[A-List] Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst terror attacks in history

[glparramatta <glparramatta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst terror attacks in history

By Norm Dixon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/636/636p3.htm

August 6 and August 9 will mark the 60th anniversaries of the US 
atomic-bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 
Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second. 
Some 13 square kilometres of the city was obliterated. By December, at 
least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries.

Three days after Hiroshima's destruction, the US dropped an A-bomb on 
Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the 
year was out.

Since 1945, tens of thousands more residents of the two cities have 
continued to suffer and die from radiation-induced cancers, birth 
defects and still births.

A tiny group of US rulers met secretly in Washington and callously 
ordered this indiscriminate annihilation of civilian populations. They 
gave no explicit warnings. They rejected all alternatives, preferring to 
inflict the most extreme human carnage possible. They ordered and had 
carried out the two worst terror acts in human history.

The 60th anniversaries will inevitably be marked by countless mass media 
commentaries and speeches repeating the 60-year-old mantra that there 
was no other choice but to use A-bombs in order to avoid a bitter, 
prolonged invasion of Japan.

On July 21, the British New Scientist magazine undermined this chorus 
when it reported that two historians had uncovered evidence revealing 
that ``the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 
... was meant to kick-start the Cold War [against the Soviet Union, 
Washington's war-time ally] rather than end the Second World War''. 
Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American 
University in Washington stated that US President Harry Truman's 
decision to blast the cities “was not just a war crime, it was a crime 
against humanity''.

With Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York, 
Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. 
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.

These terrible acts were intended to warn the leaders of the Soviet 
Union that their cities would suffer the same fate if the USSR attempted 
to stand in the way of Washington's plans to create an ``American 
Century'' of US global domination. Nuclear scientist Leo Szilard 
recounted to his biographers how Truman's secretary of state, James 
Byrnes, told him before the Hiroshima attack that ``Russia might be more 
manageable if impressed by American military might and that a 
demonstration of the bomb may impress Russia''.

Drunk from the success of its nuclear bloodletting in Japan, Washington 
planned and threatened the use of nuclear weapons on at least 20 
occasions in the 1950s and 1960s, only being restrained when the USSR 
developed enough nuclear-armed rockets to usher in the era of ``mutually 
assured destruction'', and the US rulers' fear that their use again of 
nuclear weapons would led to a massive anti-US political revolt by 
ordinary people around the world.

Washington's policy of nuclear terror remains intact. The US refuses to 
rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. Its latest 
Nuclear Posture Review envisages the use of nuclear weapons against 
non-nuclear ``rogue states'' and it is developing a new generation of 
``battlefield'' nuclear weapons.

Fear of the political backlash that would be caused in the US and around 
the globe by the use of nuclear weapons remains the main restraint upon 
the atomaniacs in Washington. On this 60th anniversary year of history's 
worst acts of terror, the most effective thing that people around the 
world can do to keep that fear alive in the minds of the US rulers is to 
recommit ourselves to defeating Washington's current ``local''wars of 
terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From Green Left Weekly, August 3, 2005.