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60 Years Since Hiroshima
cryptoz writes "Today is the 6th of August, 2005, exactly 60 years after the first nuclear device was used in a war. Japan remembers what happened, as do those around the world. Elswhere, we remember where the bomb hit, as well as how it worked." From the article about Japan's observation of the anniversary: "The anniversary comes as regional powers meet in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind rising calls in Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the United States. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was among those attending the ceremony in Hiroshima, 690 km (430 miles) southwest of Tokyo." We've previously reported on the anniversary of the first nuclear explosion.
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-71-1794/conflict_war/ hiroshima/
It's a sad day in the history of humanity. The cruelty that we visit upon each other should never be forgotten.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
from wikipedia.
The Japanese also engaged in mass killings; millions of Asian civilians and Allied POWs were killed by its military and/or used as forced labour. The most notorious atrocities occurred in China, including the slaughter of almost half a million Chinese during the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731's experiments with biological warfare in Manchuria, with a view to killing a large part of the Chinese population. Japanese war crimes also included rape, pillage, murder, cannibalism and forcing female civilians to become sex slaves, known as "comfort women" .
IIRC 300,000+ or so were lost in Japan's Rape of Nanking, addition to the hundreds of thousands that were literally raped.
Would you not prefer that a nuke had been dropped, and only 210k killed?
Here's a film from the Internet Archive:
...
A Tale of Two Cities" (1946)
There is be more
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
I keep reading posts from proud Americans how the bombs were justified, saved x lives and the world should be thankful for the guardian angel that US is.
Yet no word on the point of view (that I assume was never taught in US schools) that the bombing was unnecessary, as Japan was about to surrender, the wheels were in motion but accidental/intentional communication problems prevented that from happening before the bombs were dropped.
I also cannot discount the point of view that US had used this opportunity to do a real-life test and show the world its new weapon technology, just like recently in Iraq with the bunker busters and stealth fighters, and to ensure its uncontended first page in the world superpower book.
No words on that fact that mostly CIVILIANS were killed in a horrible way in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"As for the future, when energy resources start to dwindle..."
Thats the problem, resources are not dwindling, nor will they. If one looks at all the oil, for one example, and looks at ALL the know oil shale, rock oil, tar sands, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of years of petroleum avaliable.
No, the low scale war that is occuring over resources are occuring over rare-earths or class items (diamonds), resources which are not rare.
When something strategic does become rare, the powers that need it, EU-US-China-Russia-Pacific Rim will secure it's delivery.
The rape of Nanking was only one incident, and was completely indicative of Japan's atrocities in Asia (China, Korea, SE Asia). See this:_ Atrocities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_War
The people of China and Korea (both of them) will never forgive the Japanese for what they did in World War II during their totally unjustified quest to create the "East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" i.e. the Japanese Empire.
It is quite interesting how the war is treated differently in regards to the treatment of Japan and Germany. When one talks about Germany during World War II, all he/she usually talks about is the Holocaust and other acts of Nazi brutality. Rarely is the plight of the German people mentioned. This in my opinion is totally justified. However, when one talks about the Japanese, a quite significant number will choose to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how terrible it was for the Japanese civilians. The story that the first poster put up may be touching, but if you listen to the stories of the many millions of Chinese and Koreans who were brutalized, this story seems trite and insignificant in comparison. In my opinion much more focus should be put on Japan's war atrocities, just like Germany's war atrocities are commonly focused upon.
As a Chinese native living in the USA, I am surprised daily as to how many people feel sympathy for the Japanese b/c they were nukes, because I can never bring myself to feel such sympathy. To sympathize with them, is to denigrate the millions of my countrymen who were brutally slaughtered.
Contrary to your ignorant statement, America did more for Japan than it's emperor EVER did. We rebuild Japan with a vengence.
Japan's efficiency in manufacturing and business process did not come from some stroke of post-war national pride. It came from the business philosophies of Dr. William Deming.
Deming was the grandfather of Process. His processes, referred to as TQM (Total Quality Management) or TQC (Total Quality Control)
The direct ancestor of Deming's initial work, was the business philosophy which turned Japan into an economic powerhouse in the 1980s, is called Theory Z
The real irony here, is that like so many absolutely brilliant and revoluationary new ideas that originated in America, American businesses rejected Deming's value.
The other factor which created Japan how it is today is General Douglass MacArthur. During the five years diretly following the end of the war, MacArthur put as much fervor and resources into reconstruction Japan, as he did in conquering it. The Japanese, after accepting their defeat, transferred their reverence of Hirohito, and turned it into a devotion towards MacArthur.
If you have ANY copping that a country run by an ages-old dictatorial/monarchical society like Japan was, could possibly be the free and thriving nation it is today, but 10 years earlier, if we hadn't dropped a couple of low-yield hydrogen bombs, then you're insane.
of your post. Japanese are in general apolitical and the younger generation simply doesn't think about Hiroshima (or history in general, for that matter). I once asked one of my Japanese coworkers, a very bright guy, how much they studied WWII during school. His answer was three or four days. I had an entire class entitled "WWII", and probably spent six weeks covering the war (the rest was the cold war and Vietnam).
.3% of the people that died in WWII, yet probably half of the anecdotes that an average American reads. That provides a completely distorted perspective.
The problem I have with anecdotes is that one is almost never exposed to them in proportion. The bombs constitute about
Actually Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets.
From wikipedia, Hiroshima:
During the First Sino-Japanese War, Hiroshima emerged as a major supply and logistics base for the Japanese military, a role that it continued to play during World War II.
and for Nagasaki
On 9 August 1945, the primary target for the second atomic bomb attack was the nearby city of Kokura, but the bomber pilot found it to be covered in cloud. The industrial areas outside Nagasaki were the secondary target.
And don't forget, the civilian population were under orders from the Emperor (who was seen as a god) to not be taken captive and use whatever they could as a weapon. There was an example of this (I can't recall the battle atm) where the civilians on an island that the Allies just won from Japan all commited suicide or rushed the Allies ending up dead.
Speaking of entirely irrational racist flamebait... http://www.superdickery.com/propaganda/1.html
"Superman says: You can slap a Jap with War Bonds and Stamps!"
In Japan, more so than other countries, there is a big difference between the way you truly feel and the public face you put on (honne and tatamae).
Having "harmonious" relationships with those around you is very important, even when there is a deep-rooted problem that you are burying. Since discussing politics does not lend itself to harmony, it is not talked about much. If it is not talked about, it tends to be not thought about. Because of that, it isn't covered so much on the news - there sure isn't a Crossfire or Fox here. It is pretty much a one-party system anyway, with the same left-center group having been in power for ages. Hence, most Japanese are fairly apolitical.
KAI BIRD and MARTIN J. SHERWIN are coauthors of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," published earlier this year by Knopf.
August 5, 2005
SIXTY YEARS ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.
The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 just five days after the Nagasaki bombing Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.
This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.
But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."
Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" and many other historians have long argued it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.
The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.
These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.
Today, in the post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the truth about the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war over Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender..."
- Admiral William D. Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff
"Arnold's view was that it was unnecessary. He said he knew the Japanese wanted peace. There were political implications in the decision and Arnold did not feel it was the military's job to question it."
- Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker,
deputy to the commanding general of the U.S. Armed forces, Henry H. Arnold
"The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with end of the war at all."
- Major General Curtis E. Lemay, commander of the 21st Bomber Command
"The President in giving his approval for these attacks appeared to believe that many thousands of American troops would be killed in invading Japan, and in this he was entirely correct; but (I) felt...that the dilemma was an unnecessary one, for had we been willing to wait, the effective blockade would, in course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials."
- Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations
"I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to (Secretary of War Stimson) 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..."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
[Back to the Atomic Bomb Controversy Page]
The decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan was heavily criticized almost immediately. Through the years an increasing number of scholars, politicians, activists, members of the military and others have challenged President Truman's conduct in the matter. Among their primary arguments are:
1) President Truman did not use all the options available to him and thus condemned 200,000 innocent civilians to a needless death.
Revisionist historian Gar Alperovitz in his book "The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb" proposes that a "two-step" policy was under consideration by President Truman and his top advisors in the summer of 1945. The first step was to secure Soviet cooperation to attack Japan soon after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the surrender terms offered the Japanese should specifically spell out that the Emperor would be allowed to remain in power upon Japan's acceptance of the terms.
Alperovitz writes that the the Joint Intelligence Committee informed the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that "a Russian decision to join with U.S. and Britain in the war against Japan would have enormous force - and would dramatically alter the equation: 'The entry of the U.S.S.R. into the war would, together with the foregoing factors, convince most Japanese at once of the inevitability of complete defeat.' It went on (step two): 'If...the Japanese people, as well as their leaders, were persuaded both that absolute defeat was inevitable and that unconditional surrender did not imply national annihilation, surrender might follow very quickly.'"
Doug Long on his web site writes: "Historian and former Naval officer Martin Sherwin has summarized the situation, stating, 'The choice in the summer of 1945 was not between a conventional invasion or a nuclear war. It was a choice between various forms of diplomacy and warfare.'"
The challenging position clearly believes that the use of the atomic bombs was unnecessary because there was a military and political reality in the Pacific that would have brought about Japan's surrender without the tragedies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This contention is "fleshed out" as follows:
Water will run out before the oil will.
evil is as evil does
Actually it did. The only thing holding back the American and Russian generals and politicians from going at each other was the nuclear carnage. Plenty of classified discussions from both sides have been released to support this thesis.
Second, this is again, limited hindsight. Japan was asked to surrender after the first bomb and they refused under the belief that it was very unlikely the Americans had a second bomb. If Japan had surrendered after the first one, there would not have been a Nagasaki. By dropping the second bomb so closely after the refusal to surrender the USA signaled "there is plenty more from where this one comes from". By the way, an American physicist on his own accord dropped a letter with the first bomb saying so, and urging them to surrender. This letter made it up the chain of command in Japan and had no effect.
It is easy to condemn the bomb drop without all the facts at hand. Look at all the information that was missing from your judgment (a) letter attached to the bomb (b) in which way it was dropped so that it would survive the explosion and (c) be found by the Japanese after the blast (d) that it was addressed to a distinguished Japanese scientist who was a friend of the American scientist so that he could vouch for the credibility of its contents (e) that another Japanese physicist independently informed the Japan war cabinet that it was unlikely the US would have enough material for more than one bomb (f) that based on this Japan decided to continue fighting (g) that as soon as the second bomb was dropped the Japanese surrendered (h) that the US already had a third bomb on the way to the Pacific theater.
Dropping the bomb was a horrific act. The alternative (not dropping it, millions death upon invasion of the mainland) was equally horrific. Truman faced a veritable Sophie's Choice and either choice would haunt him forever. (Sophie was forced by the Nazis to choose which one of her two children would survive.)