nuclear-news

Nuclear bombing of Hiroshima immoral and unnecessary

the Americans and British had long crossed the moral frontier about terror-bombing civilians…

The Americans didn’t want the Japanese to surrender before they had a chance to drop the bomb.

Weapon of choice, Review By Hamish Mcdonald,December 17, 2011 “……. Now Paul Ham, already established as the best of Australia’s popular war historians, has painted more detail on a wider canvas. Through individual stories, he doesn’t spare us the horrifying reality on the
ground. Almost as excruciatingly, he takes us through the practical and moral decisions about using the bomb……..
Many of the scientists who had urged the development of the atomic bomb to pre-empt Hitler became opposed to its use against Japan. Some petitioned for a demonstration explosion instead. …..
the Americans and British had long crossed the moral frontier about
terror-bombing civilians. In Europe, it was Dresden. In Japan, Curtis
LeMay’s B-29s had already levelled 66 cities, setting off a firestorm
in Tokyo with incendiaries one night in March 1945. As LeMay later
boasted: ”We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in
Tokyo on that night of 9-10 March than went up in vapour in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.”
The Americans were also decoding frantic cables between foreign
minister Shigenori Togo and his Moscow ambassador, forlornly seeking
Soviet intermediation to end the war……
Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, actually hardened the
interpretation of the Potsdam declaration. The Americans didn’t want
the Japanese to surrender before they had a chance to drop the bomb.
As much as to force a surrender, it was also a warning to the Soviets.
”Only a character of unearthly will, vast authority and transcendent
moral vision could have resisted the fatal momentum of the atomic
project,” Ham writes. ”However great a president, Truman was not
that character.”
As for the Japanese war cabinet, it scarcely discussed the news from
the two atom-bombed cities when it convened on August 10. Soviet
armies were sweeping into Manchuria and northern islands; Europe was
already showing what followed Soviet occupation: installation of a
communist regime. This frightened them much more than losing civilians
to more A-bombs.
After the surrender, bomb proponents headed off a campaign by
scientists for atomic energy to be placed under international control
– America’s hands were safe enough. Stalin had his spies in the
Manhattan Project anyway. Japan’s conservatives combined with American
agencies to play down the suffering of A-bomb survivors…
As for the Japanese public, its ”nuclear aversion” deepened when 23
fishermen on the tuna boat Lucky Dragon 5 returned from Bikini Atoll
in 1954 badly irradiated from an H-bomb test. As Evan Osnos recently
wrote in The New Yorker, Washington then supplied Japan with its first
civilian reactor to help it get over the aversion. Fukushima is one
result….
The real story of what happened in Japan in August 1945 makes you
wonder about nuclear deterrence when fanatical regimes are concerned.
HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI

Paul Ham

HarperCollins,

640pp, $55

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/weapon-of-choice-20111215-1ovfn.html#ixzz1gngXs6CI

December 17, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, Religion and ethics, resources - print, USA