G-7 Leaders At Hiroshima To Urge More Visits to Nuclear Bombsites (voanews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Sunday leaders from the G-7 countries gathered in Hiroshima Sunday, a gesture which the Japanese government hopes will send a message of peace and nuclear nonproliferation. The seven world leaders will first honor the dead at Hiroshima Peace Park and visit an atomic bomb museum, which the Associated Press calls "a dream come true for many surviving victims, who have for decades campaigned to bring leaders of nuclear states to Hiroshima to see the damage." In addition, Japan hopes that the world leaders will also issue a "Hiroshima Declaration," which reportedly will call for more transparency about stockpiles of nuclear weapons, but also more visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki by both world leaders and young people.

Comments

Re:There has only been one country....

[jedidiah]

Get over yourself.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not at all remarkable in terms of destruction. The Allies leveled the whole of Germany and Japan during WWII. If you only fixate on two cities, then you are belittling the entire rest of the war.

Also, you are belittling the Japanese. They are not a nation to be trivialized and that's exactly what you doing when you try to claim that we could do anything short of everything we could.

Typical "White Man's Burden" BS.

Re:There has only been one country....

[FlyHelicopters]

Nagasaki and Hiroshima will forever live on as America's shame.

Easy for you to say, 70 years on, not having lived during that time or having faced the ruthless Japs who were giving little quarter in their attacks.

Meanwhile in an alternate universe

[rossdee]

where atomic weapons weren't used, there is no nation of Japan, just the mass graves of thousands of allied soldiers, millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians (most of whom died of disease and starvation).
Nothing grows there because of the defoliants that were used. The Japanese are extinct.

Still the whales and dolphins are a lot better off than in our timeline.

The invasion

[DNS-and-BIND]

Fun fact: the US military was going full-on for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. The atom bomb was top-secret, remember? Casualty estimates were huge for both sides. The Japanese had a defense plan, and it was a good one. They had correctly predicted what the Americans were going to do. It would have been a bloodbath. When the Japanese surrendered it was a huge relief to both sides.

August 5, 1963

Dear Kup:

I appreciated most highly your column of July 30th, a copy of which you sent me.

I have been rather careful not to comment on the articles that have been written on the dropping of the bomb for the simple reason that the dropping of the bomb was completely and thoroughly explained in my Memoirs, and it was done to save 125,000 youngsters on the American side and 125,000 on the Japanese side from getting killed and that is what it did. It probably also saved a half million youngsters on both sides from being maimed for life.

You must always remember that people forget, as you said in your column, that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was done while we were at peace with Japan and trying our best to negotiate a treaty with them.

All you have to do is to go out and stand on the keel of the Battleship in Pearl Harbor with the 3,000 youngsters underneath it who had no chance whatever of saving their lives. That is true of two or three other battleships that were sunk in Pearl Harbor. Altogether, there were between 3,000 and 6,000 youngsters killed at that time without any declaration of war. It was plain murder.

I knew what I was doing when I stopped the war that would have killed a half a million youngsters on both sides if those bombs had not been dropped. I have no regrets and, under the same circumstances, I would do it again -- and this letter is not confidential

. Sincerely yours,

Harry S. Truman