[A-List] Hiroshima bomb may have carried hidden agenda

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Rob Edwards

NewScientist.com news service (July 21 2005)

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant
to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to
two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial
theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and
killing over 200,000 people sixty years ago was done more to impress the Soviet
Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision,
Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

"He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species" says Peter
Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in
Washington DC. "It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity".

According to the official US version of history, an A-bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima on Six August 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later, to force
Japan to surrender. The destruction was necessary to bring a rapid end to the
war without the need for a costly US invasion.

But this is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York. They are presenting their evidence at a meeting
in London on Thursday organised by Greenpeace and others to coincide with the
sixtieth anniversary of the bombings.


Looking for peace

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that
Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims.
Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after
the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state
James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped
on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace". Truman was told by his army
generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff,
William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan" says Selden.
Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting money on the
Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb was not used, he
adds.

Kuznick and Selden's arguments, however, were dismissed as "discredited" by
Lawrence Freedman, a war expert from King's College London. He says that
Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima was "understandable in the circumstances".

Truman's main aim had been to end the war with Japan, Freedman says, but adds
that, with the wisdom of hindsight, the bombing may not have been militarily
justified. Some people assumed that the US always had "a malicious and nasty
motive", he says, "but it ain't necessarily so".

Related Articles

The A-bomb: 60 years on, is the world any safer?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725083.800
16 July 2005

Nuclear test fall-out killed thousands in US
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1993
01 March 2002

Careful with that nuke
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17022960.700
30 June 2001

Weblinks
Peter Kuznick, American University
http://domino.american.edu/AU/media/Expt2004.nsf/80ae7d46ef4066b9852569e7005a9bb0/6d2fd4951fdf116085256ccc005e7e04?OpenDocument&Highlight=0,Kuznick

Mark Selden, Cornell University
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/ms44/

Lawrence Freedman, King's College London
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/wsg/prospectus/staff/lf.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7706


Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/