Search Results for: hiroshima

Every year during the first two weeks of August the mass news media and many politicians at the national level trot out the “patriotic” political myth that the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945 caused them to surrender, and thereby saved the lives of anywhere from five hundred thousand to 1 million American soldiers, who did not have to invade the islands. Opinion polls over the last fifty years show that American citizens overwhelmingly (between 80 and 90 percent) believe this false history which, of course, makes them feel better about killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians (mostly women and children) and saving American lives to accomplish the ending of the war.

The best book, in my opinion, to explode this myth is The Decision to Use the Bomb by Gar Alperovitz, because it not only explains the real reasons the bombs were dropped, but also gives a detailed history of how and why the myth was created that this slaughter of innocent civilians was justified, and therefore morally acceptable. The essential problem starts with President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender, which was reluctantly adopted by Churchill and Stalin, and which President Truman decided to adopt when he succeeded Roosevelt in April of 1945. Hanson Baldwin was the principal writer for the New York Times who covered World War II and he wrote an important book immediately after the war entitled Great Mistakes of the War. Baldwin concludes that the unconditional surrender policy

was perhaps the biggest political mistake of the war….Unconditional surrender was an open invitation to unconditional resistance; it discouraged opposition to Hitler, probably lengthened the war, cost us lives, and helped to lead to the present aborted peace.

The stark fact is that the Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, including the emperor, were willing to surrender in May of 1945 if the emperor could remain in place and not be subjected to a war crimes trial after the war. This fact became known to President Truman as early as May of 1945. The Japanese monarchy was one of the oldest in all of history, dating back to 660 BC. The Japanese religion added the belief that all the emperors were the direct descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The reigning Emperor Hirohito was the 124th in the direct line of descent. After the bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9 of 1945, and their surrender soon thereafter, the Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor on the throne and he was not subjected to any war crimes trial. The emperor, Hirohito, came on the throne in 1926 and continued in his position until his death in 1989. Since President Truman, in effect, accepted the conditional surrender offered by the Japanese as early as May of 1945, the question is posed, “Why then were the bombs dropped?”

The author Alperovitz gives us the answer in great detail which can only be summarized here, but he states,

We have noted a series of Japanese peace feelers in Switzerland which OSS Chief William Donovan reported to Truman in May and June [1945]. These suggested, even at this point, that the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender might well be the only serious obstacle to peace. At the center of the explorations, as we also saw, was Allen Dulles, chief of OSS [Office of Strategic Services] operations in Switzerland (and subsequently Director of the CIA). In his 1966 book The Secret Surrender, Dulles recalled that “On July 20, 1945, under instructions from Washington, I went to the Potsdam Conference and reported there to Secretary [of War] Stimson on what I had learned from Tokyo — they desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and their constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people.”

It is documented by Alperovitz that Stimson reported this directly to Truman. Alperovitz further points out in detail the documentary proof that every top presidential civilian and military advisor, with the exception of James Byrnes, along with Prime Minister Churchill and his top British military leadership, urged Truman to revise the unconditional surrender policy so as to allow the Japanese to surrender and keep their emperor. All this advice was given to Truman prior to the Potsdam Proclamation which occurred on July 26, 1945. This proclamation made a final demand upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or suffer drastic consequences.

Another startling fact about the military connection to the dropping of the bomb is the lack of knowledge on the part of General MacArthur about the existence of the bomb and whether it was to be dropped. Alperovitz states,

MacArthur knew nothing about advance planning for the atomic bomb’s use until almost the last minute. Nor was he personally in the chain of command in this connection; the order came straight from Washington. Indeed, the War Department waited until five days before the bombing of Hiroshima even to notify MacArthur — the commanding general of the U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific — of the existence of the atomic bomb.

Alperovitz makes it very clear that the main person Truman was listening to while he ignored all of this civilian and military advice was James Byrnes, the man who virtually controlled Truman at the beginning of his administration. Byrnes was one of the most experienced political figures in Washington, having served for over thirty years in both the House and the Senate. He had also served as a United States Supreme Court Justice, and at the request of President Roosevelt, he resigned that position and accepted the role in the Roosevelt administration of managing the domestic economy. Byrnes went to the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt and then was given the responsibility to get Congress and the American people to accept the agreements made at Yalta.

When Truman became a senator in 1935, Byrnes immediately became his friend and mentor and remained close to Truman until Truman became president. Truman never forgot this and immediately called on Byrnes to be his number-two man in the new administration. Byrnes had expected to be named the vice presidential candidate [to FDR] to replace [Henry A.] Wallace and had been disappointed when Truman had been named, yet he and Truman remained very close. Byrnes had also been very close to Roosevelt, while Truman was kept in the dark by Roosevelt most of the time he served as vice president. Truman asked Byrnes immediately, in April, to become his secretary of state but they delayed the official appointment until July 3, 1945, so as not to offend the incumbent. Byrnes had also accepted a position on the interim committee which had control over the policy regarding the atom bomb, and therefore, in April 1945 became Truman’s main foreign policy advisor, and especially the advisor on the use of the atomic bomb. It was Byrnes who encouraged Truman to postpone the Potsdam Conference and his meeting with Stalin until they could know, at the conference, if the atomic bomb was successfully tested. While at the Potsdam Conference the experiments proved successful and Truman advised Stalin that a new massively destructive weapon was now available to America, which Byrnes hoped would make Stalin back off from any excessive demands or activity in the postwar period.

Truman secretly gave the orders on July 25, 1945, that the bombs would be dropped in August while he was to be en route back to America. On July 26, he issued the Potsdam Proclamation, or ultimatum, to Japan to surrender, leaving in place the unconditional surrender policy, thereby causing both Truman and Byrnes to believe that the terms would not be accepted by Japan.

The conclusion drawn unmistakably from the evidence presented is that Byrnes is the man who convinced Truman to keep the unconditional surrender policy and not accept Japan’s surrender so that the bombs could actually be dropped, thereby demonstrating to the Russians that America had a new forceful leader in place, a “new sheriff in Dodge” who, unlike Roosevelt, was going to be tough with the Russians on foreign policy and that the Russians needed to “back off” during what would become known as the “Cold War.” A secondary reason was that Congress would now be told about why they had made the secret appropriation to a Manhattan Project and the huge expenditure would be justified by showing that not only did the bombs work but that they would bring the war to an end, make the Russians back off, and enable America to become the most powerful military force in the world.

If the surrender by the Japanese had been accepted between May and the end of July of 1945 and the emperor had been left in place, as in fact he was after the bombing, this would have kept Russia out of the war. Russia agreed at Yalta to come into the Japanese war three months after Germany surrendered. In fact, Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, and Russia announced on August 8, (exactly three months thereafter) that it was abandoning its neutrality policy with Japan and entering the war. Russia’s entry into the war for six days allowed them to gain tremendous power and influence in China, Korea, and other key areas of Asia. The Japanese were deathly afraid of communism and if the Potsdam Proclamation had indicated that America would accept the conditional surrender allowing the emperor to remain in place and informed the Japanese that Russia would enter the war if they did not surrender, then this would surely have assured a quick Japanese surrender.

The second question that Alperovitz answers in the last half of the book is how and why the Hiroshima myth was created. The story of the myth begins with the person of James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, who was a prominent scientist, having initially made his mark as a chemist working on poison gas during World War I. During World War II, he was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee from the summer of 1941 until the end of the war and he was one of the central figures overseeing the Manhattan Project. Conant became concerned about his future academic career, as well as his positions in private industry, because various people began to speak out concerning why the bombs were dropped. On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publically quoted extensively as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out.” He further stated, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment….It was a mistake to ever drop it.” Albert Einstein, one of the world’s foremost scientists, who was also an important person connected with the development of the atomic bomb, responded and his words were headlined in the New York Times: “Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb.” The story reported that Einstein stated that “A great majority of scientists were opposed to the sudden employment of the atom bomb.” In Einstein’s judgment, the dropping of the bomb was a political-diplomatic decision rather than a military or scientific decision.

Probably the person closest to Truman, from the military standpoint, was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Leahy, and there was much talk that he also deplored the use of the bomb and had strongly advised Truman not to use it, but advised rather to revise the unconditional surrender policy so that the Japanese could surrender and keep the emperor. Leahy’s views were later reported by Hanson Baldwin in an interview that Leahy “thought the business of recognizing the continuation of the Emperor was a detail which should have been solved easily.” Leahy’s secretary, Dorothy Ringquist, reported that Leahy told her on the day the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, “Dorothy, we will regret this day. The United States will suffer, for war is not to be waged on women and children.” Another important naval voice, the commander in chief of the US Fleet and chief of naval operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945 had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. Also, the opinion of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, given in a press conference on September 22, 1945, was reported as: “The Admiral took the opportunity of adding his voice to those insisting that Japan had been defeated before the atomic bombing and Russia’s entry into the war.” In a subsequent speech at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945, Admiral Nimitz stated, “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” It was learned also that on or about July 20, 1945, General Eisenhower had urged Truman, in a personal visit, not to use the atomic bomb. Eisenhower’s assessment was, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing….[T]o use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime.” Eisenhower also stated that it wasn’t necessary for Truman to “succumb” to Byrnes.

James Conant came to the conclusion that some important person in the administration must go public to show that the dropping of the bombs was a military necessity, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, so he approached Harvey Bundy and his son, McGeorge Bundy. It was agreed by them that the most important person to create this myth was Secretary of War Henry Stimson. It was decided that Stimson would write a long article to be widely circulated in a prominent national magazine. This article was revised repeatedly by McGeorge Bundy and Conant before it was published in Harper’s Magazine in February of 1947. The long article became the subject of a front-page article and editorial in the New York Times, and in the editorial it was stated, “There can be no doubt that the president and Mr. Stimson are right when they mention that the bomb caused the Japanese to surrender.” Later, in 1959, President Truman specifically endorsed this conclusion, including the idea that it saved the lives of a million American soldiers. This myth has been renewed annually by the news media and various political leaders ever since.

It is very pertinent that in the memoir of Henry Stimson entitled On Active Service in Peace and War, he states, “Unfortunately, I have lived long enough to know that history is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.”

To bring this matter more into focus from the human tragedy standpoint, I recommend the reading of a book entitled Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945, by Michiko Hachiya. He was a survivor of Hiroshima and kept a daily diary about the women, children, and old men that he treated on a daily basis in the hospital. The doctor was badly injured himself but recovered enough to help others and his account of the personal tragedies of innocent civilians who were either badly burned or died as a result of the bombing puts the moral issue into a clear perspective for all of us to consider.

Now that we live in the nuclear age and there are enough nuclear weapons spread around the world to destroy civilization, we need to face the fact that America is the only country to have used this awful weapon and that it was unnecessary to have done so. If Americans would come to recognize the truth, rather than the myth, it might cause such a moral revolt that we would take the lead throughout the world in realizing that wars in the future may well become nuclear and therefore all wars must be avoided at almost any cost. Hopefully, our knowledge of science has not outrun our ability to exercise prudent and humane moral and political judgment to the extent that we are destined for extermination.

From LRC, here.

Robert B. Stinnett,  (New York, Free Press, 2000)

A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush’s South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about.

After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinnett published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.

Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear. Stinnett establishes and proves his case with voluminous documentary evidence, including forty-seven pages of Appendices [p. 261-308] presenting photographic reproductions of key official records, as well as numerous others reproduced in the body of the text, and 65 pages [309-374] of closely detailed reference notes.

This evidence proves Stinnett’s factual assertions, arguments and conclusions. His research files and notes are deposited at the Hoover Institute library at Stanford. Day of Deceit is exemplary documentary historiography. It presents the material testimony on which its analysis and conclusions are based. Its validity will be clear to any fair-minded reader. Stinnett’s book settles and resolves rational, candid, honest, fact-based discussion and debate about the background of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

As Stinnett shows, the plan that eventuated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was set in motion in early October 1940 based on an “eight-action memo, dated October 7, 1940 … by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Navy Intelligence.” Of course, it is unlikely that McCollum drafted it on his own initiative, but this is where Stinnett’s paper trail starts. “Its eight actions call for virtually inciting a Japanese attack on American ground, air, and naval forces in Hawaii, as well as on British and Dutch colonial outposts in the Pacific region….” [p. 6-8; the memorandum is reproduced on 261-267]:

A. Make an arrangement with Britain for use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.
D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the US Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Complete embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

As the plan unfolded its development was closely monitored through decoded intercepts of Japanese diplomatic and naval radio communications. “McCollum oversaw the routing of communications intelligence to FDR from early 1940 to December 7, 1941 and provided the President with intelligence reports on Japanese military and diplomatic strategy. Every intercepted and decoded Japanese military and diplomatic report destined for the White House went through the Far East Asia section of ONI, which he oversaw.

The section served as a clearinghouse for all categories of intelligence reports…. Each report prepared by McCollum for the President was based on radio intercepts gathered and decoded by a worldwide network of American military cryptographers and radio intercept operators…. Few people in America’s government or military knew as much about Japan’s activities and intentions as McCollum.”[8] Knowledge of the plan was closely held, limited to 13 Roosevelt administration members and chief military officers and 21 members of Naval Intelligence and related operations [listed in Appendix E 307-308]. Item C was already US policy when McCollum wrote his memo. Item F was set in motion on October 8, Items A, B and G on October 16, 1940, Item D and E by November 12, 1940. [Chap. 1 n. 8 p. 311-312; 120 ff. etc.].

Meanwhile, also in the fall of 1940, campaigning for a third term in Boston on October 30, President Roosevelt said: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” On November 1 in Brooklyn he said “I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.” At Rochester on the 2nd he said “Your national government … is equally a government of peace — a government that intends to retain peace for the American people.”

The same day in Buffalo he asserted “Your President says this country is not going to war,” and in Cleveland on the next he declared “The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.” [William Henry Chamberlin, “How Franklin Roosevelt Lied America Into War,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton, 1953), Chapter Eight, p. 485-491].

Admiral Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, opposed Roosevelt’s orders [Item F] to station the fleet at Pearl Harbor as putting the fleet at risk, so he was replaced with Admiral Kimmel, with Admiral Anderson of ONI as Kimmel’s third in command at Pearl Harbor, to supervise the radio intercept operation there, unbeknownst to Kimmel. [10-14; 33-34] “Anderson was sent to Hawaii as an intelligence gatekeeper”[36]. When he arrived he established his personal housing well away from Pearl Harbor, out of range of the coming attack.

Though he was commander of the seven battleships which bore the brunt of the attack with the loss of over two thousand lives, Admiral Anderson was safe at home on the other side of the mountain when the attack came. [36-37; 244, 247] Meanwhile, the commanders in Hawaii, “Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, were deprived of intelligence that might have made them more alert to the risks entailed in Roosevelt’s policy, but they obeyed his direct order of November 27 and 28, 1941: ‘The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.’” [6-8] Afterward, they were scape-goated.

In early January 1941 the Japanese decided that in the event of hostilities with the US they would commence with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American intelligence learned of this plan on January 27 [30-32]. On July 21, 1941 Lieutenant Commander McCollum’s Item H lit the fuse. Up through late November the White House continued to block concerted attempts by Japanese diplomats to discuss an accommodation. [On this diplomatic history see Charles Beard , American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948); Frederic Rockwell Sanborn, Design For War (1951); and Charles Tansill, Back Door To War (1952).]

Beginning November 16, 1941, radio intercepts revealed the formation of the Japanese fleet near the Kurile Islands north of Japan and from November 26 through the first week of December tracked it across the Pacific to Hawaii [41-59 etc.]. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Stark (one of the 34 informed participants) ordered Kimmel to dispatch his aircraft carriers with a large escort fleet to deliver planes to Wake and Midway Islands. “On orders from Washington, Kimmel left his oldest vessels inside Pearl Harbor and sent twenty-one modern warships, including his two aircraft carriers, west toward Wake and Midway… With their departure the warships remaining in Pearl Harbor were mostly 27-year-old relics of World War I.”

That is, the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor with their crews were employed as decoys [152-154]. On 22 November 1941, a week after the Japanese fleet began to assemble and four days before it sailed for Oahu, Admiral Ingersoll issued a “Vacant Sea” order that cleared its path of all shipping and on 25 November he ordered Kimmel to withdraw his ships patrolling the area from which the aerial attack would be staged [144-145]. FDR kept close tabs on the plot’s final unfolding while radio intercepts continued to track its voyage toward Hawaii [161-176].

Stinnett comments: “Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row and its old dilapidated warships presented a mouth-watering target. But it was a major strategic mistake for the Empire. Japan’s 360 warplanes should have concentrated on Pearl Harbor’s massive oil stores … and destroyed the industrial capacity of the Navy’s dry docks, machine shops, and repair facilities”[249]. Six months later, at the battles of Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) and Midway (June 4-7), the warships of the Pacific Fleet which were at sea when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred permanently destroyed the offensive capacity of the Japanese Navy to operate in the eastern Pacific and permanently crippled its defensive capacity in the western Pacific. Thereafter, as informed observers understood, a Japanese attack or invasion of the West Coast of America was a total logistical impossibility. Nevertheless, two months later, the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens began in August 1942.

The Pearl Harbor coverup began immediately afterward with the court marshals of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, continued through eight Congressional investigations during and after the war, with the purging and withholding of documents and false testimony by participants and others [253-260 & passim; 309-310] and persisted through the Congressional hearings chaired by Strom Thurmond in 1995 [257-258].

At the date of publication (2000) numerous documents were still withheld from Stinnett or released in extensively censored form. But his case is conclusively proven on the basis of the evidence he presents, as any fair-minded reader can see. The only way to refute or debunk it would be to establish that his documentary evidence is forged, and prove it. In face of the character of this evidence, the idea is nonsensical.

A key break for Stinnett’s research was his discovery of duplicate copies of reports of Japanese naval code transmissions from the Pearl Harbor radio-intercept station routed after the war to the Belmont (California) National Archives, and still there long after the copies in the Washington, D.C. archive files had been disappeared.

Recent writers pretending to debunk Stinnett’s evidence have resurrected claims that the Japanese naval codes had not been deciphered and that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence — claims that have been refuted repeatedly for decades. Famously, the radio operator of the American liner Mariposa intercepted repeated signals from the Japanese fleet steaming toward Hawaii and relayed its progressive bearings to the Navy. This was well-known during the war to American seamen of the Pacific merchant marine and is mentioned in published accounts.

The pretense that the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes had not been deciphered was first refuted in a federal court in Chicago in 1943. As her biographer Ralph G. Martin recounts, Cissy Patterson, managing editor of the Washington Times-Herald on December 7, 1941 (and for decades before and after) was opposed to American intervention in another world war — like over 80% of her fellow Americans, including her brother Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York News, and her cousin Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Serving in France as a battlefield officer, Robert was wounded, twice gassed, and decorated for valor. His Chicago Tribune, like his cousins’ newspapers and numerous others, especially off the east coast, was vocally anti-interventionist — until Pearl Harbor.

In Cissy (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979) Martin writes: “As the news of the disaster [at Pearl Harbor] kept coming in [to the Times-Herald’s newsroom], Cissy bitterly asked [her Sunday Editor] Roberts about Roosevelt, ‘Do you suppose hearranged this?’ Later when she learned that American cryptographers had broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor, she was convinced that Roosevelt had known in advance that the Japanese intended to attack”[418]. “The Chicago Tribune, the Times-Herald, and two dozen other papers later printed an article by a Tribune war correspondent which indicated that the United States had prevailed [at Midway] because the Japanese codes had been broken…. The Department of Justice decided to file charges that the Tribune and the Times-Herald had betrayed U.S. military secrets…. Attorney General Francis Biddle felt the disclosure of this breakthrough had been tantamount to treason because it gave the Japanese the chance to change their codes. Waldrop [Times-Herald editor] was called to Chicago to testify before a grand jury… In the middle of the testimony, the Navy disclosed that a Navy censor had passed the Tribune article. Forced to drop the case, Biddle said he ‘felt like a fool.’” [431-432] He wasn’t the only one.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Listen to the podcast

Rockwell:  Well good morning.  This is the Lew Rockwell Show.  And it’s great to have as our guest this morning Professor Peter Kuznick.  Dr. Kuznick is professor of history at American University in Washington.  He was the founder and he’s the director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.  Author of many books.  Most famously, outside of academia, anyway, his participation in Oliver Stone’s 10-episode series on The Untold History of the United States and co-author of the book that came out from that series.   Both of these things, I must say, extraordinary, extraordinary work.

Professor, you’re a part of the abolition of nuclear weapons, thank goodness.  You’ve devoted much of your life’s work to what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and trying to prevent other things like that from taking place.  What are you feeling about our — I know the bullet of the atomic scientists, it seems to me they always have the hand about to go to midnight.

Kuznick:  Yes.

Rockwell:  Do you feel that’s the case, as what Trump is doing with Russia or has been doing with Russia?  A very scary business.

Kuznick:  You know, it’s interesting.  Oliver Stone and I just put out the new edition of our book.

Rockwell:  Oh.  Magnificent.

Kuznick:  It just came out.  And we added a 160-page chapter on the end of Obama and the Trump administration.  And what we did was we looked at the way the world was at the end of 2012, when our first book came out.  And that one was more than 750 pages.  The current one is over 900 pages.

Rockwell:  Wow.

Kuznick:  But in late 2012, the world was pretty messed up but the hands of the Doomsday Clock were at eight minutes before midnight.  The big issue was America’s missile defense systems.  The tension between the U.S. and Russia was much, much less than it is now.  The tension between the U.S. and China was much less.

And so if you look at what’s happened in the last six-plus years, when we published our original book to when we came out with the new one, the world has gotten incredibly more hostile, more dangerous.  We’ve gone from the Doomsday Clock being eight minutes before midnight to being two minutes before midnight.  We’ve got Russia doing its biggest war games since the Cold War.  The United States and NATO conducting their biggest war games since the Cold War.  Tremendous tensions between the U.S. and Russia, the worst relationship in decades; the U.S. and China.  The situation with Iran is now again facing a crisis.  The Korean situation is certainly better than it was in late 2017 but is in no way resolved and again ready to blow up at any point.  And not just the U.S. and Russia and China, but we’ve also got the problems between India and Pakistan, which again almost went to war.  They were both bombing each other’s countries again very, very recently.  So the world is looking pretty shaky right now.

So for me, the number-one priority is certainly the nuclear threat.  I approach these things from the standpoint of the existential crisis.  And the major existential crisis for life on our planet right now is still the threat of nuclear war and nuclear annihilation.

But in the long run, we’ve also been threatened with climate catastrophe.  We can get into that, too.

So I think that the world right now is looking very, very bleak, the world situation.  There is no leader and no leaders anywhere who are really speaking for the planet.  You’ve got Trump talking about making American great again and Putin making Russia great again and Xi making China great again and Modi making India great again.  I mean, you’ve got these pygmies at a time when we need some real noble statesmen who are terribly lacking right now.  And so I am very concerned.  And the nuclear threat does keep me up at night.

Rockwell:  You know, to go back to something that you’ve devoted a lot of scholarly work to, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do most Americans still think those were necessary, that those were actually good things when Truman did that?

Kuznick:  Well, you know, that’s hard to determine.  But the latest poll that I’ve seen was a poll a couple of years ago conducted by CBS News.  And that had 43 percent opposing the use of the atomic bombs –

Rockwell:  Oh.

Kuznick:  – and 42 percent supporting it.  Most of the surveys over the years have been something more in the range of 55/45 in favor of the bomb.  But this latest one was much more encouraging.

We know that among women and among younger people there’s greater opposition to the use of the bomb.  It’s mostly the older Americans who continue to accept the mythology surrounding the bomb.  Which Obama doubled down on when he went to Hiroshima.  I had been calling for Obama to go to Hiroshima since the time he got elected.  And he finally, in May of 2016, decided to go.  I was there also at that time.  NHK, Japanese public television, brought me over there to do some shows and commentary while Obama was there.  And Obama, if you remember this speech, his opening line was, “Death fell from the skies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”  Death didn’t fall from the sky!  The United States dropped two atomic bombs!

Rockwell:  Yes.

Kuznick:  But then he goes on and he says, “We must look history straight in the eye.”  And he says, “World War II reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”  That’s the prevailing myth.  That’s the myth that they’ve been doubling down on since 1945, the idea that the atomic bombs were terrible but they were necessary in order to end the war without a U.S. invasion.  Nonsense.  The invasion was not going to happen.

It wasn’t even the atomic bombs that ended the war.  It was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan — or the beginning — the surrounding islands.  And as Prime Minister Suzuki says — I think it was August 10 when he was asked why we had to have a surrender so quickly and end the war, he says, “The Russians, the Soviets were already in the Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands.  They’ll be in Hokkaido tomorrow.  When that happens, the foundation of Japan will be destroyed.  We must surrender when we can surrender to the Americans.”  Because they knew that with Americans there was at least a chance that they would be able to keep the emperor.

But the reality is that American policy makers had known that there were two ways to end the war without the bomb.  The first was to ensure the Japanese that they could keep the emperor, which we wanted to do anyway for our own purposes.  Although, Jimmy Byrnes, secretary of state, was opposed to that and convinced Truman that he would be politically crucified if he let the Japanese keep the emperor.  Nobody complained when it finally happened, when we did let them keep the emperor.  And secondly, we knew that the Soviet invasion was going to break the backs of the Japanese resistance.  American intelligence had been saying that for months, as had the Japanese themselves in some of the intercepted cables.  The Japanese Supreme War Council met on May 16th and said that invasion of Japan by the Soviet Union will spell the end of the Japanese Empire.

So we knew that.  Truman knew that.  In fact, Truman refers to the intercepted July 18th telegram as the telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.  Truman says he went to Potsdam to make sure that the Soviets were coming in.  And he meets with Stalin, has lunch with Stalin; Stalin assures him that the Soviets are coming in on time.  And Truman writes in his journal, “Stalin will be in the Jap war by August 15th.  Finis, Japs, when that occurs.”  He writes home to his wife, Bess, the next night and says, “The Russians are coming in.  We’ll end the war a year sooner now.  Think of all the kids who won’t be killed.”  And Truman knew this.

So the question for historians really is, knowing that the bombs were militarily unnecessary and morally unjustifiable, why did the United States decide to use them.  And the conclusion that I and others have drawn is that the real target was not Japan.  The real target was the Soviet Union.  We were saying to the Soviets, if you interfere with U.S. plans in Europe or the Pacific, this is what you’re going to get and worse, much, much worse.

Rockwell:  Wow.  And of course, I remember the Chicago Tribune leaked this, that the Japanese were trying to surrender, if only they could keep the emperor and not have him tried as a war criminal and keep him, which as you point out, the U.S. eventually went along with that, and yet refused to accept their offer of surrender, so.

Kuznick:  And one of the things that you probably know, but a lot of listeners don’t, is that the United States had eight five-star admirals and generals in 1945.  Seven of the eight are on the record saying that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.  Admiral Leahy, the chair of the meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was Truman’s personal chief of staff, said, “This puts us on the moral level of the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

But the Americans, one of our myths, a key anchor in our sense of American exceptionalism, is the idea that somehow this was a moral act because it prevented an invasion in which Truman says a half million American boys would have been killed.  It was not.  And it was instrumental in starting the Cold War and began the nuclear arms race.  The scientists, many of them – the Frank Committee, at the University of Chicago Met Lab, had argued against dropping the bomb, even if it would be militarily advantageous, they said, because it could lead to an uncontrollable arms race that could threaten the future of mankind.  And that’s what happened.  We’re lucky to have survived it.

You know, we look at what’s going on now, there’s about 14,000 nuclear weapons left now, 93% controlled by the U.S. and Russia.  But by the mid ‘80s, it had gotten close to 70,000.  I take my students every summer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a study abroad class.  And I would find myself, year after year, writing down the same statistic at the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima that, by 1985, the world had accumulated the equivalent of 1.47 million Hiroshima bombs.  How insane do we have to be?  How many times do we have to be able to kill everybody on the planet before we’re satisfied?

Rockwell:  It’s actually astounding.  Is it just evil?  Are they power mad?  I mean, do you have an explanation or is it just the nature of the state and the imperial state?  What is it?

Kuznick:  I think all of the above.  And there’s a certain kind of – Freud, in his wonderful, beautiful but depressing 1929 book talks about the death instinct.  I mean, why, as a species, do we spend so much more perfecting the means of killing and destruction, the lethality of our weapons, than we do on trying to find peace and economic development and solving the world’s problems?  Why do we have a War Department – now we call it Defense Department – and not a Peace Department?  I mean, why do we not spend any money or any effort or – you know, we put so much of our intelligence and resources devoted to perfecting the means of killing.  It doesn’t make any sense from a human standpoint.

There’s certainly profits to be made.  And we understand, unfortunately, why those who were called the Merchants of Death after World War I, the arms merchants, the arms manufacturers, might want to profit from death.  You know, every time one of those drones goes off, every time a bomb is dropped, every time we have military exercises, that’s putting money into the pockets of some of the most ugly, greedy bastards on this planet.

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From Lewrockwell.com, here.

On August 6, 1945, the world, sadly, entered the atomic age. Without warning, a single nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima killed about 90,000 people instantly and injured many others — who then died from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians.

“The Library of Congress adds roughly 60 million pages to its holdings each year, a huge cache of information for the public. However, also each year, the U.S. Government classifies nearly ten times that amount – an estimated  of documents. For scholars engaged in political, historical, scientific, or any other archival work, the grim reality is that most of their government’s activities are secret.” – Richard Dolan, historian, author (source) (you can read more about what is known as the “black budget” here)

The point above is significant. How can we really know anything about American history if a considerable portion of it remains classified? That being said, how can we really know anything about American history when we have so many examples of dishonesty and misinformation? What will the history books say about 9/11? We will have to wait and see, but what our history books tell us about the atomic bomb and why it was dropped seems to be a complete lie, at least according to some very credible sources.

We are often taught that the use of the atomic bomb was necessary to end the war with Japan at the earliest possible moment, but judging by the statements of many high ranking political and military personnel, this is simply not the case.

General/President Dwight Eisenhower discusses this in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313). When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, he was deeply troubled.

“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ ” (source)

“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing… I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”(source)

Given what I mentioned at the start of this article, I think it’s also important to note that Eisenhower also said (in his farewell address) that:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. . . . Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful message and goals.”  (source)

Did this “misplaced power” influence the decision to drop the atomic bomb? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it seems absurd to not consider the possibility.

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” – Woodrow Wilson, from his book The New Freedom(1913)

Another great example comes from General Douglas MacArthur, who sent a 40-page memorandum to President Roosevelt that clearly outlines five different surrender overtures from high ranking Japanese officials. This memo was also revealed on the front page of theChicago Tribune and the Washington Times on August 19th, 1945.

Again, the memo unequivocally states that the Japanese were offering to surrender. What is even more eye-opening is the fact that the surrender terms were practically identical to what was ultimately accepted by the Americans after the bomb had dropped. The memo (source) stated these terms:

• Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
• Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
• Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan.
• Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war
• Release of all prisoners of war and internees
• Surrender of designated war criminals

Japan also made multiple attempts to end the war through Sweden and Portugal, who were neutral at the time. They also approached Soviet Russia’s leaders “with a view of terminating the war if possible by September.” (source)

Here is a quote from Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Ellis Zacharias:

Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia. 

Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it was time to use the A-bomb. 

I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds. ()

Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:

It is my opinion that the use of the 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 because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.(source)

There have also been some disturbing remarks like this one:

On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publicly quoted as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out…” He further stated that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment” and that it was“a mistake to ever drop it.” (source)

He said this despite the fact that most prominent scientists were completely against it. The scientists involved with the Manhattan project even wrote to the Secretary of Defense to try to encourage him not to drop the bomb.

So ask yourself, why did they really drop the bomb? A number of theories have been proposed;history.com outlines how it could have been dropped to demonstrate a new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviets, ultimately serving as a show of military strength. In 2005, New Scientist alluded to the same thing, claiming that it was done to kick start the Cold War.

“The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that (quite apart from the inaccuracy of this figure, as noted by Samuel Walker) most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.” – Gar Alperovitz, University of Maryland Professor of Political Economy, former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State (source)

Continue reading…

From Lewrockwell.com, here.