Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst single terror attacks in history

[Orwellian_Ghost]

By Norm Dixon

August 6 and August 9 2009 mark the 64th 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 were 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 single terror acts in human history.

...

On July 21, 2005, the British New Scientist magazine undermined this chorus when it reported that two historians had uncovered further evidence revealing that “the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... was meant to kick-start the Cold War 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”.

...

http://links.org.au/node/1186#comment-26064

[backwoodsbob]

1. Tokyo...dresden

why do we have to do all this hand wringing every anniversary

[Orwellian_Ghost]

6. 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'

-George Santayana From his work; Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense 1905.

It should be noted that William Shirer included the quote as an epigraph in his literary work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1959.

[ColbertWatcher]

29. Because some people believe that sympathy can only be given ...

... after certain pre-conditions are met.

[BobRossi]

2. Keep trying.

Do you enjoy hitting yourself in the head with that hammer?

[pscot]

3. What horseshit

I think you had to be there.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

9. Do tell

What was your experience at that time?

You're not thinking in fact. Not even a single cogent thought which used analytical concepts relating to the article.

But I'm interested. Tell me what you saw when you were there.

[pscot]

35. Knowing only what Truman knew in 1945

I probably would have made the same decision with regard to the Hiroshima bomb. I have read that the Nagasaki bomb was authorized by the military without HST signing off on it, something he was not happy about. You are judging the actions of men whose country had been under attack for 5 years by brutal dictatorships. The whole country was on a war footing and the threat was not color coded, but very real. Our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are ugly, and probably indefensible, but not really analogous to WW2.

It's easy to sit here at a comfortable historical distance and preen your moral superiority. Those who were there saw it differently. I don't think Harry Truman lost much sleep over his decision.

I don't remember much about the war years. I remember my mother using ration stamps. There were very few men around. I remember an old guy driving a horsedrawn wagon down the ally hollering "Rags, old-iron!" Fortunately there are many books about the period that can broden one's understanding.

[inna]

40. .

:facepalm:

[Captain Hilts]

4. Easy to say in 2009. nt

[ControlledDemolition]

5. K&R! America doesn't always wear a white hat. n/t

[hack89]

7. They weren't even the deadliest bombing attacks in WWII

they didn't even set a new threshold for civilian deaths - 50 million civilians were killed. To think that Hiroshima or Nagasaki represent some unique evil is ridiculous. The only thing unique about it was how quickly they were killed.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

13. Deadliest SINGLE attacks

Read again more slowly this time.

Tell me of one single bombing attack that has ever killed more. Give details.

[hobbit709]

18. Firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo

Maybe they didn't use just a single bomb but it a single attack.
We can quibble semantics all day.

[hack89]

24. Tokyo and Dresden.

and there were plenty of others that weren't too far behind - Hamburg comes to mind.
The point is simple - the scale of deaths at Nagasaki or Hiroshima was routine in WWII.

A question for you - what if we didn't drop the atomic bombs but continued the blockade? Don't you think that it would have resulted in even more deaths than the atomic bombs? Can you imagine a rural population dying from famine and sickness ?

[backwoodsbob]

8. you do know what the Japanese did in ww2 right?

do I have to link to every thing they did?

[Hippo_Tron]

10. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all about the Cold War...

Then why didn't Truman drop a few nukes on Russia when it became clear that dropping them on Japan had not scared the Soviets into submission?

[LostInAnomie]

11. Every fucking year we get this same old tired bullshit.

Look up the Rape of Nanking if you want to see terrorism.

[ColbertWatcher]

25. Tell me about it. So, how do YOU commemorate Nanjing? n/t

[LostInAnomie]

30. The usual tradition is to spam the boards with holier-than-thou posts dripping with indignation...

... that annoy the shit out of everyone. Kinda like this OP and the 50 others just like it I've seen this week.

[ColbertWatcher]

31. That's it? No LOLcats, no Nanjingrolls? No Hitler-reaction videos? n/t

[noamnety]

32. Anniversaries are like that

rolling around every year.

[Ex Lurker]

38. apparently the Japanese were driven to it by US sanctions

I learned that On DU the other day.

I shouldn't have to put a sarcasm tag at the end of this post.

[greguganus]

12. With all the previous threads, this has to be flamebait. n/t

[Deja Q]

14. Yup,

[Orwellian_Ghost]

15. Not at all

It's an accurate portrayal of an historical event.

Is that what you characterize as flamebait?

If that's the case it certainly speaks volumes.

[greguganus]

20. Here's a portrayal of a historical event for you.

Warning. Graphic historical event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3PZ_TaEqs0&feature=rela...

[backwoodsbob]

21. I see you didn't list dresden

or tokyo...or the death march..or the 20+ million the Japanese killed in China..Manchuria..Korea.

I see you just want to wring your hands and talk about the bomb without talking about contexts

[greguganus]

22. Some are ignorant of history or just want attention. n/t

[Orwellian_Ghost]

26. Neither

Just posting a simple truth that some find problematic.

[hobbit709]

16. Keep in mind that nukes haven't been used since

whereas cluster bombs, napalm, land mines, etc. have been used by the millions.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

23. Though

we have seen depleted uranium used. Only one country has ever used them on several occasions:

Iraq

Yugoslavia

Iraq (again)

Afghanistan

http://www.wise-uranium.org/diss.html

[backwoodsbob]

27. and DU means what?

nm

[hobbit709]

17. Dupe

[BobRossi]

19. Welcome to my ignore list. nt

[slackmaster]

28. K&U for a sensationalistic, factually inaccurate post

[nadinbrzezinski]

33. tokyo, dresden...

oh wait, there were a couple during the Crusades... like oh Jerusalem... blood all the way to knees of horses.

Did I mention the sacking of so many cities during the medieval period it is not even funny? Of course this is the damn tip of the damn iceberg... I am sure I am forgetting of the lovely use of biological warfare in the ancient world, as well as chemical warfare...

Where do these jokers who know nothing of history think the concept of JUST WAR came from? Oh wait, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I guess the people in the XVI century who spoke of this in theory, and the theory of war, traveled to the future and then to the past.

[noamnety]

34. Democrats are afraid of Zinn

I used to think the people of DU read Zinn, respected Zinn, understood what he was saying.

Now I understand that Zinn challenges the status quo, challenges myths about our country, and I understand that democrats need to silence him. Unfortunately, the article you quoted is too close to Zinn for people here.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Bombs_August.htm...

I hit recommend, but I knew your thread was already unrecommended into oblivion. The unrecommend feature is doing what we knew it would.

[inna]

39. so did i, and i'm with you on all the points that you made.

[dysfunctional press]

36. it got the job done, and they haven't been used since...next!

[inna]

37. i'm astounded and deeply disappointed by those unreccing this thread. nt

[proteus_lives]

41. Wow, revisionist history.

And utter bullshit. It was a legitimate military operation in a declared war. The Japanese were offered terms of surrender, they refused. This article also discounts the the land invasion scenario, the Russian desire for Japanese possession and other factors. It's just a desperate attempt to paint the USA as the aggressor. Ooooh, look comrades, evil capitalists!

Here's were I stopped taking this article seriously.

"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 obliterate 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”. "

Bullshit, the Japanese were ready to surrender, why were they sneaking army units back to Japan from the mainland? Why were they preparing thousands of kamikaze planes and boats? Why were all men, women and children being organized into militias? Hell, even after the bombings there was massive resistant to surrender from the Japanese high command, including several coup attempts.


You know what was a bigger series of terror attacks? Japan's decades long rape of China and Korea. They're mistreatment of POWs, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the rape of Nanjing, The slaughter of Manila Bay, The Bataan Death March, the sexual slavery of the Comfort Women. Millions of dead Chinese, turning all of Korea into a slave factory, the enslavement of Indonesia and more. All with the endorsement and approval of the Japanese civilian population. It sickens me that people forgot why we dropped the bombs.

"The Capitalist Media" I wonder if Mr. Dixon ever actually stepped foot in a communist country. Stalin was willing to cut the throats of his own children for nuclear weapons. Obviously he wanted them for peaceful reasons, not like those awful capitalists.

[defendandprotect]

42. k i c k