\u201cThe rights and\nwrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,\u201d Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at\nNuremberg, once said, \u201cbut I have never heard a plausible justification of\nNagasaki\u201d \u2014 which he labeled a war crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his 2011 book\nAtomic Cover-Up<\/em>, Greg Mitchell says,\n\u201cIf Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki\nshows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.\u201d Mitchell notes that\nthe US writer Dwight MacDonald cited in 1945 America\u2019s \u201cdecline to barbarism\u201d\nfor dropping \u201chalf-understood poisons\u201d on a civilian population. The New York Herald Tribune <\/em>editorialized\nthere was \u201cno satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had\nproduced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the\nwhole history of mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mitchell reports\nthat novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said, \u201cThe most racist, nastiest act by this\ncountry, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.\u201d Vonnegut experienced\nthe February 1945 firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in his\nmasterpiece Slaughterhouse Five<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Aug. 17,\n1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News<\/em>, put it this way: \u201cLast week we\ndestroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new\natomic bomb. \u2026we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt.\n\u2026we\u2026did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times\nindiscriminately against men, women and children. \u2026 Surely we cannot be proud\nof what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed\nof it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If shame is the\nnatural response to Hiroshima, how is one to respond to Nagasaki, especially in\nview of all the declassified government papers on the subject? According to\nJoseph Gerson\u2019s With Hiroshima Eyes<\/em>,\nsome 74,000 were killed instantly at Nagasaki, another 75,000 were injured and\n120,000 were poisoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Hiroshima was unnecessary, how to justify Nagasaki?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The saving of\nthousands of US lives is held up as the official justification for the two\natomic bombings. Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering\ncivilians to protect soldiers, what can be made of the Nagasaki bomb if\nHiroshima\u2019s incineration was not necessary?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most\namazingly under-reported statement in this context is that of Truman\u2019s\nSecretary of State James Byrnes, quoted on the front page of the August 29,\n1945 New York Times<\/em> with the\nheadline, \u201cJapan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.\u201d\nByrnes cited what he called \u201cproof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten\nbefore the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Sept. 20,\n1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the famous bombing commander, told a press conference,\n\u201cThe war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and\nwithout the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the\nwar at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to\nRobert Lifton\u2019s and Greg Mitchel\u2019s Hiroshima\nin America: 50 Years of Denial <\/em>(1995), only weeks after August 6 and 9,\nPresident Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb \u201cdid not win the war.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The US Strategic\nBombing Survey, conducted by Paul Nitze less than a year after the atom\nbombings, concluded that \u201ccertainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all\nprobability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the\natomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and\never if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Likewise, according\nto reports Gar Alperovitz in his authoritative 1995 book The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb<\/em>, the Intelligence Group of the\nUS War Department\u2019s Military Intelligence Division conducted a study from\nJanuary to April 1946, and declared that the bombs had not been needed to end\nthe war. The IG said it is \u201calmost a certainty that the Japanese would have\ncapitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Russia did so on\nAug. 8, 1945, and, as Ward Wilson reports in Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons<\/em> (2013), six hours after news reached\nTokyo of Russia\u2019s invasion of Sakhalin Island\u2014 and before Nagasaki was bombed \u2014\nthe Supreme Council met to discuss unconditional surrender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Experiments with hell fire?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nagasaki was\nattacked with a bomb made of plutonium, named after Pluto, god of the\nunderworld earlier known as Hades, in what some believe to have been a ghastly\ntrial. The most toxic substance known to science, developed for mass\ndestruction, plutonium is so lethal it contaminates everything nearby forever,\nevery isotope a little bit of hell fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Atomic Cover-Up<\/em>, Hitoshi Motoshima,\nmayor of Nagasaki from 1979 to 1995, said, \u201cThe reason for Nagasaki was to\nexperiment with the plutonium bomb.\u201d Mitchell notes that \u201chard evidence to\nsupport this \u2018experiment\u2019 as the major reason for the bombing remains sketchy.\u201d\nBut according to a wire service report in Newsweek<\/em>,\nAug. 20, 1945, by a journalist traveling with the president aboard the USS Augusta<\/em>, Truman reportedly announced\nto his shipmates, \u201cThe experiment has been an overwhelming success.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n US investigators\nvisiting Hiroshima Sept. 8, 1945 met with Japan\u2019s leading radiation expert,\nProfessor Masao Tsuzuki. One was given a 1926 paper on Tsuzuki\u2019s famous\nradiation experiments on rabbits. \u201cAh, but the Americans<\/em>, they are wonderful,\u201d Tsuzuki told the group. \u201cIt has\nremained for them to conduct the human experiment!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering civilians to protect soldiers, what can be made of the Nagasaki bomb if Hiroshima\u2019s incineration was not necessary?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":594,"featured_media":50737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[66],"region":[65],"series":[],"article_type":[],"class_list":["post-50732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","tag-nuclear-weapons","region-north-america"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n