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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."
Actually, no.
He died in 2002, a whopping 57 years after his "walk in the atomic park".
I've said it before and I've said it again. It saved lives.
It saved the lives of approximately One Million US Service Personnel, and it saved the lives of Millions of Japanese Civilians and Soliders -- you see, atleast during WWII, alot of people really took that "Death before Dishonor" thing seriously, and could not be made to surrender. So the only way to force an unconditional surrender was a rather raw display of power. The Bombs were a way of saying, "We don't need to use people to decimate you -- we can do it in a manner that you cannot possibly defend against. Now, will you give up?"
Go here and learn.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear myths
"Always look on the bright side of life."
That link says some pretty bizarre things. Instead of one 20 megaton warhead, we are supposed to take comfort that MIRVs carry a dozen warheads of "only" 300 kilotons and "therefore" the cities wouldn't really be destroyed. According to Wikipedia, the Nagasaki bomb was a whole whopping TWENTY kilotons. So call me crazy but I figure a MIRV would effectively destroy a metropolis.
Remember, nothing will work. CARS newer than the early seventies won't work. The EMF will take out everything solid-state. In WWII electronics meant tubes and cars were mechanical. Without an intrastructure, will offshore oil rigs have a port to unload in? Will there be oil refining? How will it get transported and distributed? Even if you have a nuke plant outside of town and can string some distribution back up, will even a nuke plant run forever without lubrication or is beef tallow adequate?
A person better hope oil gets distributed because, even with the die-off, those cans in the grocery store won't last long. And plows and combines don't run on hay. How many farmers _have_ work horses (did you know there are differences between riding horses and plow horses?), much less have the equipment and knowledge and two-bottom plow to hitch them up to?
It is tempting to say that we would only slip back to the Romans without oil and electricity but we would still have to relearn how to create the intense fire in a primitive iron foundry.
And there would still be the sticky little problem of overpopulation. Tribes _are_ a social organization. Tribes are not a post-war state of anarchy. And according to my old anthropology book even in established hunter and gather societies:
"Equipped with knowledge of virtually every edible plant and with effective means of exploiting most vegetables and animals, population density varied according to the abundance of resources. It ranged from one person per square mile--and rarely more than this--to one person per 50 to 100 square miles." (Anthropology Today, CRM, 1971)
Do the math of what the first few years of a post-nuke world would be like without an infrastructure for gas and electricity.
In the main, it really needs to be said that survivalists are losers. They are so often people who are marginalized and fantasize that if society were only shattered, they would have the opportunity to rise to the top. Because society hasn't valued them, they dismiss the importance of society. But instead of some noble savage fantasy, a post-nuke world would more likely offer them the opportunity to club a widow to steal the last can of spaghettios from her children.
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.
A form of Pentagon-supported censorship...
l
http://www.democracynow.org/static/hiroshima.shtm
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.
(sorry, accidentally pushed submit instead of preview)
First, thank you for a reasoned and thoughtful response.
Secondly, I believe you're wrong.
What I often see from those who condemn The Bomb's use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revisionist morality. We know today, thanks to the experiences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how terrible are the consequences of nuclear warfare. We didn't know then; we'd had precisely one successful nuclear test. Our knowledge was--as it still is today--sadly limited.
Likewise, if our knowledge of the political situation of WW2 Japan today is so sketchy, how can we expect people of the day to have had any better knowledge? Yes, it's true we insisted on unconditional surrender. Yes, it's true the Japanese were making noises about less-than-unconditional surrender, but the peace factions of the Japanese Cabinet were never able to decide what "less-than-unconditional" meant. And even after the two Bombs were dropped, the war-at-any-price faction of the Cabinet tried to stage a military coup in order to prevent the Emperor from being able to surrender at all. What I read from history is the Japanese government was disintegrating and the militarists were still running things: the peace faction had no unity, but the militarists were quite united in their desire to see the nation burn to a cinder before any surrender would take place.
Regarding a "plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu before sending servicemen in", you should know as well as anybody else that's what militaries do: they plan. Right now, the United States Government has SIOPs--nuclear warfare plans--which cover every conceivable contingency: limited exchange, strategic exchange, population attacks, strategic resource attacks, infrastructure attacks... militaries make far, far more plans than they will ever use. Militaries make these plans so that, in the event the world takes a direction they weren't expecting, they can have a game plan. If we had a plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu, that by itself is no evidence at all unless you also have General MacArthur--himself an opponent of nuclear warfare--advocating the use of that plan.
What I see from history is this. We didn't know what was going on inside the Japanese political machine. (We still don't know today.) We didn't know how the Japanese political machine would react to The Bomb. We didn't know how the Japanese political machinery would react if we didn't drop The Bomb. We. Didn't. Know.
What we did know is we were against a foe which practiced total war, one in which even schoolchildren were forcibly conscripted into helping the war effort. We were against a foe which had commited countless atrocities in China and in the Pacific. We knew from the Battle of Okinawa that they would fight to the last man. All right, so we drop The Bomb and we pray history will be forgiving. It'd be nice to do a demonstration, but... we only have two of these things, and future devices will not be immediately forthcoming.
(Do you know what the Soviet response time was to a nuclear strike in the 1950s and 1960s? Six weeks. Know what our response time was like? Four weeks. Prior to modern nuke design and ICBMs, these things were extraordinarily difficult to maintain. They couldn't be built and put into storage for later use; they had to be built when they were needed. If in the 1950s our nuclear response time was 30 days, what was it like in 1945?)
So if we only have two of these devices, and they must be used within days of final assembly or else the bombs are useless, and we're not going to get more bombs anytime soon... can we really afford to not go after strategic targets?
Hiroshima. Gone.
It wasn't the right choice to make. When dealing in war, atomic or conventional, the only right choice is not to start. But Hiroshima was the least-wrong of a whole passel of bad options. In hindsight, should we have conducted things differently? Of course. But we can't judge Truman based on what we know in hindsight. We can only judge him based on what he knew when he gave the order.
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.
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
Those who live in fear like scared little children are the one's who believe such lies as you just said.