that. But there are too many people that question things that a) can't be changed and b) try to make all war seem evil.
A) is not so bad, as we can learn from past mistakes--and I think that the military would avoid using nuclear weapons (talking about US military, as well as European militaries) at all costs. There can be, however, a point beyond which it is no use to travel in your inspection of the past.
B) is foolish in the extreme. I had a coworker who, at one point, stated that she felt ALL war was wrong, and there was no point at which it would be justified to fight a war. This is foolish. At some point (and what point that is is debatable) there comes a time where if you do not fight, you allow innocent civilians to be slaughtered by an enemy who will torture and rape and abuse, just because the enemy has the ability to do so (I don't think that the majority of us would have liked it if Nazi Germany had won). In the case of WWII, if no one had opposed Hitler, then we still would have had concentration camps and the Holocaust. I don't think that appeals to most of us.
Does that justify, then, the use of nuclear weapons? I don't know. I do know, however, that there is NO way that you can ever be certain that if we hadn't done that that the Japanese (at that time) wouldn't have ended up winning the war. Maybe we would have had to use the nuclear bomb, but instead of hitting Japan, an enemy-occupied US city (possible). From a military standpoint, you always stop the enemy before they take your land. Especially when it is a war across oceans, where if Japan had taken and held Hawaii, it would have given them a major advantage.
So, "just following orders" is more complicated than you seem to think. That's why we aren't in the military (or I assume you are not). I, at the very least, would want to know why I should storm a particular hill or destroy a particular area. Sometimes an action may seem odd, or even wrong, but in the interest of winning a war, it may be absolutely essential. Without knowing the entire picture, however, you can't always be certain that an action is not the best thing. I'm not talking about rape or abuse or defying the Geneva conventions (those are always wrong, and then the soldier should take the moral ground and refuse, knowing that the senior officer might just have him severely punished (and in some cases killed), but defying the orders all the same), but about taking a village or bombing a particular target. So while I agree that there are some situations and actions that are extremely hard to justify (rape is never justified in my mind), don't be quick to judge a soldier's defense that he was just following orders. If the Milgram studies taught us anything it was that authority is more powerful than we tend to think, and that most people will obey orders when asked to do something the would never do on their own (shocking someone with a supposedly lethal charge)--just because they were told to do it by someone with authority (experimenter). Think about it a little more before you discount that particular defense!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
First British Bombing raid on Berlin: 23 Aug 1940
First German Bombing raid on London: 7 September 1940
They Japanese were big on forced labor camps. Given this, I'd say there is a pretty obvious reason for the camp to be located near manufacturing facilities.
Why?
Does that justify, then, the use of nuclear weapons? I don't know.
I would find it hard to believe that there was much talk about "justification" at the time.
My grandmother was in a Japanese prison camp. She was there simply because she wasn't Japanese. She was "different" from them and perhaps that's while they raped and tortured her every day for months. Apparently it didn't matter to the Japanese that she was pregnant at the time. Later her son was born, but babies can't work so they don't get fed. One of the other prisoners (I don't even know his name) smuggled in some food & medicine to try and keep the kid alive. Unfortunately they found him out. The Japanese assembled all the prisoners in the camp to make an example of him. They shoved a fire hose down his throat and pumped water into him at high pressure, his stomach exploded and his internal organs flew all over the place. The prisoners could only watch as he died in agony, trying to pick up all his bits and put them back in.
This is not a unique story and not a particularly bad one when it comes down to it compared to a lot of the stuff that went on. A lot of really awful shit went on in that war.
Dropping atomic bomb(s) on a (comparative) handful of people (compared to the millions dying and in danger) to end the war with Japan is a no brainer. It only seem "wrong" to a lot of people today because they aren't having their internal organs removed and fashioned as a hat.
You wouldn't have liked him when he was angry though.
I don't necessarily see how "all war is evil" necessarily equates to "we must never go to war." I'm sorry, but all war is evil. But sometimes, if there are no other viable alternatives, we have to deal with that necessary evil. Try to avoid war at almost all costs...but sometimes it is necessary to step up to the plate. But there's no use in glorifying war or trying to make it sound better than it is; war is hell. People die. Civilians and soldiers. Teenagers will be screaming for their mother as they try to keep their guts from spilling out. Civilians will be burnt alive or killed by shrapnel. Children will see their parents cut down in front of their eyes. War is an evil act. Period. But in very specific instances, it does do some good. Sometimes evil acts have that effect. That doesn't make them less evil.
This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes "justified" by the previous atrocities.
Now, granted, the Japanese culture of war was *extremely* harsh and the atrocities commited were extreme. But that doesn't make other atrocities okay.
War is about the demonization of the enemy - the psychology that makes a Japanese soldier feel okay about (horribly) torturing someone to death to maintain order in a camp is exactly the same as the one that lets someone feel okay about killing (horribly) tens of thousand of civilians in an attempt to force an opponent into surrender. War is a nasty, violent, terrible thing and glorifying it only leads to more atrocities - no matter how bad your enemy is.
A form of Pentagon-supported censorship... http://www.democracynow.org/static/hiroshima.shtml
summary:
After the bomb drop on Hiroshima, press are confined to a barge off the coast of Japan. Wilfred Burchett, an independent journalist, decides to go and see things first hand and writes about it ("I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.").
William L. Laurence of the New York Times, and on the Pentagon payroll, writes a series of stories discrediting Burchett and gets the Pulitzer Price.
Democracy Now is trying to get the Pulitzer stripped from the NYT.
from http://archive.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn200 10806.html
Soon after the bombing, as reporters converged on a ship off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese, one independent reporter named Wilfred Burchett took a train for 30 hours to Hiroshima. He couldn't believe what he saw: people with their skin melting off them, images of people engraved on the sides of buildings. He sat down with his Hermes typewriter in the rubble, and tapped out the words, "I write this as a warning to the world." He talked about something he called, 'bomb sickness', that he had never seen before. Another reporter did a ten-part series on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was William Leonard Laurence of the New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the Pentagon. One of his headlines was, "No Bomb Sickness Found." He won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Wilfred Burchett died of cancer decades later, but always traced it to Hiroshima.
So true -- and in general, the point that people take the nuclear weapons as something completely distinct from "strategic" bombing campaigns, on both sides of the war, is ever so appropriate to make. By the time we got to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moment, those were natural extensions of the logic of those campaigns. Truman (one of my least favorite Presidents) had authorized the use of the bombs as soon as they'd work, and they were used without another decision on his part basically. For us to look back and deal with them alone has to be deeply wrong.
That doesn't mean there isn't something to be learned, though, or that we should accept the rationale that you offer for why they "worked" even on those "logic of the war" terms without scrutiny.
Even ignoring the fact that it stopped the war early, the use of the nuclear weapons both saved American lives, and saved the lives of countless Japanese civilians who would've been killed in the firestorm that followed a mass bombing of those cities.
And now we're off in the land of wishfully-accepted wisdom, positing possible events and their potential consequences. This line of thinking is certainly out there, it's worth thinking about -- and it's exactly where people who want not to deal with the morality of those bombs would like us all to come to a full stop.
Unfortunately "it stopped the war earlier and saved lives on both sides" asks us to accept that those arguments are true when they're essentially speculative. There was very real debate within the US's own armed forces about the potential costs of an invasion. There were different plans among the different services for how the end could come with Japan. They disagreed about what to do, and to suggest that there was a clear answer is a lie. To lump all that together and say "Okay, but it worked because the war didn't go any longer" avoids several questions -- "Why not drop the first bombs somewhere other than on a densely-populated city?" and so on -- and can amount to self-censorship that's just about to that head-in-the-sand point by now.
For one example: When the Smithsonian exhibit around the Enola Gay got neutered in the 1990s, one of the suggested additions to the exhibit, supposedly for "balance," was a display with a purple heart and a (quite high) estimate of the number of Purple Hearts that were prevented by the bombings. Some pretty major right wing influences, stirred up partly by "Air Force" magazine (which is a trade publication largely for purchasers of modern air weapons), wanted those fictional body counts included in the exhibit. Alas, the good folks at the museum are not especially fond of the idea of displaying fictional Purple Hearts. Partly, you know, they feel a responsibility not to insult those who got the real thing. Partly they just don't want to make things up to put on display -- and the proposed revisions weren't to be attributed to any particular primary source, they were meant to be in the neutral narrative voice of the exhibition's information panels. They chose to simply display the plane with almost no exhibit at all. Just a shiny fuselage.
Second example, and the one that horrifies me: Chester Nimitz, judging by both remarks of his own in October of 1945 and by comments of his widow, regretted the bombs horribly.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I do that. Regularly. I consider it a quality I'm proud of.
Forgotten history is doomed to repeat itself. The USS Arizona, if memory serves, is one of the most popular tourist magnets for Japanese tourists. Why aren't either hypocenter of the atomic bombs detonations a destination for Americans? The Japanese seem keen to remember their lessons.
Deciding that any race is worth more, or less, than another is a quality I never wish to have. Do you really think the US has the high road by comparing the slaughter of 2400 volunteer servicemen to the murder of nearly a quarter of a million women, children and old men in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Do you honestly expect me to think that it takes 100 Japanese lives to make up for a single American? Or do I add up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers and then decide how many Germans to slaughter to compensate for Nazi atrocities?
I did some research on Radon when we found out our house had it. Seems that the acceptable dose was never really studied- but inferred from radon levels in mines which are much higher. Workers who worked in mines were in there 40 hours a week- and were fine until the amount of radon in the air reached 100ppm. In the home- they calculated 4ppm (in the us- 10ppm is allowable in Europe) to be safe based off of exposure times extrapolated from the data. Great math- but it could be poor science if this theory proves true.
There were hardly any civilians in Japan during World War Two.
Seriously. Read up on the war. The Japanese imperial government forced elementary-school children to drill with bamboo spears and take on military rank as preparations to 'defend the homefront'. Men unfit for military duty, as well as most women, were forced to work in factories making war materiel. The entire civilian population had been forcibly mobilized by the government into joining a military war effort. The entire population of Japan over age twelve were essentially military draftees. This is called "total war". Today, total war is considered by political thinkers to be a crime against one's own populace, because it makes the entire population a legitimate military target.
I agree that following orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime. I agree that giving orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime.
I just don't see there were very many civilians in Japan.
The reprint is still spoofing the truth ... as shown on part 4 of the article. There it says, quoting roughly, that Disease-X was being treated on an experimental basis with ... [illegible] drug.
The drug was opium. It helps the immune system, mainly kidneys and liver, organize formation, collection and elimination of salts which contain radiation minerals, and thus accelerates curing. Withing a few years after the bombings, the contaminated populations had completely recovered, including hair, reproductive and immune system capacity, and etc.
The reason this is still "top secret" is that the planet's annual production capacity in opium is limited (by geographic and political availability of alkaline soil, accessible mountainous exposures with cheap labor, supervised by loyal warlords, dark nights, for complete formation of plant alkaloids, etc.) to approximately one-tenth of the size of the "national medical reserve" the U.S. alone would require to stabilize its own "designated survivor" population, in the event of a nuclear wars between the U.S. and Russia, China, France, etc. If amongst the powers on this planet, the U.S. maintained exclusive control of the entire production of the planet's maximum production capacity in opium-based pain killers, it would take the U.S. alone ten years to acquire its required "two-balled" military "entirety" for a nuclear war.
Oddly, or contrary to our Hollywood-created popular opinion, survival ("continuity of government") in a nuclear war is not determined by the bombing phase, which is relatively shortlived, using missiles which the media generally portrays as "sexy" and/or "terrifying. Survival in a war by mass contamination, and diplomacy by threat of mass contamination (read: state-sponsored terrorism), is based on not on the bombing phase, but on the longer and economically more arduous restoration phase. This more crucial phase starts with medication-stabilization programs of the government/military/fema, to treat the "designated survivors." The only know treatment for 500rem+ radiation sickness, on a mass contamination basis, is by production control and medical delivery of opium-based painkillers and treatment alkaloids.
That was the purpose of the experiments on Tuskeegee prisonors. (The controlled contamination and experimental treatment of black prisoners was for national-security dosage determinations, required for determination of (a) the size of the designation population which could be expected to survive (with any degree of continuing political stability), and then the ten-year annual production capacity of the planet, for treatment of the U.S.'s designation survivor population alone.
Is it by accident that this article just happens to blotch out and make that word illegible, while be bomb and control the most critical of the opium production areas of the planet, Afghanistan?
This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes "justified" by the previous atrocities.
... oh maybe 3 months between 6th and 7th grade.
And I think that lasted for about
The first culture that goes completely "pacifist" will be run over by one that doesn't believe in their ideals. While that might seem harsh, that's reality.
While the men went off to war, the women went to work in defense plants and other facilities to aid the war effort. Children helped with scrap metal drives and such, while seniors tended "Victory Gardens".
Would Japan have been justified in wiping out a couple of major US cities if it had developed the capability to do so?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
The difference is we didn't have total mobilization. We still had schools which educated children in math and literature, not spear drills. We still had hospitals servicing civilian needs, not off-limits to everyone but the military. We still had plumbers and electricians and carpenters building civilian housing, not forcibly conscripted into working exclusively on military projects.
If you're asking me if the defense plants were valid targets, sure. If the Japanese had somehow been able to bomb Rosie the Riveter, that would've been entirely appropriate within the laws and customs of war. The instant a civilian starts working for a military purpose, they stop being a civilian. In wartime Japan, more than ninety percent of the population over age twelve was working for the war effort. Hence, there were very few civilians in Japan.
And so long as you let your plants live, you are providing oxygen for the flame that the soldier uses to burn that child.
Lots of people have already pointed out he lived 57 years after his visit to post-nuke Nagasaki.
I would like to post a comment as someone who knows some people who were there that day.
There certainly is a strange thing about the effect of the bomb to people. I have no statistics, but my anecdotal experience shows that those who are still alive 60 years after their experience are extremely healthy.
My father was 14 and was 2.5km from the ground zero. He, obviously unscathed, visited the ground zero after a day or two. He is 74 now and plays tennis every day. He does get his conditions checked every year as a survivor. He is apparently an interesting case because he does have half the amount of white blood cells compared to normal. This is somewhat consistent with the well-known effect of radiation. Still, he doesn't even catch cold.
And my father is not an exception. There is a rather well known view among Nagasaki population that some survivors are extremely healthy. This may simply mean that they survived because they are extremely strong. There might be a correlation but it would be really hard to tell which is the cause and which is the effect. Some people may be just lucky that their damaged genes have better ability to repair itself.
On the other hand, people are now starting to talk about the effect on the third generation. There seem to be some concern that instead of the second generation, symptoms are appearing in the third generation. The effect of the bombing in terms of how much the radiation affects the genes is understandably hard to prove. There are many many other factors, and it is practically impossible to isolate the experience in a nuked environment as the major cause of mutation.
Personally, I don't have an opinion whether dropping the a-bombs is justified. It's history and that's what happend, we cannot change it. But if I'm pressed, I'd personally think because of the bomb, I'm here. If there had been no bomb in Nagasaki that day, my father may not have survived till the end of the war. It's well-known that teenager boys had been recruited to become Kamikaze attacker. An elder brother of his was being trained to be one. Another year or so, my father would probably have become one.
Every time I think about the bomb, I have a strange feeling. If my father had been killed on that day, I would not be here to think about the bomb. It was obviously a major event in his life although he always talks about it in a calm manner. I think he is a cool guy.
And, of course, the people torturing your grandmother weren't the ones who got the bomb dropped on them.
Not the point - dropping the bomb led to Japan's surrender, which is why (presumably) the people torturing his grandmother stopped doing so, and released her. Otherwise, the torture would have continued.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The real question to ask is why on God's Green Earth (or blue once you actually see it from space) did the Japanese intermix their civilian population with military manufacture? No one else did that as much as was possible (though the Brits did have secret aircraft factories in populated areas.)
The reason is multi-part but basically that was simply how Japan worked. Instead of big, mega factories, often you had small cottage industry that served the greater factory. Its actually a very nice model in peacetime.
The casualties were even worse than they needed to be. Fearing incendiery attacks, the Japanese organized to pull down wooden structures. However, they did not organize to haul away said piles of wood which ended up burning more efficiently that way.
If you look at what the japanese were doing to prepare themselves for the inevitable invasion by the Allies (including the Russians) you will no doubt come to the conclusion that dropping two atomic bombs was by far better than having a poorly armed population attempting to fight it out. They were trainng young women to fight with bamboo spears. It would have been a sensless slaughter that Japan probably would not have recovered from. I think the question is quite well answered in the book "Downfall."
Also, there is a film put out by Showtime in 1995 called "Hiroshima" that I thought was very well balanced. It does portray the Emperor in a more heroic light than I think he deserves but for the most part I think it does show the intentions of everyone involved quite well. Its 3 hours long. I got a copy off of Half.com. Its hard to find but well worth it.
--Pete
i've never understood this word, terrorism.
I'll bet back in the 1770s, England would have agreed that one man's terrorist is another man's patriot.
It's all a matter of perspective - which side you are on.
First they burn books, then they burn people.
It's not moral absolutism. He didn't say "you are completely morally responsible for the soldier burning the child." He says, correctly, that you are paying for it.
And thus are part of a shared responsibility for it. If we live in a society with a representative government, then the policies of that government are the responsibility, to some extent, of the people who live in it. Responsibility is not exactly the same thing as moral culpability: responsibility can be collective (e.g., a company has to honor its debts even if no person who created the debt is still there.)
But it is a problem to think that you can enjoy all the benefits of a nation-state without sharing in the responsibility for the actions of that nation-state, particularly if there is some representative system at hand.
It's great to see so many people trying to be philosphical about something that they can not comprehend. I am completely speculating (but so is most everyone else here), but I would think at least 95% of the people posting were not born or even in gestation during WWII. Heck, your parents probably were not either.
You have read a couple of history books that give you some highlights about a war. The highlights often have some spin, or perhaps your history teacher adds some spin to them. Here is a news flash... people die during war. Sometimes they die a gruesome death. Sometimes war is necessary. Many times, we would rather not go to war, but we must, so we do. And in all of the times that we go to war, people die. It is a tradgedy to lose a human life, but it does become necessary. It is painful. It sucks. It is life.
Quit trying to condemn people. You have not been there. You can say what you would have done... but not even you know what you actually would have done. It is the same BS that is going on right now. Just give it a rest, because you really do not know what you are talking about.
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
Those who live in fear like scared little children are the one's who believe such lies as you just said.
I would say that walking around in a heavy fallout zone is an extremely unhealthy activity
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both classical airburst detonations. These typically produce low local fallout as the radioactive material is mostly swept up into the stratosphere as the fireball rises. Although there were certainly many cancer cases, most of these were caused by prompt radiation (ie gamma and neutrons directly from the nuclear reactions in the fireball), and that prompt radiation dies away very quickly (hours rather than days).
I wouldn't like to walk around in a heavy fallout zone either, but those are generally associated with groundbursts or radiological devices rather than airbursts. So I think this reporter was probably okay. See the FAQ at nuclearweaponarchive.org for more info.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
"Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki" by Trumbull [1957] documents the stories of nine refugees from the Hiroshima bombing. These poor sods wound up in Nagasaki. Got bombed again there, and lived to tell the story. An incredible read.
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way"
Um... how? In the example specified, how would "full-blown pacifism" have stopped the torture mentioned in the parent post?
This wasn't a one-time event, people were being put through this on a daily basis both within Japan as well as in Japanese holdings in China, before, during, and even after both atomic bombings. This is one of the reasons why Nagasaki was only three days after Hiroshima, to put a stop to the continual torture.
Of course, if no bombs were dropped and insteaed of forcing surrender out of Japan the US went "full-blown pacifist" and simply stopped prosecuting the war, things wouldn't have changed. There'd be no reason for Japan to release all its Chinese and Western prisoners (they were spoils of war gained "fair and square" as far as the IJA were concerned), they would have continued to be abused until their deaths, at which point they'd be replaced by even more Chinese slaves (and probably more Westerners, too, once Japan decided they needed even more natural resources). The violence wouldn't have ended, in many ways it would have gotten worse, the only difference is that, in your version, Pilate would have been able to wash his hands of it.
They had to be nuked. Sure, that's not something to be happy about, but simpy disliking something doesn't make it less necessary. Contrary to popular belief, violence does solve things, and this is a shining example of it.
And as for the civillian deaths, there was little (if any) difference between "civillian" and "soldier" in the eyes of Japan, both for their enemies as well as their own people. Many (if not most) of those civillians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were drafted by the government to work in factories making war materiel. With Japan prosecuting "total war" like that, it's very difficult to say who was really a civillian and who wasn't.
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes 'justified' by the previous atrocities."
What bothers me about this position is that it is purely self-serving. Much like the smug vegan or self-assured decrier of the death penalty, the entire position of 'pacifism' is one of putting your own moral/mental comfort above the physical well-being and reality of others.
Pacifists rarely think through their position enough to find alternatives to the actions they dislike. They simply separate themselves to absolve themselves of responsibility - to make themselves feel good. And I find that reprehensible.
It is the easiest thing in the world to be against something, or to judge it with all the knowledge of history. And it is no better to be blindly 'against' something than to be blindly 'for' it.
Yes, the military censored the executions and brutal treatment the Japanese gave President's Bush's friends after they crashed and were captured. They did this for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was simple. The things the Japanese did were unimaginable to the American public; should the public have discovered at the time, the sentiment towards the Japanese may have turned from conquering them to annihilating them.
You think the Vietnam war was tough? Go back and find out what really happened in the Japanese conflict. Vietnam vets have no right to complain. When the Pacific Theater vets came back, they didn't complain. My own grandfather has never talked about what happened in Guadalcanal as a Marine foot soldier. All we know is that he was one of the handful of surviving troops. Most of his buddies never set foot on the sand.
One story I heard from a Pacific War vet told how he felt so bad for shooting a Japanese in the back as he was preparing to throw a grenade on his friends. He thought shooting someone in the back was unconscionable! He thought maybe he should've whistled or yelled to get him to turn around. All the while, he knew that his friends would go to get water and the Japanese snipers would wait until their backs are turned to shoot them. He knew the torture that his captured friends would endure. He knew that the Japanese would wrap themselves with bamboo so they could stay alive for a few moments longer after getting shot. I mean, the Japanese were far, far, worse than anything you or I could imagine.
And as you know, none of this was let out to the public. No one knew what was really happening there except the military. All these parents would get messages saying their children died honorably in battle defending their troops, when in truth, they were brutally beaten, tortured, and executed, usually by beheading. That's what was censored.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Or it could have been hormesis - turns out, the correct, small dose of radiation can actually be benificial
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Is it just me, or might MacAuthur have been disturbed by the section which discribed Nagasaki geography in terms of Manhatten, and been ill-disposed to the rest of the article because of it? That's just a bit too much identification with the enemy for comfort, plus they probably didn't want to give the citizens of NYC particular nightmares. And, even though the article reports that most of the stuff destroyed was factories of military contractors, it associates it with a residental and business area.
The bomb at Nagasaki was dropped on the wrong target. Not the wrong city, mind you, but the intended target was the center of town, and the actual target was an industrial facility on the edge of town. Visibility was quite low, and there were enough large buildings to fool the aircrew (our at least convince them that, whatever it was, it was a valuable target).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."
"LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
These quotes come from Robert McNamara in Errol Morris' film The Fog of War. (More quotes can be found on the wikiquote page: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War)
I completely agree with you, but I would follow up your point with McNamara's comment about proportionality. McNamara became lost in his own ability to improve our firebombing campaigns, and, in doing so, perhaps fascilitated the deaths of tens of thousands of people that could otherwise have lived, all without changing the ultimate result of the campaign.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
it's just that I think that the US has way too high of standards when it comes to "acceptable" levels.
Granite and marble are both naturally radioactive, as are bricks used for building materials. The US capitol building has a natural background radation of 30 microrems per hour. which is higher than EPA limits for "safe" LINK
Strom Thurman and Congress brain damage jokes may now start.
"There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present."
Not quite. What they were actually saying was "give the blockade more time." It had been up for months prior, slowly starving the islands, but there was no sign of wavering in the Japanese military command. Instead, they send the Yamato off with no fuel (thanks to the blockade), with the intent of beaching her on Okinawa and acting as static guns.
"Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option."
Diplomacy? With the same country that had negotiators pretending to negotiate a peaceful resolution to their invasion of China with the US while an attack fleet was steeming towards Pearl Harbor at the same time? "Fool me once, shame on you..."
What conditions would they push for in that diplomacy? That the US abandon support for China? Hang on to some of the islands they grabbed in 1941?
Yes, there were parts of the Japanese government looking for peace, but they had no power in their government. Those in power were waiting for the eventual invasion of the home islands and forcing the US into a pyrrhic victory in order to negotiate from more strength. And to that end they gave spears to children. They only surrendered when the atomic bombs demonstrated there was no hope to make the victory costly for the US beyond the price tag of the bombs.
"The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this,"
Yeah, the parts that had no power. These were some of the same voices that said going to war with the US was a bad idea back in 1941, but if anything they lost influence as Japan lost captured territories over the years (since it became easier to see us as filthy gaijin invaders).
"and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway."
Not in the way they wanted. The constitution MacArthur forced down their throats, the one that reduced the political influence of the emperor to that of a figurehead at best, is not one that they would have accepted voluntarily. One of the less etherial reasons parts of the Japanese government wanted to leave the emperor's office unchanged is that the military forces effectively ruling the country used their power in his name. They knew that, if their offices relied more on a popularly-elected legislature, they'd be replaced with people like the peaceniks they were busy supressing.
John of England got to keep his throne, too. But there was still the little matter of the Magna Carta...