Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst single terror attacks in history

[ShamelessHussy]

Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

By Norm Dixon

August 6 and August 9 2009 mark the 64th anniversaries of the US atomic-bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second. Some 13 square kilometres of the city were obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries.

Three days after Hiroshima's destruction, the US dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out.
Since 1945, tens of thousands more residents of the two cities have continued to suffer and die from radiation-induced cancers, birth defects and still births.

...

On July 21, 2005, the British New Scientist magazine undermined this chorus when it reported that two historians had uncovered further evidence revealing that “the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War”. Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University in Washington, stated that US President Harry Truman's decision to blast the cities “was not just a war crime, it was a crime against humanity”.

With Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York, Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was “looking for peace”. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war”, Selden told the New Scientist.

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http://links.org.au/node/1186#comment-26286

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I believe targeting civilians is always wrong, and how terrorist operate.

When I also take into account that Japan was a defeated nation militarily, and interested in negotiating a surrender it is hard to disagree with the headline, though it will always be debatable what was the worst single act of terror this certainly will always be on the short list, imho.

I hope that, as we examine the past, it will help us to not only understand it more deeply by going beyond the propaganda of it's time, but even more importantly, help us to ensure that evil acts like this are not repeated.

[bbinacan]

1. ....

:popcorn:

[Drunken Irishman]

2. I'm surprised you're posting this after getting your ass handed to you in that other thread.

Props, though, for opening the door to more of that.

Takes balls.

[teranchala]

3. You can't reverse engineer history. You can only complain about it.

Look, "what if" never answered a question or solved a problem. And doing something that ended badly doesn't mean it was inherently evil at the time. We have to evaluate our actions based on what we know at the time; 20-20 hindsight can't change anything.

[ShamelessHussy]

4. I was in the military and we had such a thing called "After Action Reports"

Where we examined all the details of the completed action, with the known wisdom of hindsight, to extract value from our past behavior so as to improve our behavior towards success in the future.

"What if's" are great tools at our disposal to help us become better.

They taught me a valuable lesson which I continue to use with much success in my civilian life.

[teranchala]

5. Yes, I was involved in some of that claptrap in the USAF, and in 'Broken Arrow'

exercises too. The somewhat awful truth is, few humans will accept past failures as gospel to the point of refusing to try 'one more time'. It isn't in our nature to take no for an answer...or to take yes either.

I saw your other post, I have never been to Nagasaki but I have spent a fair amount of time in Hiroshima, beginning back in 1970 which wasn't terribly long after the bomb fell there. When I was asked to go there,
(on business) I had some trepidations...after all, my countrymen had basically immolated about a hundred thousand people who lived there. Now I cannot speak for every American visitor to that city but I will tell you without any fear of retribution that I was treated with nothing less than complete politeness and respect by
everyone I met there...including the time I spent walking through the 'peace park' where 'ground zero' was.

[ShamelessHussy]

7. Well, a big salute to you for your service!

xUSN, Pilot Rescue Swimmer.

And I hear ya, certainly nothing is perfect, especially in the military, and you can only work with what you have been given but I do find the reflection exercises useful even today, though I don't follow the ridged formats used when i was in the military, mostly just personal, though I do think about them during project management in the computer development world I now find myself in.

Even though I spent a lot of time in Japan (military and civilian life) I haven't been able to bring myself to visit, yet... though I will someday, as I will be back since I have relatives there now. And though I haven't been there, everywhere else I've been to in Japan, while in the service and out, the Japanese people have been unfailing polite and respectful. I have found that to be said of them going all the way back to the very first westerners who have visited there. Even folks who were shipwrecked when Japan was officially closed to foreigners. I always found that consistency in their culture remarkable, even after the blackships and WWII.

Thank you for sharing that, I do appreciate hearing personal accounts here on DU, and also thank you for your own grace and respect. I know this topic is highly emotional for a lot of us but I really am only interested in learning and sharing what I have learned about it in the hopes of it never being repeated in our time.

Take good care teranchala :toast:

[teranchala]

8. Thank you too. I have been in 52 countries so far (getting to be an old phart so that might be all)

and I have found people pretty much the same once the unimportant crap is out of the way. :D

(unimportant is > politics, ethnicity, race, religion...things that get in the way of a nice lunch) :-)

[caseymoz]

6. Hogwash. The Tokyo firebombing killed more than 100,000 people.

We firebombed 60 other Japanese cities that way. General Curtis LeMay, who originated and ran the firebombing campaign, said that if the US had lost the war, he himself would have been charged with war crimes.

Considering that 100,000 civilians died in the Tokyo bombing alone, we had probably killed 800,000-to-1.2 million civilians through firebombings, (my estimate) prior to the dropping of the nuclear bombs. No overall figures are available.

My major point is that dropping of the nuclear bombs did not reach any level of immorality that had been previously unsurpassed. And not just by us. Japan's unabated bombing of Chinese cities for eight years probably killed far more than we killed, not to mention its other atrocities there, that seemed to go on daily. I don't say our crime was justified, but at least we didn't initiate the war with Japan with a genocidal campaign as a major part of the strategy as they did with China and as Hitler did with Russia. That mitigates it.

A minor point, if Japan was going to surrender, its leadership was certainly procrastinating while its people burned nightly-- for months. If murdering hundreds of thousands with firebombs didn't move the leadership to immediate surrender, what could have possibly made up their minds faster? How do you raise those stakes?

Leaders who came out for surrender had to fear assassination from the other leaders. (There was a form of terrorist discipline). They also knew that their lives were probably over once the US occupied their country. Surrender was a terrible thing in Japanese culture, nobody wanted their names on it for the rest of history. In other words, they were highly motivated to procrastinate surrender. I find it dubious that anything short of nuclear bomb would have done it.

America had no reason to think surrender would be forthcoming-- by experience. Given that the Japanese would fight to the last man with suicidal viciousness, it was absolutely reasonable to expect that Japan would not surrender without something spectacular-- and firebombing hadn't done it.

A third, sick and ironic point: it definitely saved many lives, over and above the numbers who would have died if we had continued the firebombing another two weeks.

BTW, the US didn't continue with genocide on Japan after surrender. That is a huge mitigating circumstance as far as I am concerned, and it is proof that the goal was to win the war. In WWII, the pattern tended to be that the real genocides started after the surrender.

I am not saying that the bombings, fire or nuclear, were justified; that's a different discussion, but the whole slant of this article was just bullshit.

[obamachangetheworld]

9. Sad that so many people had to die.

The strategic bombing employed in both the Pacific and European theaters would no doubt be considered illegal by the Geneva Conventions just a few years later. The barbaric numbers games played by Robert Mcnamara, which he admitted qualified him as a war criminal, in WWII and Vietnam are typical of the way politicians fight wars. The Atomic bombs dropped in Japan are horrific, and probably the result of a need for retribution on the part of Truman and others, but there are many aspects of WWII which are even more terrifying. The millions of people killed by a single SS regiment operating in Eastern Europe, the Japanese Unit 71, and the holocaust are all examples of this. The consequences and rationale for the dropping of the A-bombs as well as atrocities committed by other countries should be openly studied and debated to avoid repetition.

[proteus_lives]

10. Hard work keeping that lie alive huh?

"When I also take into account that Japan was a defeated nation militarily" :puke:

Utter nonsense.

The bombings were a legitimate operation. The Japanese should have surrendered when we first offered.

"I hope that, as we examine the past, it will help us to not only understand it more deeply by going beyond the propaganda of it's time, but even more importantly, help us to ensure that evil acts like this are not repeated."

The bombings were indeed a grim act, I hope never happens again. But they weren't evil. You what was evil? Japan's decades long rampage of rape, murder and enslavement across Asia. Their acts in China, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, New Guinea, Singapore were the definition of evil. We put a stop to that. And we had to use the atomic bombs because they refused to the surrender without keeping their Imperial system and the remnant of their empire. The group that should be blamed for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the Japanese government.

[PaulRevere08]

11. I don't think people understand what was really going on in the

Pacific war in 1945.

The Japanese still had over 1Million troops in Manchuria. Now many were not front line troops by this time but they were still very committed and armed. The fear was that even if we destroyed Japan that we would still have to invade China, not to mention the many island garrisons that Japanese still had. American support for the war was ebbing after victory in Europe and the thought of invading Japan and perhaps China was daunting. Especially after seeing the cost in taking Okinowa.

We were counting on the Russians to enter the war and do the bulk of the fighting in China like they did in Europe but after seeing how they were subjugating Eastern Europe the US fearful of the same in China. The Japanese were trying to get the russians to stay neutral and were actually fooled into thinking that they would broker a peace with the US. The Russians kept up this sham diplomacy to delay the end of the war and get their troops east for the invasion. By the time the war ended the Russians had invaded Manchuria, killed 10,000s of Japanese troops and civilian colonists and set the stage for the Korean tragedy.

I am not 100% that we needed to drop the bombs but I am certain that most people are clueless about the reality on the ground in 1945.

[PurityOfEssence]

12. Regardless of all that...

...what I like to focus people on is this: if there hadn't been these two ghastly incinerations with very human evidence of radiation poisoning and other after-effects, would we have gotten out of the fifties or sixties without a MUCH more nasty use and possibly mass exchange? Sometimes seeing something horrific and ugly forestalls the REALLY devastating event(s).

Food for thought.

Personally, I think the human race got of light, although this may turn on us: these bombings may be seen as such small and isolated events that this, coupled with the dimming of memories over time and the ever-present scourge of a widespread belief in an afterlife causes us to let loose a really nasty exchange. People forget how finely-tuned a thing modern society is, and with a few major cities really clobbered, the infrastructure could be overwhelmed by resultant outbreaks in infectious diseases and all sorts of destabilizing events.

Once again, looking simply at complex things--although the ceaseless curse of mankind--is not a generally good thing...

Sigh.

[proteus_lives]

13. No, I believed the Cold War would turned hot

Without the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would have used nukes because neither the Soviet bloc or NATO would have feared losing a general war. Because both sides would have believed in the reasonable chance of victory. Berlin, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, China/Taiwan, Afghanistan, Iran. So many dangerous moments.