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  DS at 09:02 PM JST - 3rd August

  I would like to know the article writer's evidence to support the claim that there is no evidence to support the theory that the bombings saved lives in the long run.

  The myth that needs correcting is that "Japan was ready to surrender anyway". Patently and totally not true. The war cabinet, even after TWO atomic bombings, was split on whether or not to surrender. Remember, it took the intervention of Hirohito to decide the issue. This was unprecedented in Japanese history.

  Another myth was that the Japanese military was finished as a fighting force. Again totally false. There were more than 500,000 troops in Kyushu alone, waiting in prepared fortifications, for the Allies to land. There were also thousands of kamikaze planes, plus the aforementioned Home Defence Force- 15 million civilians with primitive weapons who would have been slaughtered.

  Sorry, the bombings were tragic but ultimately ended the war. It is always easy to second guess the past, but try not to do so through the lens ofthe present.

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  rajakumar at 09:17 PM JST - 3rd August

  Thanks for reminder of 63 rd anniversary of WW2 A bombs.

  We also coming to 7th anniversary of 911 ,wars and bombs.

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  westurn at 10:35 PM JST - 3rd August

  Ho hum ! Cripes look at Japantoday just flooding its website with all this rehashing of history. I mean really, six stories in three days ? A bit much don't ya think ?

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  Freespeech at 04:26 AM JST - 4th August

  Thank you DS for summarizing so well. I also deplore the fact that most deplorers of the A-bombings seem to ignore how close and how formidable the USSR's forces were : they had taken control of Sakhalin island, also of these islets the name of which I always forget, and the next move would have been Hokkaido where I bet that no credible resistance had been prepared. Another hop, and it could have been Honshu. I fully realize that rewriting history starting from an "if" is preposterous, but I believe it is reasonable to think that Japan could have been split the way Germany was. An East Japan under tyrannic communist rule and a West Japan, with a demarcation line somewhere across Honshu ? Yes the bombings ended the war in a tragic way, but in the way that was giving Japan its best chances (after 14 years of uninterrupted warfare and abuse in the Asia-Pacific area).

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  ExPrinceska at 08:59 AM JST - 4th August

  Freespeech, How logical! so according to your post the enemy of the USA at that time was USSR?? Then why USA did not bomb the Russian army instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? USSR formidable? At least they had the moral not to nuke anybody. The only user of atomic bomb remains USA. Nothing justifies the use of such weapons. What is scary they continue to use depleted uranium in the weapons in their current wars.

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  USAPatriot at 09:01 AM JST - 4th August

  Ds- Great post. ExPriceska, please stop complaing about the USA. The Soviets were becoming a threat to the US, bet the USSR were the emerging threat.

  Japan has failed to show enough remorse for its war crimes. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were NOT war crimes.

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  Blue_Tiger at 02:30 PM JST - 4th August

  Lets hoipe that a "refresher" of this kind of history doesn't happen anytime soon, if ever again!!!!!!

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  Blue_Tiger at 02:32 PM JST - 4th August

  DS - Well-posted!!! There are at least four major Military History Publications that totally agree with youm, and support what you've posted...

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  DS at 02:34 PM JST - 4th August

  ＥｘPrinseska;

  OK then, how would YOU have brought the war to an end, if you were the Allies? The options, as I can see them, were;

  a/ atomic weapons b/ invasion c/ blockade

  b/ and c/ would have also meant a continuation of fire bombing attacks on Japanese cities. Using conventional bombs like incendiaries, of course.

  Which of the above would be least costly for either the Allies or the Japanese?

  I eagerly await your answer.

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  Freespeech at 05:43 PM JST - 4th August

  ExPrinceska : You have twisted logics (or colossal ignorance of 20th century history). I have not suggested that the USSR was the enemy of the USA, which at the time it was definitely not. You should know that at that moment the USSR was one of the allied powers that had coalesced for fighting tyrannies wherever they were (including Japan of course). But the USSR and the USA were already in a state of strategic rivalry (a pre-cold-war condition if you like), and their competition for advancing fast on Japanese territory could have caused a de-facto partition. Do you know that the same strategic competition caused the partition of Germany, or do I have to explain also that ?

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  OgieDoggie at 12:35 AM JST - 5th August

  Every year it's always so interesting how the Japanese try to protray themselves as such PEACE loving people, that they would NEVER (and have never) hurt anyone. That they were the victums of WWII and nobody else - GIVE US A BREAK PEOPLE.

  At the same time I want to point out that the people who did died in the Atomic bombings DID NOT DIE IN VAIN!! We need to remember them each year because I believe their deaths shocked the world enough that since then no one has used a Nuke (although that may change with Iran in another year).

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  Nordon at 03:29 AM JST - 5th August

  In summary people:

  a) Drop A-Bombs and ruin two cities. Demonstrate war as futile.

  b) Mainland Invasion. People die everywhere defending and fighting to gain land. Risk of Russian engagement, probability very likely.

  c) Blockade. A lot of people starve to death. Firebombings as bad as the Tokyo firebombings may still occur. Surrender is now long away from happening and Russia comes in to get payback for their losses.

  However all this talk doesn't change the fact that what happened did happen. So just count our good luck that everything right now is as good as it is, and we all get the moral message that nukes are devastating and makes wars futile. It could have been worse than it is today.

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  sarcasm123 at 03:36 AM JST - 5th August

  "Nah, there was no need to end the war as quickly as possible; like I said, if we hadn't dropped the A-bombs, the war would have dragged on for who knows how much longer and how many more people on both sides would have been killed and maimed."

  I am sure that if Japan had won the war, their excuse for what they did in China would have been exactly the same as what you wrote: we were just trying to shock them into surrender.

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  Freespeech at 04:36 AM JST - 5th August

  How come this thread of discussion has become difficult to locate (removed from JT's front page) when particularly vain things keep their first page status ?

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  NicholasPatler at 12:28 AM JST - 8th August

  63 YEARS LATER--DID WE REALLY NEED TO DROP THE A-BOMB? by Nicholas Patler (below is part 2 of an article I wrote last year, updated and submitted here in honor of the Japanese children, women and men killed mercilessly in August 1945. There is never a justifciation for killing the innocent. Never.)

  I deeply appreciated your valuable responses and insights to my recent piece, “Did we really need to drop the A-bomb?” One thing is for certain: although 62 years have passed, this issue remains incredibly controversial here in our own community, and really the nation at large, with thoughtful proponents on both sides.

  I indeed took to heart many of your passionate criticisms of my view that we did not have to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to achieve a Japanese surrender. I stick by that opinion however, and wish to expand on it a little more in this piece.

  It certainly seems clear that President Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes saw the demonstration of the A-bomb over Japan as way to trump the Russians, particularly in the post-war era. Thousands of children, women and men, along with everything they held dear, were horribly sacrificed in the game of power politics. However, there are many discussions that occurred between Truman and Byrnes, the only two important advocates for dropping the bomb on these cities, which were either destroyed or still remain classified. These may very well be able to lend insight into other reasons for dropping the A-bomb. Without the persuasive documentary record we now have that, for example, discredits the military necessity myth—much of it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 1993—we can only surmise at this point.

  While frightening Stalin seems to have been the important motivation behind this dreadful act, there is also something else that was at play here, I believe, that is far more disturbing. Japanese civilians and their urban centers were more than likely the fodder in a top-secret experiment to see what the $2 billion dollar atomic bomb, which had been tested in the sparse dessert of Alamogordo, New Mexico three weeks before Hiroshima, could do to human subjects and infrastructures in real-life.

  If Truman were only interested in bombing military targets, as he claimed, why would he have chosen, without any prior warning, to use WMDs on highly populated centers of innocent civilian life? Or to put it another way, if the president was only interested in displaying a shocking demonstration of the of the atomic bomb for the Russians and, as many of you maintain, to obtain Japanese surrender, then why didn’t he detonate the bombs over military targets or areas without civilian populations?

  Japan was undoubtedly a convenient target for testing the bomb. They were the last of the Axis powers to remain in the final days of what had been a protracted, brutal conflict. Delaying surrender by refusing to give them assurances that their emperor would be protected, while depicting them as never-surrender fanatics—in other words, deliberately keeping them in the war throughout the summer of 1945—provided a gateway for exploding the bomb on human subjects. Perhaps most significantly, wartime Japan, its inhabitants dehumanized for years in U.S. government sponsored and approved racist caricature and portrayed as hopelessly and inherently destructive, was easily justifiable for such purposes.

  Read here Truman’s own dehumanizing depiction of the Japanese, where he fends off criticism for using the “atomic bombs against Japanese cities” from the Federal Council of Churches: “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.” But these “beasts,” as he called them, were innocent civilians, not Japanese soldiers.

  The Nazis had dehumanized the Jews as subhuman to pave the way for their brutal campaign of genocide and mass murder. In the summer of 1945, Truman and Byrnes were in the advantageous position of having popular opinion sufficiently conditioned to believe the Japanese to be an inferior and dangerous race, undoubtedly making it easier for them to test such a devastating weapon on “beasts,” “slant eyed rats” or “yellow monkeys,” as they were depicted by Hollywood, rather than human beings.

  Shortly after the explosions, American scientists and military experts, waiting for the nuclear fallout to dissipate, rushed in with their instruments and notebooks to examine the colossal damage their new toy had wreaked upon these cities and their inhabitants, recording their experimental findings for the U.S. government.

  The use of human test subjects for dreadful experimentation shouldn’t surprise us. According to a government report that was initiated by the Clinton administration, the U.S. had conducted 4,000 radiation experiments involving 10,000 to 30,000 people, most performed after WWII and some directly targeting children.

  It seems we crossed a tragic threshold with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By our unwillingness to recognize or admit that we committed a grievous act against humanity by dropping the A-bomb, we have inherited a notion of freedom that is divorced from morality, shaping our approach to world affairs ever since.

  “[W]hen we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it,” stated Brigadier General Carter Clarke, responsible for preparing summaries of Japanese cables during the war, including those seeking surrender, “we used them for an experiment for two atomic bombs.” But to Truman, who referred to the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima as the “greatest thing in history,” “the atomic bomb was no great decision …It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.” Sound familiar?

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