Below is an essay I first published in 2015 called “No, the Atomic Bomb Wasn’t the Only Way to End the War in the Pacific.” Nothing has changed except the date.
As we approach the 70th anniversary (2015) of the atomic age, inaugurated in a radioactive blast at Hiroshima, know that the information below, which will prove shocking to some, has previously been collected, developed, verified in both newspapers and research tomes. It has been reported by time-tested journalists and noted historians. It has been confirmed and declared by top military figures and world famous political leaders. It is information that belongs to the American people, but it is information that is virtually lost to us, “disappeared” from what is well-described as our “court history,” written not to shed light on events but to burnish the ideologies that be. Yes, more American betrayal.
Today’s subject, then, is not only the two atomic bombs that the US dropped first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, but also the fairy tales we tell each other about them.
To be honest, I used to believe and tell these fairy tales, too. I used to believe that the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan was a display of heroic presidential strength — a gruelingly difficult but also moral and strategically empowering decision that ended the war in the Pacific against Imperial Japan as quickly as possible, and, most important, saved one million American men from becoming casualties in a dreaded military invasion of the Japanese main island.
If the choice is between dropping the A-bomb or losing one million Americans, there is no choice. That is, drop the Bomb and save American lives — and countless Japanese lives which would also have been lost in any such major military onslaught. But what if there were other ways, other means, to get the Japanese to sign that surrender?
Our customary focus on the up-down decision by Truman — see, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens’ “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t merely horrific, war-ending events. They were life-savers” — has had the effect of blinding us to the timeline preceding Hiroshima that is marked by Japanese peace bids (in itself a shocking concept), and, post-Hiroshima, surprisingly strong and high-level military objections to the notion that the Bomb ended the war in the first place.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Ruth King
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