Left Side of the Aisle #120 - Part 6

August 6 and 9: remember

I'm recording this on August 7, neatly set between August 6 and August 9, two dates that seem to carry less meaning than they used to but which some of us still note.

Early on the morning of August 6th, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber nicknamed "Enola Gay" took off from Tinian Island in the Pacific, headed for Hiroshima, a city in Japan of about 250,000 people. It carried a single bomb, codenamed "Little Boy." At 8:15 AM local time, Little Boy was dropped.

I want to pause for a moment to give you a sense of the kind of power we're talking about here. The bomb contained 64 kilograms - about 141 pounds - of highly-enriched, fissionable uranium. Of that amount, only about .7 kilogram, or about 1.5 pounds, actually fissioned - that is, split - and only about 600 milligrams was actually converted into energy. That 600 milligrams equals six-tenths of a gram, or a little more than 1/50 ounce.

Hiroshima

The energy released by that 1/50 of an ounce had the explosive force of 14,000 tons of dynamite. It was enough to devastate Hiroshima. Around 70,000 people died instantly; some of them were literally vaporized. Another 70,000 died by 1950 due to injuries, radiation poisoning, and cancer.

Nagasaki

Just three days later, another nuclear bomb, codenamed "Fat Man," did the same to Nagasaki, with tens of thousands more dead and another city destroyed.

These attacks were probably the two greatest war crimes the US has ever committed.

War crimes? Yes, and here's why: The bombings were unnecessary and the excuse trotted out every time the question is raised that the only alternative was a bloody land invasion of Japan was a lie. A 68-year-old damned lie.

By the spring of 1945 Japan was already a defeated nation. It no longer had any navy to speak of, its air force had been decimated, its army driven back to its own shores. It was incapable of mounting any offensive action or even of defending itself against US air raids. Critical materials and even food were in short supply.

In fact, the situation was so bad that before - before - the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan had already made secret overtures to the United States through Sweden and the Soviet Union stating that it was ready to surrender. All of this was known to the US military, all of this was known to Truman, who rejected the offer because it wasn't unconditional: Hirohito would've kept his throne.

What was also known to Truman was the USSR's intent to declare war on Japan and its likely impact: In his journal about his meetings with Stalin at the Potsdam conference, Truman wrote on July 17, 1945, "He'll be in Japan War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about."

It was so bad that US analysts sent to Japan in 1946 concluded Japan would've surrendered before November 1, 1945 "even if atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, Russia hadn't entered the war, and no invasion was planned."

Bombing Hiroshima was unnecessary and the US government and military knew it was unnecessary. It was a crime, a war crime, one that we compounded by bombing Nagasaki before the impact of the first bomb had time to settle in. The Nagasaki bomb was made ready in a day-and-night effort, which raises the question of if the second bombing was to force Japan to surrender - or to get it in before Japan had a chance to do so.

There is good reason to think the latter. US officials, including Secretary of State James Byrnes, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, and top military leaders, had urged the bombings as a means of warning the Soviet Union not to challenge American plans for a postwar world dominated by US interests, to, in Byrnes' words, allow the US "to dictate our own terms [with the USSR] at the end of the war" and "make Russia more manageable in Europe" by showing both our power and our willingness to use it.

Because The Bomb was, as President Harry Truman put it, the weapon given us by God that we were to use "for His purposes and His ends." Which means, ultimately, that hundreds of thousands of Japanese were destroyed, disintegrated, as sacrificial lambs at the start of a decades-long campaign to "contain" the Soviets if not to bully them into submission.The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the last shots of World War II, they were the first shots of the Cold War, and the Japanese the first of its many victims. And their deaths were war crimes.

Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/08/left-side-of-aisle-68-part-2.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n7_v41/ai_8257981/pg_2