Warnings over nuclear dangers as Hiroshima marks anniversary of atomic bombing
6 August 2022
The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people.
Hiroshima has remembered the atomic bombing 77 years ago as officials, including the head of the United Nations, warned against nuclear weapons build-up and as fears grow of another such attack amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“Nuclear weapons are nonsense. They guarantee no safety – only death and destruction,” said UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, who joined the prayer at the Hiroshima Peace Park.
“Three quarters of a century later, we must ask what we’ve learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city in 1945,” he said.
The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people.
It dropped a second bomb three days later on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000.
Japan surrendered on August 15, ending the Second World War and Japan’s nearly half a century of aggression in Asia.
Fears of a third atomic bombing have grown amid Russia’s threats of nuclear attack since its war on Ukraine began in February.
“Crises with grave nuclear undertones are spreading fast” in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula, Mr Guterres said.
“We are one mistake, one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from Armageddon.”
Hiroshima mayor Kazumi Matsui, in his peace declaration, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of “using his own people as instruments of war and stealing the lives and livelihoods of innocent civilians in another country”.
Russia’s war on Ukraine is helping build support for nuclear deterrence, Mr Matsui said, urging the world not to repeat the mistakes that destroyed his city nearly eight decades ago.
On Saturday, attendees including government leaders and diplomats observed a moment of silence with the sound of a peace bell at 8.15am, the time when the US B-29 dropped the bomb on the city.
About 400 doves, considered symbols of peace, were released.
Mr Guterres met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida after the ceremony and raised alarm over the global retreat in nuclear disarmament, stressing the importance for Japan, the world’s only nation to have suffered nuclear attacks, to take leadership in the effort, Japan’s Foreign Ministry said.
Mr Kishida escorted Mr Guterres in the peace museum, where they each folded an origami crane – a symbol of peace and nuclear weapons abolition.
Russia and its ally Belarus were not invited to this year’s peace memorial.
Russian ambassador to Japan Mikhail Galuzin on Thursday offered flowers at a memorial epitaph in the park and told reporters his country would never use nuclear weapons.
The world continues to face threats from nuclear weapons, Mr Kishida said at the memorial.
“I must raise my voice to appeal to the people around the world that the tragedy of nuclear weapons use should never be repeated,” he said.
“Japan will walk its path toward a world without nuclear weapons, no matter how narrow, steep or difficult that may be.”
Mr Kishida, who will host a Group of Seven summit meeting next May in Hiroshima, said he hoped to share his pledge with other G7 leaders “before the peace monument” to unite them to protect peace and international order based on the universal values of freedom and democracy.
Mr Matsui criticised nuclear weapon states, including Russia, for not taking steps despite their pledge to abide by obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“Rather than treating a world without nuclear weapons like a distant dream, they should be taking concrete steps toward its realisation,” he said.
Critics say Mr Kishida’s call for a nuclear-free world is hollow because Japan remains under the US nuclear umbrella and continues to boycott the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Mr Kishida said the treaty, which lacks the US and other nuclear powers, is not realistic at the moment and that Japan needs to bridge the divide between non-nuclear and nuclear powers.
Many survivors of the bombings have lasting injuries and illnesses resulting from the explosions and radiation exposure and face discrimination in Japan.
The government began to provide medical support to certified survivors in 1968 after more than 20 years of effort by them.
As of March, 118,935 survivors, whose average age now exceeds 84, are certified as eligible for government medical support, according to the Health and Welfare Ministry.
But many others, including those who say they were victims of the “black rain” that fell outside of the initially designated areas, are still without support.
Ageing survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha, continue to push for a nuclear ban and hope to convince younger generations to join the movement.
Mr Guterres had a message for younger people: “Finish the work that the hibakusha have begun. Carry their message forward. In their names, in their honour, in their memory – we must act.”
Hiroshima vows nuke ban at 77th memorial amid Russia threat
Via AP news wire
Fri, 5 August 2022
Japan Hiroshima Anniversary (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Hiroshima on Saturday remembered the atomic bombing 77 years ago as officials, including the head of the United Nations, warned against nuclear weapons buildup and fears grow of another such attack amid Russia's war on Ukraine.
“Nuclear weapons are nonsense. They guarantee no safety — only death and destruction," said U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who joined the prayer at the Hiroshima Peace Park.
“Three quarters of a century later, we must ask what we’ve learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city in 1945," he said.
The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. It dropped a second bomb three days later on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, ending World War II and Japan’s nearly half-century of aggression in Asia.
Fears of a third atomic bombing have grown amid Russia’s threats of nuclear attack since its war on Ukraine began in February.
Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, in his peace declaration, accused Putin of “using his own people as instruments of war and stealing the lives and livelihoods of innocent civilians in another country."
Russia’s war on Ukraine is helping build support for nuclear deterrence, Matsui said, urging the world not to repeat the mistakes that destroyed his city 77 years ago.
On Saturday, attendees including government leaders and diplomats observed a moment of silence with the sound of a peace bell at 8:15 a.m., the time when the U.S. B-29 dropped the bomb on the city. About 400 doves, considered symbols of peace, were released.
Russia and its ally Belarus were not invited to this year's peace memorial. Russian Ambassador to Japan Mikhail Galuzin on Thursday offered flowers at a memorial epitaph in the park and told reporters his country would never use nuclear weapons.
The world continues to face threats from nuclear weapons, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at the memorial.
"I must raise my voice to appeal to the people around the world that the tragedy of nuclear weapons use should never be repeated," he said. “Japan will walk its path toward a world without nuclear weapons, no matter how narrow, steep or difficult that may be.”
Kishida, who will host a Group of Seven summit meeting next May in Hiroshima, said he hoped to share his pledge with other G7 leaders “before the peace monument” to unite them to protect peace and international order based on the universal values of freedom and democracy.
Matsui criticized nuclear weapon states, including Russia, for not taking steps despite their pledge to abide by obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“Rather than treating a world without nuclear weapons like a distant dream, they should be taking concrete steps toward its realization,” he said.
Critics say Kishida's call for a nuclear-free world is hollow because Japan remains under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and continues to boycott the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Kishida said the treaty, which lacks the U.S. and other nuclear powers, is not realistic at the moment and that Japan needs to bridge the divide between non-nuclear and nuclear powers.
Many survivors of the bombings have lasting injuries and illnesses resulting from the explosions and radiation exposure and face discrimination in Japan.
The government began to provide medical support to certified survivors in 1968 after more than 20 years of effort by them.
As of March, 118,935 survivors, whose average age now exceeds 84, are certified as eligible for government medical support, according to the Health and Welfare Ministry. But many others, including those who say they were victims of the “black rain” that fell outside of the initially designated areas, are still without support.
Hiroshima marks 77th anniversary of world's first atomic bombing
Around 140,000 people were killed when Hiroshima was bombed by the US on August 6, 1945 –– a toll that includes those who perished after the blast from radiation exposure.
Bells have tolled in Hiroshima as the Japanese city marked the 77th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing, with officials including the United Nations chief warning of a new arms race following Russia's conflict with Ukraine.
UN head Antonio Guterres on Saturday joined the thousands packed into the Peace Park in the centre of the city to mark the anniversary of the bombing that killed 140,000 people, only the second time a UN head has taken part in the annual ceremony.
"Nuclear weapons are nonsense. They guarantee no safety –– only death and destruction," Guterres said.
"Three-quarters of a century later, we must ask what we've learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city in 1945."
Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, whose city this year did not invite the Russian ambassador to the ceremony, was more pointed and critical of Moscow's military actions in Ukraine.
"In invading Ukraine, the Russian leader, elected to protect the lives and property of his people, is using them as instruments of war, stealing the lives and livelihoods of civilians in a different country," Matsui said.
"These errors betray humanity's determination, born of our experiences of war, to achieve a peaceful world free from nuclear weapons. To accept the status quo and abandon the ideal of peace maintained without military force is to threaten the very survival of the human race."
'Nuclear war cannot be won'
At 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, the US B-29 warplane Enola Gay dropped a bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" and obliterated the city with an estimated population of 350,000.
Thousands more died later from wounds and radiation-related illnesses.
On Saturday, as cicadas shrilled in the heavy summer air, the Peace Bell sounded and the crowd, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is from Hiroshima, observed a moment of silence at the exact time the bomb exploded.
"At the start of this year, the five nuclear-weapon states issued a joint statement: 'Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,'" Matsui added.
"Why do they not attempt to fulfill their promises? Why do some even hint at using nuclear weapons?"
Kishida, who has chosen Hiroshima as the site of next year's Group of Seven summit, called on the world to abandon nuclear weapons.
The Hiroshima catastrophe was followed by the US military's atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, instantly killing more than 75,000 people.
Japan surrendered on August 15, ending World War II and Japan's nearly half-century of aggression in Asia.
The effects of the nuclear bombings lasted for decades and spanned across generations.
HIGHLIGHTS
80,000 people were killed instantly and thousands died later
Every year on August 6, Hiroshima Day is observed
Seven decades back, the world witnessed its first ever atomic bombing when the United States detonated a nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, a major hub of industrial and military activities in the country. The bombing that happened around 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, killed 1.4 lakh people by the end of that year, including those who perished from radiation exposure after the blast.
The impact of the blast was such that 80,000 people died instantly while tens of thousands more lost their lives to the effects of radiation within the months and years that followed, wiping 39 per cent of the city's total population.
Three days later, a slightly larger plutonium bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people by the end of the year. Radioactive rain poured down as ground temperatures reached 4,000°C.
The effects of the nuclear bombings lasted for decades and spanned across generations. Five to six years after the bombings, the incidence of leukaemia increased noticeably, and after about a decade, survivors began suffering from different types of cancers at higher than normal rates.
Pregnant women exposed to the bombings experienced higher rates of miscarriage and children born after the bombings were more likely to have intellectual disabilities and impaired growth. And even after seven decades, the risk of cancers related to radiation exposure still remains for all the survivors.
Though in the last 77 years Japan recovered from the attack and has flourished, the horror of nuclear weapons lives on.
During World War II, the United States secretly developed Atomic Bomb technology under the Manhattan Project.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer, one of the lead scientists behind the bomb’s creation, recalled a piece of Hindu scripture as he witnessed the first test detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16.
Less than one month later, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb nicknamed 'Little Boy' on Japan’s Hiroshima on August 6. As Japan refused to surrender, another nuclear bomb named 'Fat Man' was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9.
ALSO READ | Hiroshima Day 2022: How the atomic bombs ended World War II
About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki died by the end of 1945. Many children were later born with birth defects, while radiation-induced cancers killed more people. The blast also caused massive structural damage, destroying 69 per cent of the buildings in Hiroshima.
When the nuclear weapons were detonated over the two Japanese cities, even the first responders - hospitals, firemen, aid organisations - couldn't help. In Hiroshima, 90 per cent of physicians and nurses were killed or injured, and 42 of 45 hospitals were rendered non-functional.
WHY WAS HIROSHIMA BOMBED?
During the war, Japan had refused to surrender before the Allied Forces and was still holding out. It carried out several attacks against the US and British forces to seize control of European and American colonies and their resources in Southeast Asia. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Hawaii's Pearl Harbor and a day later, it attacked British-occupied Hong Kong, causing numerous casualties and extensive damage to the US and the UK fleets.
After witnessing the devastation, Japan's Emperor Hirohito announced his country's unconditional surrender via radio on August 15, ending World War II.
HIROSHIMA DAY
Every year on August 6, the world observes Hiroshima Day to highlight the effects of nuclear war, pay respect to the victims, discourage nuclear proliferation and promote world peace. On the 77th anniversary of the tragic Hiroshima bombing, here is a look at ten haunting images from the world's first-ever atomic bombing.
The pyrocumulus, or firestorm cloud, that engulfed the city of Hiroshima after the US atomic bomb attack on 6th August 1945. The fire reached its peak intensity around three hours after the detonation.
The wrecked framework of the Museum of Science and Industry as it appeared shortly after the blast. City officials recently decided to preserve this building as a memorial though they had at first planned to rebuild it.
This file photo taken in September 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan, shows discharged Japanese soldiers in crowded trains, as they take advantage of free transportation to their homes after the end of World War II.
Photo taken in 1948, which shows an aspect of the devastated city of Hiroshima in Japan, three years after the first atomic bomb was dropped on a population. On August 6, 1945, at 08:15, in an hour of intense movement in the city, the B29 bomber of the United States Air Force dropped a bomb on the city. Currently, the world capital of pacifism, the city of Hiroshima in southern Japan, remembers next week the day the planet entered the nuclear era.
Years Later. "I'm Just Waiting For Death." Those are the words of Mrs. Yoskio Nishikawa, 43, a bedridden "A-Bomb widow" who lives on $22 a month in charity. Yukiko, 15, one of her four children, cools her forehead with a wet towel as the 70-pound widow rests in their nine-foot square room, part of a frame charity home housing families of 20 widows. A small wooden Shinto shrine, in memory of her blacksmith husband who was killed while riding to work, occupies a place of honor. Mrs. Nishikawa suffers from radiation effects because she combed the city searching for her husband after the bomb fell. She has a bad heart and liver trouble.
Picture dated August 1945 showing the American crew of the B-29 "Enola Gay" plane which dropped on Hiroshima during WWII the first atomic bomb in history, killing more than 100,000 people. Paul W. TIbbets, the pilot is in the center. Enola Gay was his mother's name.
The total area devastated in Hiroshima is shown in a darkened area (within the circle) of photograph. Numbered items are military and industrial installations with percentages of total destruction. This chart is made from Air Intelligence reports and charted on an earlier reconnaissance photograph.
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Aerial view of Hiroshima, Japan, after the atomic bombing during World War II.
Crewmembers of the 'Enola Gay,' the American B-29 bomber which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, including (left to right) co-pilot Captain Robert A. Lewis, commander and pilot Paul W. Tibbets Jr., tailgunner Staff Sergeant George Caron, and flight engineer Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenbury, proudly parade through New York on a jeep in the first Army Day Parade since the end of the War, April 12, 1946.
Hiroshima, Japan: Injured atomic bomb victims were treated in a bank building.
ALSO READ | Hiroshima Day 2022: History, significance, and all you need to know
Why Did the U.S. Nuke Civilians?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 77 Years Later
A bombed-out temple in Nagasaki
It is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history.
— President Harry S. Truman (August 6, 1945)
One of the seemingly endless Good [sic] War myths goes a little something like this:
The U.S. had no choice but to drop atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had they not done so, the fanatical Japanese would have never surrendered. Countless millions of brave American soldiers would have perished in the ensuing invasion of the Japanese islands.
As we mark the 77th anniversary of the deliberate use of nuclear weapons on civilians, I’ll yet again answer the question: Why was the bomb used?
The enemy was never fascism
Before confronting the unleashing of the bomb, there is a lesser-known myth that must be dealt with: the life-and-death race with German scientists.
“Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico,” writes historian Kenneth C. Davis, “atomic scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a ‘Nazi bomb.’”
Surely, if it were possible for the epitome of evil to produce such a weapon, it would be the responsibility of the good guys to beat der Führer to the plutonium punch. While such a desperate race makes for excellent melodrama, the German bomb effort appears to have fallen far short of success.
Thanks to the declassification of key documents, we now have access to “unassailable proof that the race with the Nazis was a fiction,” says author Stewart Udall, who adds: “According to the official history of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), those agents maintained ‘contacts with scientists in neutral countries.’”
These contacts, by mid-1943, provided enough evidence to convince the SIS that the German bomb program simply did not exist.
Despite such findings, U.S. General Leslie Groves, military commander of the Manhattan Project, got permission in the fall of 1943 to begin a secret espionage mission known as Alsos (Greek for “grove,” get it?). The mission saw Groves’ men following the Allies’ armies throughout Europe with the goal of capturing German scientists involved in the manufacture of atomic weapons.
While the data uncovered by Alsos only served to reinforce the prior reports that the Third Reich was not pursuing a nuclear program, Groves was able to maintain enough of a cover-up to keep his pet project alive. In the no-holds-barred religion of anti-communism, the “Good War” enemy was never fascism.
Truman’s daughter, Margaret, remarked about his early presidential efforts after the death of FDR in April 1945, “My father’s overriding concern in these first weeks was our policy towards Russia.”
“Saved millions of lives”
The most commonly evoked justification for the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was to “save lives.” Let’s first acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (The lives worth saving, of course, were American but we do know of a few U.S. soldiers who fell between the cracks. About a dozen or more American POWs were killed in Hiroshima, a truth that remained hidden for some 30 years.)
The hypothetical U.S. body count ranges from “thousands” to “millions.” In an August 9, 1945 statement to “the men and women of the Manhattan Project,” President Truman declared the hope that “this new weapon will result in saving thousands of American lives.”
“The president’s initial formulation of ‘thousands,’ however, was clearly not his final statement on the matter, to say the least,” remarks historian Gar Alperovitz. In his book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, Alperovitz documents but a few of Truman’s public estimates throughout the years:
•December 15, 1945: “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities.”
•Late 1946: “A year less of war will mean life for three hundred thousand — maybe half a million — of America’s finest youth.”
•October 1948: “In the long run we could save a quarter of a million young Americans from being killed, and would save an equal number of Japanese young men from being killed.”
•April 6, 1949: “I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved.”
•November 1949: Truman quotes Army Chief of Staff George S. Marshall as estimating the cost of an Allied invasion of Japan to be “half a million casualties.”
•January 12, 1953: Still quoting Marshall, Truman raises the estimate to “a minimum one-quarter of a million” and maybe “as much as a million, on the American side alone, with an equal number of the enemy.”
•Finally, on April 28, 1959, Truman concluded: “the dropping of the bombs saved millions of lives.”
Fortunately, we are not operating without the benefit of official estimates.
In June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost of American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to “accurate”: 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing.
While the actual casualty count remains unknowable, it was widely known at the time that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior to the atomic bombing. A May 5, 1945, cable — intercepted and decoded by the U.S. — “dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace.”
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported shortly after the war, that Japan “in all probability” would have surrendered before the much-discussed November 1, 1945, Allied invasion of the homeland.
Truman himself eloquently noted in his diary that Stalin would “be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini [sic] Japs when that comes about.”
Translation:
- The U.S. knew the Japanese wanted to surrender rather than risk Soviet occupation.
- In the unlikely event of an American invasion of Japan in late 1945, the projected body count appears to be more political than scientific.
Even so, 60 percent of Hiroshima, a city with a population of roughly 343,000, was annihilated by the “greatest thing in history” on August 6, 1945. The resulting carnage was heinous.
“Alligator people”
A Tokyo radio broadcast two days after the bomb struck Hiroshima described how “the impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animal, were seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast.”
Tokyo radio went on to call Hiroshima a city with corpses “too numerous to be counted … literally seared to death.” It was impossible to “distinguish between men and women.” The Associated Press carried the first eyewitness account: a Japanese soldier who described the victims as “bloated and scorched — their legs and bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister.”
Then there were the “ant-walking alligators.” This is what eyewitnesses called those who had the misfortune to survive the initial blast. One eye-witness report detailed:
The skin had been seared from their skulls; leaving only a black, leathery substance without eyes or features. All that remained was a red hole where their mouths had once been. They staggered about the outskirts of Hiroshima, avoided by other survivors — but the real horror was the sound they made.
In his book, Last Train to Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino wrote:
The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds. The noise they made was worse than screaming. They uttered a continuous murmur — like locusts on a midsummer night. One man, staggering on charred stumps of legs, was carrying a dead baby upside down.
“Humanity had been forced to witness enormous destruction all through World War II,” declared Michael C.C. Adams, in The Best War Ever: America and World War II. “By 1945, the killing had reached such enormous proportions that the bombing of one more city did not have the aspect of moral horror that it might have now. In such a time of death, the unimaginable had become acceptable.”
Three days later, more of the now-acceptable unimaginable would be unleashed upon another city teeming with civilians.
“The Butcher of Asia”
From the very concept of strategic bombing, all the developments — night, pattern, saturation, area, indiscriminate — have led straight to Hiroshima, and Hiroshima was, and was intended to be, almost pure Schrecklichkeit [terror bombing].
— Life magazine, summing up Allied bombing tactics (August 1945)
At 11 o’clock on the morning of August 9, 1945, Prime Minister Kintaro Suzuki told the Japanese Cabinet that Japan’s “only alternative” was to accept the Allied peace terms and “terminate the war.”
Minutes later, the Home of the Brave™ dropped a second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
Afterward, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, called Truman a “monster,” adding, “I can think of him as nothing else but the Butcher of Asia,” and even U.S. Admiral William D. Leahy characterized the atom bombs as “an inhuman weapon to use on a people that were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
If the Hiroshima bombing was pure Schrecklichkeit, who then could explain the purpose of bombing Nagasaki three days later?
“I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb?” asked historian Howard Zinn. “Were the dead and irradiated Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?”
Perhaps it was the cold logic of the Cold War that motivated the nuking of civilians.
As far back as May 1945, a Venezuelan diplomat was reporting how Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller “communicated to us the anxiety of the United States government about the Russian attitude.”
U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes seemed to agree when he turned the anxiety up a notch by explaining how “our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in the East … The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia with America’s military might.”
General Leslie Groves was less cryptic: “There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis.”
During the same time period, President Truman noted that Secretary of War Henry Stimson was “at least as much concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten the war.”
What sort of shaping Stimson had in mind might be discerned from his September 11, 1945 comment to the president: “I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected but as virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb.”
Stimson called the bomb a “diplomatic weapon,” and duly explained that “American statesmen were eager for their country to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.”
“The psychological effect [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] on Stalin was twofold,” proposes historian Charles L. Mee, Jr. “The Americans had not only used a doomsday machine; they had used it when, as Stalin knew, it was not militarily necessary [emphasis added]. It was this last chilling fact that doubtless made the greatest impression on the Russians.”
It also made an impression on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After learning of the annihilation wrought upon Japan, he began to harbor second thoughts and he resigned in October 1945.
In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told Truman: “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.”
Truman’s reply: “It’ll come out in the wash.”
Later, the president told an aide, “Don’t bring that fellow around again.”
The leaders and heroes [sic] who devised and carried out America’s nuclear “experiment” on Japanese civilians are generally considered to be part of this country’s “greatest generation” (of men). By any reasonable definition, what I just detailed is nuclear terrorism.
Keep this in mind when pondering who and what we’re up against today.
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