Whatever the purported justifications for the Hiroshima bomb, those justifications were absent for the Nagasaki bomb. That bomb was more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but ended up killing fewer people. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:
The U.S. has had a moral obligation to commemorate Nagasaki, but this year the U.S. refused to mark its murder of innocent Japanese by defending its murder of innocent Palestinians.
An atomic cloud hangs over the Japanese city of Nagasaki after the U.S. dropped a second nuclear bomb on the country on Aug. 9, 1945. (Hiromichi Matsuda, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
On June 18, 1945, President Harry Truman, who had taken over the presidency in April 1945 following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, convened a meeting in the White House cabinet room of his top military and diplomatic advisers to discuss the endgame strategy for defeating Japan.
Nazi Germany had surrendered in early May, and Truman was now dealing with the realities which accrued from that event. Under pressure from Congress, the U.S. had demobilized more than 450,000 soldiers in Europe, sending them home even as Truman wrestled with the probability of more than 260,000 U.S. casualties should he order the invasion of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, part of the Japanese homeland (incredibly, Congress also authorized the demobilization of 30,000 troops in the Pacific, even though the war with Japan was far from over.)
In short, America’s appetite for war was waning.
Truman also had to deal with the issue of the victorious Soviet Red Army, which had played the leading role in defeating Nazi Germany and, as a result, now occupied all eastern Europe and half of Germany, including its capital, Berlin.
Ignoring the fact that the Soviet Union and its leader, Joseph Stalin, were exhausted by a war that had destroyed a third of its industry and killed more than 27 million of its citizens and, as such, were looking for peace, not a new war with the West, Truman fell under the sway of his closest advisers, including his choice to be secretary of state, James Byrnes, who viewed the Soviets as a threat that had to be contained and, if necessary, confronted by U.S. military power in the post-war period.
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The minutes of the meeting of the top Japanese commanders after the first nuclear bomb show that they didn’t even discuss the bombing, their concern was that Russia had now declared war on Japan and if they were part of dividing Japan and ruling it they thought their fate would be much worse than if they surrendered to the Americans, which would have been true. Even with that the generals were evenly split and it took the Emperor’s vote to break the tie. Japan had offered surrender in February of 1945 and April of 1945 with the condition that they could keep their emperor. After the nuclear bombs had been dropped this was still their condition and America accepted it. It was known that the emperor was little more than a figure-head for the empire and the real rulers were the military leaders. If you are willing to accept this condition after the bombs, why not accept it before and save millions of lives?
~ Chad
The photographer is way too close! (s/)
Stalin knew about the weapon and said use it to Truman.
Fun Trivia:
Only Mckinley and Truman have no college degree in the history of the preezy or CEO but was it a corporation in that time?
Search says Act of 1871 made it a corporation ended in 1999.
Hmm… says USA is corporate instrument of world bankers?
Subversive, wrongthink, thoughtcrime! (s/)
This just in from Carpathian Forest:
Nostalgia (Demo Version)
“Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about ‘target-rich environments’ and ‘collateral damage’—that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing—and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.
Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, ‘them’ and ‘us,’ victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents a total failure of the human spirit.”
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation