WW2: United States military crimes - Two nuclear bombs killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan.

August 9, 2005

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THE A-BOMB GENOCIDE IN JAPAN

The biggest terrorist attack in history that directly killed around hundreds of thousand of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the years many other hundreds of thousand of people would perish of illness from the radioactivity and many others would suffer from genetic problems.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: victims of nuclear terror

Most people now agree that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years ago was a tragedy. But for 50 years, the myth that it was also necessary has been argued by political and military supporters of nuclear weapons. All official commemorations assume that the nuclear bombing, though a terrible thing, was the only way to end the Pacific war without an invasion of the Japanese mainland that would have resulted in massive US casualties. President Nixon used to speak of the "risk of 1 million American dead" if Japan was invaded by US servicemen.

The reality, however, is that millions of Japanese civilians were killed, or still suffer from radiation illnesses, from a nuclear bombing that was militarily unnecessary. The nuclear bombing was a calculated, and criminal, political strategy by the US to extend its postwar expansion into Asia and the Pacific, and to use its nuclear "muscle" to seize other choice bits of global real estate.

By August 1945, Japan was virtually defeated. The bulk of the Imperial Navy had been sunk, its last operational forces destroyed in the battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. The Air Force was reduced to sporadic kamikaze attacks. American B-29 bombers were in range of Tokyo and met little resistance, losing only around 100 planes in 7000 missions in the four months to June 1945, a rate of loss much lower than Germany was able to inflict on Allied bombing raids.

The US naval blockade had strangled the Japanese war economy, which could no longer support anything like its former military strength. Japan was cannibalising functioning civilian industrial plant and machinery to convert it into scrap metal for arms production. Japan's ally, Nazi Germany, had been defeated and the Soviet Union was about to declare war on Japan. Militarily, Japan faced overwhelming odds, and Japanese officials had privately accepted defeat and were making diplomatic surrender overtures to the Allies well before August.

Most US military leaders did not accept the necessity for the atomic bombing. Their intelligence indicated that Japan would capitulate from economic and conventional military pressures in at most two to three months after August, without an invasion of the mainland.

Chief of Staff Admiral Leahy said the bomb was of "no material assistance" in ending the war, adding that its use returned the US to the ethical standards "common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages". General Eisenhower (supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe) believed that "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing".

General Curtis Le May (the US Air Force commander) said the bomb "had nothing to do with the end of the war". Conventional bombing, he said, "was driving the Japanese back to the Stone Age". He gloated over the March 10 incendiary raid on Tokyo which set a record for the greatest single act of military destruction in history with its 124,000 casualties. Le May was certainly no angel, then or later when he was in charge of bombing the Vietnamese "back to the Stone Age", so his hard-headed assessment of the military irrelevance of the atomic bombing carries some weight.

General Macarthur (supreme allied commander in the Pacific) and thus the military leader with the most direct involvement in potential invasion plans, wrote that, as early as April 1945, "my staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender. I even directed that plans be drawn up for a possible peaceful occupation without further military operations".

Others perceived the lack of military need for the atomic bombing, Winston Churchill amongst them. The Manhattan Project scientists who built the bomb were divided on its use. Some opposed its use on moral grounds, but some of those who favoured its use, like the project's coordinator, Robert Oppenheimer, later said that they did so because they knew nothing about the real state of Japanese collapse and were fed only the official line about the necessity of the bomb to prevent a bloody invasion.

Why was the bomb used if it was not needed? The needs of US imperialism spoke louder than the purely military assessments. The US was set to emerge from the war as the strongest imperialist power in history. Its global economic and political rule depended on subverting the potential socialist outcomes in liberated Europe (especially France, Italy and Greece) and in other developed countries, countering the national independence struggles in the postwar decolonisation period (especially in South-East Asia) and containing the Soviet Union's territorial gains, which would lock up a significant part of the globe from exploitation by US capital.

Japan was central to all three considerations. As Japan's economy collapsed from the war strain, the hardships of war-inflicted damage grew. Thirty per cent unemployment, real wages reduced to 10% of prewar levels, and 22 million left homeless from Allied bombing, created the potential for radical democratisation and socialism.

This potential was illustrated when the war ended, as trade union membership rocketed up from virtually zero and factories were seized under workers' control, while half a million workers celebrated May Day in 1946. One of the reasons Japanese authorities had been putting out surrender feelers was the threat of revolution, which they felt would grow from prolonging the war:

"At night, while the rest of the people huddled hungry in bombed out dwellings, those in power entertained one another at luxurious dinner parties, parties that often turned into night-long orgies ... This increasing demoralisation of the people was what chiefly preoccupied Prince Konoye who feared that if, or when, Japan lost the war, the masses would turn to communism as a panacea. The only way to retain the system ... was to terminate the war as swiftly and painlessly as possible." (Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War.)

A socialist Japan would also have been likely to support independence struggles in South-East Asia and thus harm the political and economic control that the US was hoping for in the region.

The most immediate concern of US capital and government during August 1945, however, was to stop the Soviet Union's advance into Japan and a possible geographical power-sharing arrangement with the Soviet Union similar to that which prevailed in Europe at the end of the war with Germany and which was based on the military power balance between the Allies and the Red Army.

As soon as Germany was defeated, US President Truman could dispense with his forced alliance with the Soviet Union against the imperialism of German fascism. He turned to the offensive in his quest to eliminate or reduce Soviet influence from Europe and Asia. The atomic bomb was central to this revived anti-Soviet policy. As Truman wrote in his diary, once exploded in Japan, the bomb gave him "an entirely new feeling of confidence" in his dealings with Stalin and "put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war".

Secretary of War Stimson saw the bomb as a "master card" of diplomacy. Secretary of State Byrnes sought to use it "to make Russia more manageable". General Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, said that he had always understood that "Russia was our enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis". Edward Teller, a Manhattan Project physicist, "considered Russia as an enemy from the beginning".

The professional military leaders who opposed the use of the bomb on military grounds were right but irrelevant to the structural interests of US multinational capital. The dominance of the political-economic pro-bomb lobby over the military realists is illustrated by General Eisenhower, who moved from opposition to the bomb during the war to threatening its use against China during the Korean War when he became president and who advised later presidents to use it in Vietnam.

The politics of the atomic bombing become evident from the timing of its use. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed to force the capitulation of Japan before the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan and advanced into Japanese-held Manchuria, northern China and Japan itself. This tactic worked.

The Allies had agreed at the Yalta conference of Truman, Churchill and Stalin in April that Russia would declare war on Japan on August 8. Following the successful July test of the A-bomb in the Nevada desert, however, Truman negotiated a week's delay to August 15 for Russia's entry into the war against Japan. This allowed the Manhattan Project to swing into top speed to produce two bombs, which were then dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Japan formally surrendered to the Allies on August 14. The atomic bombing thus was successful in keeping the Soviet Union out of China, Japan and Asia, leaving these as a US corporate playground. "Our dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan", confided Truman to his diary, "forced Russia to reconsider her position in the Far East".

Militarily it was not necessary to bomb the two Japanese cities. Truman had rejected options which would have demonstrated the power of the bomb without causing the terrible casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had rejected inviting Japanese observers to the Nevada test explosion in July, rejected a demonstration explosion on an uninhabited Japanese island, rejected the choice of the less densely populated city of Kyoto as a target and rejected providing a warning to allow for evacuation from Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Truman's intent was to cause maximum carnage and terror in two heavily populated, industrial cities, the better to display US power, to keep the Soviets out of the Pacific, and not to save the lives of US servicemen.

The political value of the bomb was made obvious as, with the war now over, expenditure on the bomb increased - from $43 million in August to $59 million in October - and research on the thermonuclear H-bomb went full throttle.

The myth that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a "necessary evil" is still in vogue. It is a dishonest cover usually trotted out by those who, in the tradition of the deceitful Truman, support nuclear weapons ("reluctantly", of course) as a necessary evil and who oppose nuclear disarmament. Chief amongst these have been the politicians and their capitalist constituency, primarily in the US, who have threatened the further use of US nuclear weapons - Korea in 1953, Berlin in 1961, Cuba in 1962, Vietnam in the '60s, and on at least 20 other occasions since the end of World War II.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a crime of the US ruling class and we should never forget that. There were many crimes committed during World War II - Auschwitz, Japan's Unit 731 in Manchuria and the fire-bombing of Dresden amongst them - but the killing of masses of people (78,000 people were killed instantly at the centre of the Hiroshima blast) and its harvest of leukaemia, still-births and congenital malformations in future generations, all from a single weapon, and all for the sake of the dividend returns of US-based multinational capital, was an atrocity with its own unique level of horror.

The total yield of all the non-nuclear bombs used in World War II is 2 million tonnes of TNT, the yield of just one modern nuclear weapon.

Fifty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear bandit states of the world, led by the US and supported by uranium-rich countries like Australia, pack a nuclear punch equal to 1 million Hiroshimas. Forty thousand "necessary evils" are aimed at the world's people. We should ask, "necessary for whom?". For the world's ruling classes to protect their wealth and power by the threat of nuclear terrorism.

But stronger than all the nuclear megatonnage is the power of people's protest. When Nixon considered using the nuclear bomb against Vietnam, he was not bluffing. The reason he gave, in his memoirs, for not ordering a nuclear strike was that there were too many angry Americans on the streets protesting against the Vietnam War. The world's working classes have the power to get rid of the economic and military bosses and all their bombs once and for all.

CREDITS/SOURCES:By Phil Shannon, Green Left Weekly - 18 September 1995

Death Statistics of the A-Bombs

Little Boy nuclear bomb

HIROSHIMA

NAGASAKI

Hiroshima Damage:

At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was a prosperous city of nearly 320,000. The bomb exploded almost directly over the center of the city. Two square miles of the city were completely leveled by the bomb, and the intense heat generated by the explosion started fires as far as two miles from ground zero.

TOTAL DIRECT DEATHS: 256,300 thousand

Nagasaki Damage:

Though Fat Man was nearly twice as powerful as Little Boy, its damage was less extensive, due partly to the geography of the Nagasaki area and partly to the fact that the bomb was dropped about 2 miles off target.

TOTAL DIRECT DEATHS: 173,800 thousand

PHOTOS OF CIVILIAN CASUALTIES

Using Nuclear Bombs on Japan Was a Political, Not a Military Decision

IT HAS BEEN observed so often that truth is the first casualty of war that it is now a banal remark rather than an insightful critical comment. However, of greater consequence than the death of truth is the surrender of critical thinking.

Golden anniversaries of crucial events are often used to proclaim the lessons learned from the past. But if history was never truly understood because it was purposefully misrepresented, exactly what lessons have we learned?

Deeply entrenched and culturally significant historical misrepresentations are very difficult to dispel within the lifetime of those responsible for the event. Anniversaries of those events are occasions when critical thinking must occur. Received historical stories must be challenged and held up to thorough critical scrutiny.

Today is one such anniversary. Fifty-seven years ago the first of only two atomic bombs ever used in war was unleashed.

At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, a 22 kiloton A-bomb was dropped in the commercial heart of a then unknown city: Hiroshima. Fifty thousand people died in the first few moments of the surprise attack; within five years another 150,000 of the survivors were dead from injuries resulting from massive irradiation. A similar event happened three days later in Japan's only center of Christianity: Nagasaki.

Aside from some resilient trees, a skeletal building or two, and some charred artifacts, these statistics and others (e.g., the heat of the bomb, the force of the blast) are the only objective historical remains in existence from those two days.

Conversely, the history we almost completely rely on to form our evaluations and understandings of the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the subjective stories from both North America and Japan.

However, we have been consistently hampered in our understanding of these apocalyptic events for two reasons: The first is a result of our basic human inability to describe experiences that are so far beyond our everyday reality as to be inexplicable. Even the hibakusha, or A-bomb survivors, experienced this difficulty.

The second reason for our near universal misunderstanding of the twin nuclear holocausts stems from an equally human, but more socially harmful motivation. We have been collectively blocked from a critical understanding of the A-bombings because of a lack of public criticism in the face of a powerful and purposeful historical misrepresentation that began with President Harry Truman in the years following 1945 and is only ending now, albeit very slowly.

The ongoing declassification of U.S. government documents and officials' diaries have fairly recently revealed evidence that the history lessons that we were taught after the end of the Pacific War were false. To wit:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff and every other high military official, as well as all Truman's key advisers, save one, were against the use of the A-bombs against the Japanese. Many were particularly concerned about the impact to America's moral stature for using bombs that they considered barbaric, especially upon a nation that they knew was beaten. After all, the U.S. military had already gained complete domination of Japanese airspace and waterways. They were simply waiting for the terms of surrender to be formulated between the U.S. and Japanese governments.

Truman repeatedly delayed acceptance of the Japanese government's conditional surrender attempts until after both types of A-bomb had been used.

Truman's physical target for the A-bombs were the Japanese, but the political target was his ally, but ideological opposite, Joseph Stalin. Hiroshima's city center was targeted because its high population and building density would maximally display to the Soviets the killing and destructive power of America's new weapon.

The deciding factors for the Japanese government's capitulation were the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War coupled with America's post-bombing acceptance of conditional surrender.

The story of a million American lives (and many more Japanese lives) saved by the A-bombs was a complete fabrication designed to eliminate public criticism of the president's decision.

Thus, the twin destructive forces of "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" were of political, but not military, utility. In other words, the nuclear holocausts were used for the purpose of "atomic diplomacy" with the Soviets rather than to bring a swift end to the war.

This is a completely different — yet more accurate and fully developed — story than the one that we have received for the previous 50 years.

Since we know that truth is a casualty to war, we must understand that our public history lessons are sometimes false. The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that we must all be vigilant regarding the official stories promoted by government leaders and officials, especially during and after times of war.

Kevin Black is a clinical psychologist who has lived and worked in Hiroshima.

CREDITS/SOURCES:By Kevin BlackPublished 2002 in the Toronto Star - Lessons of Hiroshima

Why the Atom Bomb wasn't necessary to end the war

I believe that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when considered in a historical perspective, were undoubtedly unnecessary and barbarous acts. Those who support this view include Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and General Dwight Eisenhower. I would ask the following questions of those who still support the bombings:

Why was there no demonstration explosion in an uninhabited area to convince the Japanese of the awesome power of the bomb?

Why was it necessary to bomb two cities? During the pause for thought that these questions invoke I will use the words of others, involved at the time, as well as evidence that has come to light since, which prove that:

"Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'... It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." (General Eisenhower).

First, let us stop for a minute and remember the impact of the atomic bombs.

The uranium bomb exploded over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki on 9 August killed tens of thousands instantly and had claimed 350,000 lives by 1950. Those not killed or vaporised immediately by the blast were horribly burned by the intense heat of the explosion. Eye-witness accounts describe traumatised people wandering with their skin trailing from their bodies 'like walking ghosts'. All recorded pregnancies within a two-mile radius of the centre of the blast resulted in miscarriage or stillbirth. Even today, survivors live with the fear that they may be struck down by a radiation-related disease.

We now know that the allies were aware by May 1945 that the Japanese were attempting to make contact in order to negotiate a surrender and that Japan was being overcome by conventional might. According to Admiral William D. Leahy, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman's Chief of Staff:

"The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... In being the first to use it [the atomic bomb], we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."

April: General Curtis le May (US Air Force) expressed a belief that the war could be ended by September or October without an invasion.

May 12: William Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Studies, reported to President Truman that Shuichi Kate, Japan's Minister to Switzerland, wished to "help arrange for a cessation of hostilities."

Mid-June: "A surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America's defense against future trans-Pacific aggression." Admiral W.D. Leahy, President's Chief of Staff.

July 16: The US exploded a nuclear bomb secrety in the New Mexico desert to prove to themselves that it would work.

July 18: Stalin told Truman that he had had a telegram from the Japanese Emperor himself asking for peace. Code-breakers were already aware of this. The Soviet Union was still officially neutral at that time.

August 10: The Japanese publicly broadcast an offer of surrender. Truman ordered conventional military operations to continue full force.

August 14: The Japanese surrender was accepted. "It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell." (UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill.)

"Certainly prior to 31 December 1945... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." (US Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946.)

If Japan was ready to surrender, there must have been another reason for the atom bombs to have been used. This, unbelievable as it might seem, was to make a point to the Soviet Union.

Vannevar Bush (Chief Aide for atomic matters to Stimson, the Secretary of State for War) confirmed this when he said that the bomb was: "delivered on time so there was no necessity for any concessions to Russia at the end of the war."

The US did not want the Soviet Union to be involved in the anticipated 'last push' land invasion of Northern China, since this would put it in a good position to exert influence in the area once hostilities ceased. The US therefore attempted to end the fighting before the Red Army entered Chinese territory but did not accept Japanese moves to surrender, leaving President Truman confident about finishing the war in the Far East with as little help from Russia as possible.

Truman postponed meeting Churchill and Stalin to discuss post-war territorial control until after July 16, when the first ever atomic explosion took place as the US tested its new weapon in New Mexico. Truman went to Potsdam, Germany, the very next day buoyed by the conviction that he had a weapon which would, as predicted by his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, "make Russia more manageable in Europe."

The Hiroshima bomb was dropped on 6 August. The message to the Japanese must have been unmistakable and it is difficult to imagine why a second one should have been used on August 9. Except that the Soviet Union was due to enter the war in that week and the US wanted to demonstrate to the Soviets the awesome power that they would be dealing with once the war was over.

In part because he wanted to wait until the bomb was ready, President Truman ignored advice in May 1945 from Acting Secretary of State Grew that changing the surrender terms might well halt the fighting. Some came to believe that this actually cost lives. Stimson, Secretary of State for War, said: "History might find that the US, by its delay in stating its position, had prolonged the war."

It is clear that 50 years on, the existing mythology must be questioned and a more sober assessment of the facts is needed. The need for this has been brought sharply into focus by the latest twist in the Arms Trade race.

For the past few years there has been a general impression that there is no longer a nuclear threat. This, alas, is far from the truth. Whilst the US and Russia take tentative steps towards a build-down, France, China and the UK are increasing their arsenals. The British Government has stated that the new Trident nuclear warheads will be used for targeting non-nuclear states. The French decision to resume nuclear testing in the South Pacific in September threatens to unleash a new wave of nuclear proliferation, since the only reason to test is to develop new nuclear weapons. It may cause the breakdown of talks in Geneva towards a complete nuclear test ban, an important step on the road to disarmament.

CREDITS/SOURCES:By Janet BloomfieldChair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Photos of civilians that lived in the area of the nuclear explosions

Links about Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/index.shtml

http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/mainn.htmlhttp://web.simmons.edu/~baildon/520/atomic/http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/http://www.rerf.or.jp/http://www.gensuikin.org/english/photo.html

Nuclear tests:

http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab15.asp