The U.S. Atomic Bombing of Japan

[mada85]

I came across a very interesting article: The U.S. Atomic Bombing of Japan, on the Medialens website today. It is a discussion of the findings of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, professor of history at the University of California, as published in his book 'Racing The Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan'.

I found this a well written and informative article which clearly explains the events of that period at the end of WWII. The time line of events surrounding the Potsdam Proclamation is analysed, and Hasegawa clearly shows that the use of the atomic bomb was not necessary in order to end WWII, enforce Japanese surrender, and save American and Japanese lives. The article also discusses the vexed question of the estimates of American casualities in the event of an invasion of Japan, and it seems this figure was inflated by successive presidents culminating with George Bush Snr putting the figure at millions.

It chills me to think that for their own ends, Truman and the US administration of the time were quite happy to sacrifice two cities of innocent civilians, even though the evidence suggests they knew that, to achieve their stated aim of forcing Japan to surrender, these bombings were unnecessary. Not much has changed in the upper echelons of the US administration since, except to get worse.

I've posted the first few paragraphs. Follow this link to the Medialens website. If the article has been archived it can be found here.

January 15, 2008
MEDIA LENS COGITATION: Racing Towards The Abyss: The U.S. Atomic Bombing of Japan

By: David Cromwell

Introduction

One of the major events of the twentieth century, with reverberations that reach today, is the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945. Before the bomb was used, the top officials who led the Manhattan Project told U.S. president Harry S. Truman:

“The world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”[1]

Many people, and I concur, believe that the moral ‘justification’ of using the atomic bomb in World War II, and the threatened use of nuclear weapons in succeeding decades, has no basis in civilised society. But what about the conventional argument that the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan did, nonetheless, bring about the end of the war? This essay examines critically that view.

The first of the bombs was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and the second on Nagasaki three days later. Soviet armed forces invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria on August 8. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan in a radio address to the nation.

Broadly speaking, there are three different schools of thought as to why the U.S. government used the bomb. We may refer to these as the orthodox, the revisionist, and the neo-orthodox or anti-revisionist schools.

Orthodox historians argue that dropping the atomic bombs was necessary and justified because this led directly to Japan’s surrender, thus saving millions of American and Japanese lives that would have been otherwise lost during the U.S. invasion of Japan, planned to begin on November 1, 1945. Revisionists disagree: the bombing was neither necessary nor justified, they say; Japan had already been comprehensively defeated. Some revisionists even argue that the United States used the bombs to intimidate the Soviet Union.

In recent years, anti-revisionists have challenged the revisionist view and argued, as did the original orthodox historians, that the bomb was used to end the Pacific War by directly prompting Japan’s surrender. They contend that the Soviet entry into the war against Japan played a minor role in surrender, and certainly less than the decisive ‘shock’ factor of the bombs.

The above is necessarily a sketchy summary but captures the essence of divergent views on the end of the Pacific War. In what follows I intend to show that while there continues to be vibrant, sometimes heated, debate among historians, the revisionist view most closely accords with the evidence.