In his 2011 book, “Atomic Cover-Up,” Greg Mitchell wrote, “If Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki shows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.”
Mitchell noted that the U.S. writer Dwight MacDonald cited, in 1945, America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population.
Mitchell reported that novelist Kurt Vonnegut said, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.” Vonnegut experienced the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden firsthand and described it in his masterpiece, “Slaughterhouse Five.”
On Aug. 17, 1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way: “Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. … We shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. … We … did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. … Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”
If shame is the natural response to Hiroshima, how is one to respond to Nagasaki, especially in view of all the declassified government papers on the subject? How to justify Nagasaki?
The saving of U.S. soldiers’ lives is held up as the official justification for both U.S. atomic bombings. Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering civilians to protect troops, what can be made of the Nagasaki bombing?
The most underreported statement in this context is that of then-Secretary of State James Byrnes, quoted on the front page of the Aug, 29, 1945, New York Times under the headline, “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.” Secretary Byrnes cited what he called “proof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”
On Sept. 20, 1945, the famous bombing commander Gen. Curtis LeMay told a press conference, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” According to Robert Lifton’s and Greg Mitchel’s “Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial,” published in 1995, only weeks after the atomic attacks, President Harry Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb “did not win the war.”
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey was conducted by Paul Nitze less than a year after the atomic bombings. It concluded that “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
Likewise, according to Gar Alperovitz in his comprehensive 1995 book, “The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb,” the Intelligence Group of the then-U.S. War Department’s Military Intelligence Division conducted a study from January to April 1946. The group declared that the bombs had not been needed to end the war, and that it was “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war” — which it did on Aug. 8, 1945. In 2013, new research by historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and others showed that Japan surrendered because the Soviets joined the war.
Nagasaki was attacked with a plutonium bomb in what some say was an experiment, adding weight to Vonnegut’s charge of wartime racism. According to “Atomic Cover-Up,” the mayor of Nagasaki from 1979 to 1995 Hitoshi Motoshima said, “The reason for Nagasaki was to experiment with the plutonium bomb.”
According to Joseph Gerson’s book, “With Hiroshima Eyes,” 74,000 were killed instantly at Nagasaki, another 75,000 were injured, and 120,000 were poisoned. Having defeated Japan even before the attack on Hiroshima, how can anything but racism explain the massacre of Nagasaki?
John LaForge of Luck, Wis., is co-director of Nukewatch in Wisconsin and edits its Quarterly newsletter.
