August 3, 2005
Green Left Weekly

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst Terror Attacks in History

Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was 'looking for peace'. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. 'Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war'.

by Norm Dixon


Three days after Hiroshima's destruction, the US drooped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out.





With Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York, Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was "looking for peace". His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. "Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war", Selden told the New Scientist.

While the capitalist media immediately dubbed the historians' "theory" "controversial", it accords with the testimony of many central US political and military players at the time, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who stated bluntly in a 1963 Newsweek interview that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing".



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".

Drunk from the success of its nuclear bloodletting in Japan, Washington planned and threatened the use of nuclear weapons on at least 20 occasions in the 1950s and 1960s, only being restrained when the USSR developed enough nuclear-armed rockets to usher in the era of "mutually assured destruction", and the US rulers' fear that their use again of nuclear weapons would led to a massive anti-US political revolt by ordinary people around the world.

Washington's policy of nuclear terror remains intact. The US refuses to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. Its latest Nuclear Posture Review envisages the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear "rogue states" and it is developing a new generation of "battlefield" nuclear weapons.

Fear of the political backlash that would be caused in the US and around the globe by the use of nuclear weapons remains the main restraint upon the atomaniacs in Washington. On this 60th anniversary year of history's worst acts of terror, the most effective thing that peace-loving people around the world can do to keep that fear alive in the minds of the US rulers is to recommit ourselves to defeating Washington's current "local" wars of terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.


[Norm Dixon is a former editor of Australia's leading radical newspaper, Green Left Weekly, and continues to write regularly on the impact of US foreign policy and the real nature of the"war on terror".]

"9/11: U.S. Accuses Iran, Plans Nuclear Attack," The Wisdom Fund, July 21, 2003

Amy Goodman and David Goodman, "Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer,", August 10, 2004

Patrick J. Buchanan, "Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki: Terror on a Monumental Scale,", September 1, 2004

[But the U.S. had already crossed a terrifying moral threshold when it accepted the targeting of civilians as a legitimate instrument of warfare. --David M. Kennedy, "Hiroshima: Crossing the Moral Threshold," Time, August 1, 2005]

Amy Goodman and David Goodman, "The Hiroshima Cover-Up," Baltimore Sun, August 5, 2005




[Hiroshima did contain an important military base, used as a staging area for Southeast Asia. But the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city of 350,000, a continuation of the American policy of bombing civilian populations in Japan to undermine the morale of the enemy.--Greg Mitchell, "The Day After Hiroshima: How the Press Reported the News -- And the 'Half-Truths' That Emerged,", August 7, 2009]

"Atomic Cover-Up: The Hidden Story Behind the U.S. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,", August 9, 2011

Matt Agorist, "Far Worse than Hiroshima -- The US Bombings on Japan the Govt Wants You to Forget,", May 27, 2016

Jack Hunter, "Conservatives used to criticize the Hiroshima bombing far worse than Obama did,", May 30, 2016

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