Apparently, Washington's blog has another entry with the title, "The Real Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan. It Was Not To End the War Or Save Lives".It worth reading to find out how so many people disagreed to dropping of the atomic bombs!
Five myths about the atomic bomb
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Another bomb fell August 9 on Nagasaki. The 70th anniversary of the event presents an opportunity to set the record straight on five widely held myths about the bomb.
But as Truman also observed after the war, if he had not used the atomic bomb when it was ready and GIs had died on the invasion beaches, he would have faced the righteous wrath of the American people.
The first was a demonstration of the atomic bomb prior to or instead of its military use: exploding the bomb on an uninhabited island or in the desert, in front of invited observers from Japan and other countries; or using it to blow the top off Mount Fuji, outside Tokyo. The demonstration option was rejected for practical reasons. There were only two bombs available in August 1945, and the demonstration bomb might turn out to be a dud. The second alternative was accepting a conditional surrender by Japan. The US knew from intercepted communications that the Japanese were most concerned that Emperor Hirohito not be treated as a war criminal. The “emperor clause” was the final obstacle to Japan’s capitulation. (President Franklin Roosevelt had insisted upon unconditional surrender, and Truman reiterated that demand after Roosevelt’s death in mid-April 1945.)
Although the US ultimately got Japan’s unconditional surrender, the emperor clause was, in effect, granted after the fact. “I have no desire whatever to debase [Hirohito] in the eyes of his own people,” Gen Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied powers in Japan after the war, assured Tokyo’s diplomats following the surrender.
But there was never any specific warning to the cities that had been chosen as targets for the atomic bomb prior to the weapon’s first use. The omission was deliberate: The US feared that the Japanese, being forewarned, would shoot down the planes carrying the bombs. And since Japanese cities were already being destroyed by incendiary and high-explosive bombs on a regular basis - nearly 100,000 people were killed the previous March in the firebombing of Tokyo — there was no reason to believe that either the Potsdam Declaration or Truman’s speech would receive special notice.
In reality, military planning, not diplomatic advantage, dictated the timing of the atomic attacks. The bombs were ordered to be dropped “as soon as made ready.” Postwar political considerations did affect the choice of targets for the atomic bombs. Secretary of war Henry Stimson ordered that the historically and culturally significant city of Kyoto be stricken from the target list. (Stimson was personally familiar with Kyoto; he and his wife had spent part of their honeymoon there.) Truman agreed, according to Stimson, on the grounds that “the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long postwar period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area rather than to the Russians.”
Like Stimson, Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, hoped that the bomb might prove to be a “master card” in subsequent diplomatic dealings with the Soviet Union — but both were disappointed. In September 1945, Byrnes returned from the first postwar meeting of foreign ministers, in London, lamenting that the Russians were “stubborn, obstinate, and they don’t scare.” —Washington Post
Gregg Herken is an emeritus professor of American diplomatic history at the University of California and the author of The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War and Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. As a Smithsonian curator in 1995, he participated in early planning for the National Air and Space Museum’s Enola Gay exhibit.
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Top 10 facts about Hiroshima's atomic tragedy
Some facts you should know about what went down in Japan in 1945
Conrad Egbert
July 29, 2015
1. Hiroshima, which means ‘Wide Island’ in Japanese, is the biggest city on the largest island of Japan and is the first city in history to be targeted by a nuclear weapon.
2. The US air force dropped an atomic bomb on the city at 8.15am on Monday, August 6, 1945.
3. The nuclear bomb was code named “Little Boy” and was transported in the belly of an American B-29 bomber (pictured above) called Enola Gay.
4. The bomb instantly killed an estimated 80,000 people, but after taking into account all deaths caused by injury and radiation at the end of that year, the total number of deaths was estimated at 166,000.
5. The population before the atomic attack on Hiroshima was estimated to be 340,000, but following the bombing in 1945, the population dropped to around 137,000.
6. The Uranium-based atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was the equivalent of 20,000 tonnes of TNT and it annihilated about 80% of the city's buildings. The mushroom cloud climbed up to 25,000 feet in the sky.
7. The Oleander was chosen to be the official flower of the city of Hiroshima, because it was the first to bloom, showing signs of renewed life, after the explosion.
8. Six Ginkgo trees, which were growing about one kilometre away from the atomic explosion in 1945, were among the few living things in the area to survive the blast. The Ginkgos speedily recovered and are alive to this day. These trees are sometimes described as living fossils; their origins have been known 250 million years. The city trams also survived the blast and were in fact used to transport the injured away from ground zero. Some of these trams are still in operation today and are a sense of pride for the Japanese people as a sign of resilience. The Bank of Japan building, which was around 400 metres from ground zero, also survived the explosion and due to its thick walls, many people who took refuge inside the bank, were saved.
9. The 1954 film Godzilla, or Gojira in Japanese, was actually created as a personification of a nuclear bomb inspired by the Hiroshima tragedy in 1945. The beast’s weapon of choice was its atomic breath in the form of a radioactive heat wave that it released from its jaws.
10. The Hiroshima city government continues to advocate the abolition of all nuclear weapons and the mayor of Hiroshima is the president of an international organisation called Mayors for Peace that is working towards the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide by 2020. A Peace Flame, lit in 1964 at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, will continue to burn until all nuclear weapons in the world have been destroyed.
Five myths about the atomic bomb
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Another bomb fell August 9 on Nagasaki. The 70th anniversary of the event presents an opportunity to set the record straight on five widely held myths about the bomb.
1. The bomb ended the war
The notion that the atomic bombs caused the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, has been, for many Americans and virtually all US history textbooks, the default understanding of how and why the war ended. But minutes of the meetings of the Japanese government reveal a more complex story. The latest and best scholarship on the surrender, based on Japanese records, concludes that the Soviet Union’s unexpected entry into the war against Japan on August 8 was probably an even greater shock to Tokyo than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima two days earlier. Until then, the Japanese had been hoping that the Russians — who had previously signed a nonaggression pact with Japan — might be intermediaries in negotiating an end to the war. As historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa writes in his book Racing the Enemy, “Indeed, Soviet attack, not the Hiroshima bomb, convinced political leaders to end the war.” The two events together — plus the dropping of the second atomic bomb on August 9 — were decisive in making the case for surrender.2. The bomb saved half a million American lives
In his postwar memoirs, former president Harry Truman recalled how military leaders had told him that a half-million Americans might be killed in an invasion of Japan. This figure has become canonical among those seeking to justify the bombing. But it is not supported by military estimates of the time. As Stanford historian Barton Bernstein has noted, the US Joint War Plans Committee predicted in mid-June 1945 that the invasion of Japan, set to begin November 1, would result in 193,000 US casualties, including 40,000 deaths.But as Truman also observed after the war, if he had not used the atomic bomb when it was ready and GIs had died on the invasion beaches, he would have faced the righteous wrath of the American people.
3. The only alternative to the bomb was an invasion of Japan
The decision to use nuclear weapons is usually presented as either/or: either drop the bomb or land on the beaches. But beyond simply continuing the conventional bombing and naval blockade of Japan, there were two other options recognised at the time.The first was a demonstration of the atomic bomb prior to or instead of its military use: exploding the bomb on an uninhabited island or in the desert, in front of invited observers from Japan and other countries; or using it to blow the top off Mount Fuji, outside Tokyo. The demonstration option was rejected for practical reasons. There were only two bombs available in August 1945, and the demonstration bomb might turn out to be a dud. The second alternative was accepting a conditional surrender by Japan. The US knew from intercepted communications that the Japanese were most concerned that Emperor Hirohito not be treated as a war criminal. The “emperor clause” was the final obstacle to Japan’s capitulation. (President Franklin Roosevelt had insisted upon unconditional surrender, and Truman reiterated that demand after Roosevelt’s death in mid-April 1945.)
Although the US ultimately got Japan’s unconditional surrender, the emperor clause was, in effect, granted after the fact. “I have no desire whatever to debase [Hirohito] in the eyes of his own people,” Gen Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied powers in Japan after the war, assured Tokyo’s diplomats following the surrender.
4. The Japanese were warned before the bomb was dropped
The US had dropped leaflets over many Japanese cities, urging civilians to flee, before hitting them with conventional bombs. After the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, which called on the Japanese to surrender, leaflets warned of “prompt and utter destruction” unless Japan heeded that order. In a radio address, Truman also told of a coming “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth.” These actions have led many to believe that civilians were meaningfully warned of the pending nuclear attack. Indeed, a common refrain in letters to the editor and debates about the bomb is: “The Japanese were warned.”But there was never any specific warning to the cities that had been chosen as targets for the atomic bomb prior to the weapon’s first use. The omission was deliberate: The US feared that the Japanese, being forewarned, would shoot down the planes carrying the bombs. And since Japanese cities were already being destroyed by incendiary and high-explosive bombs on a regular basis - nearly 100,000 people were killed the previous March in the firebombing of Tokyo — there was no reason to believe that either the Potsdam Declaration or Truman’s speech would receive special notice.
5. The bomb was timed to gain a diplomatic advantage over Russia and proved a “master card” in early Cold War politics
This claim has been a staple of revisionist historiography, which argues that US policymakers hoped the bomb might end the war against Japan before the Soviet entry into the conflict gave the Russians a significant role in a postwar peace settlement. Using the bomb would also impress the Russians with the power of the new weapon, which the US had alone.
In reality, military planning, not diplomatic advantage, dictated the timing of the atomic attacks. The bombs were ordered to be dropped “as soon as made ready.” Postwar political considerations did affect the choice of targets for the atomic bombs. Secretary of war Henry Stimson ordered that the historically and culturally significant city of Kyoto be stricken from the target list. (Stimson was personally familiar with Kyoto; he and his wife had spent part of their honeymoon there.) Truman agreed, according to Stimson, on the grounds that “the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long postwar period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area rather than to the Russians.”
Like Stimson, Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, hoped that the bomb might prove to be a “master card” in subsequent diplomatic dealings with the Soviet Union — but both were disappointed. In September 1945, Byrnes returned from the first postwar meeting of foreign ministers, in London, lamenting that the Russians were “stubborn, obstinate, and they don’t scare.” —Washington Post
Gregg Herken is an emeritus professor of American diplomatic history at the University of California and the author of The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War and Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. As a Smithsonian curator in 1995, he participated in early planning for the National Air and Space Museum’s Enola Gay exhibit.
===
Top 10 facts about Hiroshima's atomic tragedy
Some facts you should know about what went down in Japan in 1945
Conrad Egbert
July 29, 2015
2. The US air force dropped an atomic bomb on the city at 8.15am on Monday, August 6, 1945.
3. The nuclear bomb was code named “Little Boy” and was transported in the belly of an American B-29 bomber (pictured above) called Enola Gay.
4. The bomb instantly killed an estimated 80,000 people, but after taking into account all deaths caused by injury and radiation at the end of that year, the total number of deaths was estimated at 166,000.
5. The population before the atomic attack on Hiroshima was estimated to be 340,000, but following the bombing in 1945, the population dropped to around 137,000.
7. The Oleander was chosen to be the official flower of the city of Hiroshima, because it was the first to bloom, showing signs of renewed life, after the explosion.
8. Six Ginkgo trees, which were growing about one kilometre away from the atomic explosion in 1945, were among the few living things in the area to survive the blast. The Ginkgos speedily recovered and are alive to this day. These trees are sometimes described as living fossils; their origins have been known 250 million years. The city trams also survived the blast and were in fact used to transport the injured away from ground zero. Some of these trams are still in operation today and are a sense of pride for the Japanese people as a sign of resilience. The Bank of Japan building, which was around 400 metres from ground zero, also survived the explosion and due to its thick walls, many people who took refuge inside the bank, were saved.
9. The 1954 film Godzilla, or Gojira in Japanese, was actually created as a personification of a nuclear bomb inspired by the Hiroshima tragedy in 1945. The beast’s weapon of choice was its atomic breath in the form of a radioactive heat wave that it released from its jaws.
10. The Hiroshima city government continues to advocate the abolition of all nuclear weapons and the mayor of Hiroshima is the president of an international organisation called Mayors for Peace that is working towards the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide by 2020. A Peace Flame, lit in 1964 at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, will continue to burn until all nuclear weapons in the world have been destroyed.
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