http://www.webster.sk.ca/GREENWICH/HIRO2BMB.HTM
THE JAPANESE SURRENDER
PRIOR TO THE DROPPING OF THE A-BOMBS
Really, it was also too late to use it against Japan, too. Already the Japanese were looking for terms of surrender, but these approaches for peace from Japan, not made public, even to members of the Manhattan Project, were ignored. The U.S. wanted no terms, no conditions; not even the safety of the Emperor could be guaranteed (although that request was granted, after the two atom bombs were dropped). Japan had to surrender immediately and unconditionally - the U.S. knowing full well that Japan could never go for that. (Add'l evidence, in square brackets, added 1999):
[That there really were surrender overtures by the Japanese was confirmed by a man who ought to know, CIA chief Allen Dulles. In an interview with Clifford Evans (1/19/63 (NY) WOR-TV), Dulles said: "I had been in touch with certain Japanese.... They...were ready to surrender provided the Emperor could be saved so as to have unity in Japan. I took that word to Secretary (of State) Stimson at Potsdam July 20, 1945...."
[Just weeks later, August 6 and August 9, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed.]
The cover story for the public - and for dissenting scientists of the Franck Report - was that "a tremendous shock" was needed to end the war in Asia. But it had actually ended for all intents and purposes, considering the even greater decimation of Tokyo already from conventional bombing. In addition, most of Japan's navy had been destroyed, all its Axis allies were defeated, and its hold on the Pacific had been broken. For Truman, the real issue was that only a show of actual destruction from the bomb's use would serve to warn the USSR of the new formidable military power of the U.S. No harmless academic "demonstration" far from life would do. The Franck report was dismissed in just 4 days. A real city would be made a target.
[Additional, added in 1999: Dr. Joseph Rotblat, 1996 Nobel prize winner, was worried then that Germany would develop an atom bomb first, but after Germany's defeat, he no longer saw the need to work on the bomb, not even as a "deterrent." The original assurances given to the scientists, including Rotblat, to keep the scientists working on the horrendous bomb, was that its development would be a "deterrent" against its ever actually being dropped.
[But, as the deterrent idea began to lose credibility with Rotblat and others, General Groves, military administrator of the project, told Rotblat the bomb had to be used "to subdue the Russians." (From: Rotblat on CBC, 8/7/96)
[Groves did not inform the members of the Manhattan Project that Japan was suing for surrender.
[Another scientist, Hans Bethe, was given a similar message from Edward Teller, a leading project scientist. For this USSR-oriented goal, no mere "demonstration" would do. A real city -- indeed, two cities -- would have to be destroyed.]
The U.S. Congress (which is supposed to run the show) had been kept in total ignorance of the Manhattan Project, even though the War Department, by trying to disguise it in various budgets, spent $2 billion on it. (Indeed, few had any grasp of the whole of the project they were working on. Many working on it were ex-cons, murderers on the "lam " and they were told their criminal files would be burned if they 'played ball' with the project and Col. Paul Tibbet, who later piloted the bomber that flew the mission over Hiroshima.)
As time wore on, Congress grew aggressive and suspicious. What's it all for? came the demands. On August 6th and 9th, as Einstein bitterly noted then, Truman showed Congress that it got its money's worth; At the expense of nearly a quarter-million lives (including U.S. prisoners of war in Japanese target areas), Truman's overkill took the Congressional heat off himself.
TARGETING INSTANT HOLOCAUST
On the list of possible targets were Kokura, Hiroshima, Niigata and Kyoto. The documents read that Hiroshima "has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focusing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed."
All targets on the list I were then "reserved," and no conventional bombing was to be permitted there. The desire was that there be little or no prior bomb damage. For example, the damage already done to Tokyo by regular bombing would detract from the "spectacular" effect and measurement of the bomb's true power. Tokyo was thus excluded from the target list..
Other targets were debated, without conscience, on how "flat" they were so as to show the full ability of the bomb's blast to spread through a city of residential houses!!
Planners were finally "rewarded," as on August 6 Tibbet reported "success in all respects," after bombing Hiroshima.
What happened after was unbelievable, unearthly and for most of us today, unimaginable. This is based on official health & statistical reports analyzing the event:
In a microsecond, huge stone pillars were rammed deep into the ground. For those distant enough not to be vaporized by the 50 million degree core temperature, eyes were liquefied, pouring out of sockets; clothing was fused to skin, which hung in runny tatters and shreds. Trapped people were burning alive and many were covered from head to foot, stuck with splintered glass which the shock wave fired like a whirlwind of needle-shaped bullets through the air. Others, blinded by the flash, staggered into jagged debris. Children cried and whimpered, completely lost. Others wandered like a funeral procession of the living dead, while the mushroom cloud overhead blotted out the sun and brought on night. 180 of 200 doctors in Hiroshima were killed. Only 130 nurses were left from 1,800. 3 of 55 hospitals were all that remained, and 70,000 water-main breaks hampered the few remaining (16) fire trucks.
It should be pointed out that a Cruise missile will carry fifteen times the power of the Hiroshima death.
The barbaric and fascist regime of the Japanese military government and Emperor deserved any fate. But it was their oppressed subjects who paid, at U.S. hands, for their overlords' brutality. The documents all show the reasons for the bomb's's use weren't military, nor to "save lives," but political.
HUMAN GUINEA PIGS
There were only two bombs available for the Project: "Little Boy," a uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima (and almost lost when the U.S.S. Indianapolis was knocked out of the war just after delivering it to the Mariana Islands), and "Fat Man," a plutonium bomb, dropped on Nagasaki later.
Two types of prototype test bombs: Two cities bombed to "test" them.
Between bombs, a U.S. demand to surrender ("unconditionally" as always) came as if to appear that Truman was interested in saving lives.
But in the three days interim, not even a full report of the impact of this strange new bomb could be fully digested in Japan. The government in Tokyo, unwarned, had not seen the blast and could not react in three days and Truman knew it. (The Manhattan Project gave itself a full 4 days to reject the Franck Report.) Truman "made the record;' and then ordered bomb number two dropped.
The test of the Plutonium type bomb obliterated 50,000 more people in Nagasaki on August 9,1945.
[Additonal: added 1999: Only three days after the bombings, it was impossible for the Japanese government in Tokyo to know or digest what happened at Hiroshima.
[Imagine, if you had never even conceived in your mind the power of an atomic bomb, and suddenly all communications, travel simply end. Just total silence comes from a nearby city.
[How could you know that the cause of it was the utter destruction of the city? Who would tell you? Walking stragglers and a few drivers, with limited ability to know what strange horrendous new vision they had even seen (survivors would have to be fairly distant in order to survive), would take hours, perhaps days to reach a phone or nearby city, or Tokyo. Few would have believed their rantings.
[Even an official call from the USA's leaders to the government sitting in Tokyo that one of their cities was destroyed would be greeted with disbelief at first, as a strange trick or bluff. The Japanese would necessarily have taken time, likely days, just to check it out.
[But the scant 3 days allowed Truman to demand total unconditional immediate surrender on August 7th; and then, without waiting a reasonable time for the Japanese to regroup, meet, and to conference among their staff in order to draft a reply, Truman would claim he had an excuse to test the second bomb on Nagasaki.
[After that 2nd bomb killed hundreds of thousands more defenceless men, women and children, the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender (clearly designed to be ignored or rejected anyway) was no longer necessary to demand. Now it was OK for the U.S. to give a guarantee for the Emperor's safety!]
Truman had also been afraid that many might think the first bomb was a fluke "firestorm" such as had melted in one night hundreds of thousands of people huddled in Dresden's underground, Germany, from conventional bombs. While a "demonstration" of the bomb for international observers would have solved that problem, Truman wanted the world to believe the U.S. nuclear arsenal was actually larger than it was, that there were many bombs - as it was, there were only two bombs produced, both dropped...and the arms race began.
- So now you're simply admitting there's a possibility that you're wrong afterall.
Wow, talk about a predictable answer. In short, no. However it DOES mean that you cannot accuse the Japanese of "total disregard for the Geneva Convention when it came to POWs" IF THEY HAD NOT EVEN SIGNED INTO THEM.
Linear Mode
