It brings tears to see the survivors of one of the most horrific atrocities turn their suffering into a hope for peace for all humanity. (Unlike some groups who cashed in their suffering and cause great suffering for others.)

Isn't it amazing that they call the people who did this "The Greatest Generation"?

It's a hard truth that we burned the Japanese cities with A-bombs and incendiaries and killed millions doing it. War as Gen. Sherman so aptly said 80 yrs. earlier is HELL. But, lets not forget all of this happened in the context of a World War where our enemies were not exactly peaceniks. Anyway, even at this distance feelings are hard on all sides. I lost an entire side of my family to the Nazis in death camps and some other relatives to the Japanese. I'm not sorry we beat these people they'd have had little mercy on us had we lost. But, maybe using A-bombs in retrospect wasn't such a good idea after all. It's easy to be a Monday Qtr. back in these matters but we must never forget we didn't have to make the calls and the people that did had no really good way out. Or at least with the knowledge they had they didn't think they did.

Before anyone has too much sympathy for the people of Hiroshima, they might do well to read up on something the Japanese army did in Nanking in 1937 to about 250,000 of China's innocent civilians, in a war started by Japan.
No one really knew much about atomic weaponry in 1945, beyond the heat & blast effects. What was known, or at least assumed, was that approximately 1,000,000 Americans & 5,000,000 Japanese would have died if an invasion of the Japanese homeland had been required to end the war (the Japanese warlords were hoping to kill so many Americans on the beaches that the US would just give up). In addition, there would have most-likely been a few hundred thousand troops from Uncle Joe's country in northern Japan before all was said & done, and they would have most likely stayed there until the Soviet Union disintegrated 45 years later.
Whether Harry Truman did the right thing in using the bomb will be debated forever, I imagine. Unfortunately, it was the only logical option he had ....

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey did indeed indicate that Japan would likely have surrendered by 11/1/45 or almost definitely surrendered by 12/31/45 without an invasion, Soviet declaration of war, or use of atomic weapons. However, between August 6, 1945 and November 1, 1945, it is very likely that well over 300,000 Asian civilians would have perished had the war continued (http://www.worldwar-2.net/casualties/world-war-2-casualties-index.htm). And that number obviously doesn't count the additional Allied and Japanese soldiers who would have been killed, nor the additional Japanese civilians who would have been killed via the U.S. conventional bombing of Japan, nor the likely thousands and thousands of Japanese civilians who would have starved to death had the U.S. bombed the Japanese railroad system starting on 8/11/45, a planned move that would have prevented already-scarce food to travel from agricultural areas to the urban areas where it was needed.

It is possible that the bombs used against Japan may have actually saved more lives than they took. For one thing, the leaders of the world's two biggest nuclear powers knew, based on the devastation in Hiroshima & Nagasaki, what these weapons could do against real targets. Considering that, by the mid to late 50's, weapons of 1945 kiloton-level yields were little more than tactical battlefield devices, that knowledge probably weighed greatly in the post-war decisions by US & Soviet leaders in their responses to each others provocations. Even a small nuclear war between the US & USSR in the 50's, involving just a few of the multi-megaton city-busters of the time, would have killed many millions in the belligerent nations, and in others not directly involved. Our world would be a far more unpleasant place than it is now, for those who lived .....

What garbage. Shame some of Japan's victims couldn't have answered her. Oh, wait... they are dead.

Perhaps she would like to talk to some survivors of Pearl Harbor or the families of the sailors still in their ships.

Maybe 64 men from my Dad's Company...Oh wait. They died at Guadal Canal, or perhaps the 83 men from his company that died on Iwo Jima attacking their peaceful soldiers. Nope, dead too.

As I read the comments in this and other atomic-bombs-on-Japan articles what strikes me is the nearly complete lack of context and history. The entire genesis of WWII seems to get lost on the question of whether to have atom-bombed these two cities.

There is no question, to me, of the evil of this weapon genie, now out of its bottle. The very ugliness of this particular weapon seems to turn Japan from vicious aggressor to meek victim. At least in these revival narratives. To remove all surrounding causes and history and give us "bomber bad, bombed good" is wrong.

Even the arguments for dropping "the bomb" seem rooted in the immediate few weeks around the date. But Japan was a military society for centuries before being opened up to the "west" in the mid 1800s.

Once Japan opened itself to the world it sent its people around the world to learn as much of the outside as they could, not just to survive in a world dominated by "western" technology, but to aquire as much power as they could - rapidly. First the French were brought in as military trainers and when the Prussians beat the French in the Franco-Prussian war, the trainers were changed to the Germans.

They used gunboat diplomacy with Korea eventually occupying and then annexing Korea. Japan defeated China in 1894 taking Taiwan. By 1931 their continual spats with the Chinese turned into a full-time sustained war conquering Manchuria (as Manchukuo in 1932) and lasted until 1945. This is estimated by the Chinese to have cost them some 20-million dead and 15-million wounded Chinese, civilian and military.

In the Japanese propaganda of the time the invasion of China became a "holy war" (seisen). They used the Chinese population for biological and chemical experiments. They used actual Chinese for bayonet practice, rather than straw targets, like every other nation on the planet. This was done deliberately to harden their soldiers to kill on orders.

When it came to surrenders, the Japanese didn't. Other nations around the world, ours, the Germans, the Italians, anyone else, surrender was all but certain at a casualty rate of about 20% (killed and wounded). This is already heavy damage. But the Japanese rate was 99% (killed), literally fighting to the death or at last gasp, suicide.

And of those captured, often they were captured because they were physically unable to avoid capture. Prisoners were a dishonor to their families at home, because of capture or surrender. Some, would later kill themselves rather than remain prisoner.

I still remember the two incidents of Japanese soldiers isolated in the war who fought on until the 60s, 70s when they were each (separately) convinced that the emperor had indeed ordered them to stop and that the war really was over, even though they had not had contact for more than two decades with their commands.
Anyone confronted with the question of how the Japanese would respond to an invasion of the homeland had to be more than a little concerned with that 99% combat death rate.

Both the Japanese and the Germans had atomic bomb projects ongoing. Dr. Nishina in Japan thought that neither the Japanese nor the USA would be able to make a bomb before the end of the war (he reported his estimate in early 1943, which caused a further lack of resources to be devoted to his program).

Considering the long history of the Japanese, I have to wonder what would have happened had we allowed the Japanese to surrender with their bomb project ongoing and their militarism in place. How much else would have remained in place in terms of conditions for surrender or end-of-hostilities agreement? I believe those are the more important questions. Would, by now, such a preserved Japanese government have become even more dangerous?

In the 1950's they sent their students and engineers into the USA and other nations to buy up all the goods possible and bring them back to Japan to examine, improve, and market, just as in the late 1800s they had sent their people abroad to learn about the world and update their military in only decades.

There is also the argument that the military and others with a stake in "the bomb" really just wanted to use their toy. I have to believe that "use-their-toy" was a factor. It always is, then and now. But that overlooks the question of "if not then, when?" That may point to one of the few good things (if it can be said that way at all) that dropping those two bombs did.

Imagine not having used it in 1945. The "use-my-toy" factor would be getting really itchy. Maybe they would have used it for real in Korea. Or, worse, in 1962, in the Cuban missile crisis, in which we missed nuclear war, by a hair, as we learned after the fall of the Soviet Union. The "toys" were far worse by then.

So, perhaps the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented a far larger set of horrors later. Without this real-human example they might not have held back later. When it comes to war, sooner or later every "toy" gets used. Still, this is talking about roads not taken.

None of which means that those people deserved what they got, any more than the far larger number of casualties in the fire bombings deserved what they got (don't forget these people either). None of which means, “oh how lucky” that we have an example of what to avoid. Nonetheless, it exists, in a Strangelovian way as a focus point for outrage, while we forget and neglect the environment which brings it into play.

To this day, the Japanese do everything they can to not acknowledge these and many other atrocities. That they have managed to expunge most of this from school books remains a hard point between Japan and China. We have to remember ALL of it.

May the twin horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki never be repeated......

Profiling the Hiroshima Hawks:

Every time I see someone justifying the dropping of the bombs in August 1945 I really wonder where these people are coming from. It's easy to understand the right-wing, über-patriotic, kick-ass American. But I'm talking about others who sound reasonable otherwise. Here's what I think:

Some people think it's justified to defend the dropping of the bombs because they lost family members in the war. While it's "understandable", I don't see how that automatically makes it "justifiable". "Collective punishment" of civilian population is a crime, no matter which way you spin it, and no matter who has done it. I think the people who have lost family members find it difficult to imagine that their family members could have died fighting for an equally brutal aggressor. I know many have moved on and have become peace activists. But I admit - if I had been one of those, I think I cannot forgive the enemy country for as long as I live. At least not that easily. But still, that only makes defending the bombs "understandable", but not "justifiable".

Those who say that Germany and Japan had active nuclear weapons programs should remember - that had it been one of them who used the bomb first, the world would not only be condemning them, but the Allies would have **destroyed** them, because such is the ferocity and the vindictiveness of the European powers and their progeny in America.

Brutality was not something that was the exclusively preserve of the imperial Japanese army. This is a canard that's used to justify the bombing. Colonial and imperial powers have engaged in brutalities against MUCH weaker adversaries, and **yet** continue as "respectable" members of the "international community".

Those who keep invoking the brutalities of Japanese imperial army conveniently forget that Japan has by and large accepted and internalized the far more brutal punishment and humiliation that was handed to them, and has mostly moved on. However, like any nation with a half-decent sense of dignity, if you keep prodding them, the nationalist fringe in that country too would start acting out.

The same people who talk of Japanese killings in China, unforgivable as they are, **never once** mention the number of **Chinese** people killed during Mao's "Cultural Revolution" and the "Great Leap Forward". Watch for many of these same people also justifying or explaining away China's invasion of Vietnam, and its continuing occupation of Tibet. And they obviously would miss the shamefulness of the Opium Wars. While they may be happy to condemn the USA for Vietnam, they would be silent on Cambodia, Khmer Rouge and their chief patron. Either silent or explaining.

The hatred for Japan blinds such people to the actual period of Japanese imperialism: roughly 50 years. While all imperialist conquests have to be condemned, these people fail to put imperialism in context. They cannot compare the lengths of other imperial powers' conquests, occupation and pillaging of the conquered lands. Why? Because there's simply no comparison.

It would be too much to expect such people to remember Japan's history prior to the 20th century, or who forced Japan open. It would be pointless to ask them what a country is to do, having been forced open to trade at the point of a gun, and having a bit of dignity left. It had to adapt, of course. Also the impediments put in the way of Japan's exports and imports by Britain and the USA prior to the WW-II would be of little interest to such people.

Such people would forget that it was war. To look for the atrocities carried out by other countries such as Britain or a psychopath like Winston Churchill would take a bit of effort, a curiosity and some objectivity. Nope. It would be too much to expect these qualities from such people. The same lack would also blind them from questioning the official account, which, judging by the "documentaries" shown to this day, seems so much like whitewashing and propaganda.

Japan's imperial history was brutal, but short-lived. But Japanese energy continues on. That is probably what rankles **some** of these people.

Finally, it would be too much to expect such people who talk of "unconditional surrender" etc., to remember that "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." Japan was just another imperial power going about its business of conquest. And it was, in fact, the latest in the line of brutal imperial powers, and also the shortest-lived. However, they did not have the bomb.

Those who talk of the ferocious fighting in Okinawa or Iwo Jima forget that it was war, after all. And when faced with a dwindling stock of aircraft, they resorted to suicide missions. Viewed strictly from a soldier's point of view, it was a manly thing to do. And yet, I have not come across a single Japanese person who brags of their army or their kamikaze pilots (it doesn't mean that such people do not exist). They just want to put it all behind and move on. However, war is a glorious thing in the USA and every victory is celebrated and every brutality is explained away.

The reason I had to post this is because I am convinced that ALL nuclear weapons should be abolished. Any justification for their use - either in the past or in the future - would continue to be the biggest obstacle in the way of universal nuclear disarmament.