by Norm Dixon
August 6 and August 9 will mark the 60th 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 was obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000
people had died from radiation and injuries.
Three days after Hiroshima's destruction, the US drooped 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.
A tiny group of US rulers met secretly in Washington and callously ordered
this indiscriminate annihilation of civilian populations. They gave no
explicit warnings. They rejected all alternatives, preferring to inflict the
most extreme human carnage possible. They ordered and had carried out the
two worst terror acts in human history.
The 60th anniversaries will inevitably be marked by countless mass media
commentaries and speeches repeating the 60-year-old mantra that there was no
other choice but to use A-bombs in order to avoid a bitter, prolonged
invasion of Japan.
On July 21, the British New Scientist magazine undermined this chorus when
it reported that two historians had uncovered evidence revealing that "the
US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... was meant to
kick-start the Cold War [against the Soviet Union, Washington's war-time
ally] 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.
While the capitalist media immediately dubbed the historians' "theory"
"controversial", it accords with the testimony of many central US political
and military players at the time, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who
stated bluntly in a 1963 Newsweek interview that "the Japanese were ready to
surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing".
Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, stated in his memoirs that
"the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no
material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already
defeated and ready to surrender."
At the time though, Washington cold-bloodedly decided to obliterate the
lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to show off the
terrible power of its new super weapon and underline the US rulers' ruthless
preparedness to use it.
These terrible acts were intended to warn the leaders of the Soviet Union
that their cities would suffer the same fate if the USSR attempted to stand
in the way of Washington's plans to create an "American Century" of US
global domination. Nuclear scientist Leo Szilard recounted to his
biographers how Truman's secretary of state, James Byrnes, told him before
the Hiroshima attack that "Russia might be more manageable if impressed by
American military might and that a demonstration of the bomb may impress
Russia".
Drunk from the success of its nuclear bloodletting in Japan, Washington
planned and threatened the use of nuclear weapons on at least 20 occasions
in the 1950s and 1960s, only being restrained when the USSR developed enough
nuclear-armed rockets to usher in the era of "mutually assured destruction",
and the US rulers' fear that their use again of nuclear weapons would led to
a massive anti-US political revolt by ordinary people around the world.
Washington's policy of nuclear terror remains intact. The US refuses to rule
out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. Its latest Nuclear
Posture Review envisages the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
"rogue states" and it is developing a new generation of "battlefield"
nuclear weapons.
Fear of the political backlash that would be caused in the US and around the
globe by the use of nuclear weapons remains the main restraint upon the
atomaniacs in Washington. On this 60th anniversary year of history's worst
acts of terror, the most effective thing that peace-loving people around the
world can do to keep that fear alive in the minds of the US rulers is to
recommit ourselves to defeating Washington's current "local" wars of terror
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
GO TO ORIGINAL
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[Norm Dixon is a former editor of Australia's leading radical newspaper, Green Left Weekly,
and continues to write regularly on the impact of US foreign policy and the
real nature of the"war on terror".]
"9/11: U.S. Accuses Iran, Plans Nuclear
Attack," The Wisdom Fund, July 21, 2003
Amy Goodman and David Goodman, "Hiroshima Cover-up:
How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer," CommonDreams.org,
August 10, 2004
Patrick J. Buchanan, "Dresden, Tokyo,
Hiroshima, and Nagasaki: Terror on a Monumental Scale,"
CommonDreams.org, September 1, 2004
[But the U.S. had already crossed a terrifying moral threshold when it
accepted the targeting of civilians as a legitimate instrument of warfare.
--David M. Kennedy, "Hiroshima:
Crossing the Moral Threshold," Time, August 1, 2005]
Amy Goodman and David Goodman, "The Hiroshima
Cover-Up," Baltimore Sun, August 5, 2005
