THE FIRST AND ONLY NUCLEAR WAR
The Worst Terror Attacks in History

From CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was "looking for peace''. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. "Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war'', Selden told the New Scientist.

While the capitalist media immediately dubbed the historians' "theory" "controversial", it accords with the testimony of many central US political and military players at the time, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who stated bluntly in a 1963 Newsweek interview that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing''.

Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, stated in his memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.''

At the time though, Washington cold-bloodedly decided to sweep away the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to show off the terrible power of its new super weapon and underline the US rulers' ruthless preparedness to use it.

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Most of my life, like most Americans, I've bought the storyline that the Japanese were bound and determined to fight to the very last man, woman, and child, and that the nuclear nightmare we unleashed on them was actually saving more lives in the long run. Not any longer. Putting this new information together with what I already know about the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, it makes much more sense that dropping the bomb was in reality more of a statement to the Soviets than a brutal necessity to force Japanese surrender. The Russians, fully mobilized after defeating the Nazis in Europe, were moving troops and resources to the east in order to enter the war against Japan. At that point, the Pacific belonged to the United States, and there was no desire to see Stalin horn in their territory: it was clear that the White House wanted to end the war quickly in order to keep the Soviets out. Thus, we dropped the bomb. Of course, it was also a message to the Reds, the first shot fired in the Cold War. And it killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians who had nothing to do with it all. When you get right down to it, it was terrorism directed at Russia, plain and simple. Yet another sick stain on our nation's history.


Hiroshima, 1945

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