Nagasaki and Hiroshima were disasters of human history.
Nagasaki is like the forgotten bomb. I will be talking about Hiroshima, but I wanted to talk about Nagasaki first.
They dropped the Fatman on Nagasaki on August 9th. It was the second atomic bomb dropped and the first and more powerful Plutonium bomb ever used. It not only had plutonium, it had 15% more mass than little boy which was dropped on Hiroshima. The blast was less effective because of the mountains, but 80,000 people were killed and far more would die later from the starvation, radiation, and injuries that it caused.
I don’t know why Hiroshima gets ALL the attention. If anything the pointlessness of the first atomic bombing ought to be over shadowed by the even more pointless and evil and unnecessary SECOND atomic bombing
You will hear the rationalization about nuking people to “save lives.” This is a preposterous school room lie. A cultural city and history were lost. Erased in seconds. And why? The Japanese had been trying to surrender. Well the main reason America used the bombs when they did was because they did not want to divide Japan with Russia the way they were East and West Germany. Russia agreed to invade Japan (who had defeated Russia in their last war) three months after the German surrender on May 8th. Well that time was August 8th (or Aug 9th Japan time). And Russian began attacking Manchuria China where the Japanese army was.
The US wanted all of Japan. They had plans to invade Korea after all, which we all saw, and Japan was the unsinkable aircraft carrier. Even now almost 65 years later the US still has troops in Japan. In fact, if you are a foreigner of military age whose been to Japan the first questions you will be asked is are you military? and Okinawa or Misawa?
When I arrived in Japan in 2005 it was in August. The first thing I saw on TV were reports about the bombs. In Japan, every year they talk to survivors and have remembrance. I’ve been to the museums and I’ve talked to countless numbers of Japanese about the bombing. In the US one rarely sees anything but some footage of the buildings. The people are never shown not like the half naked and starving people shown liberated from German labor camps, or the piles of corpses, we all get to see that as early as middle school. But not America’s victims.
The typical argument for dropping the bombs will never be analyzed by the kind of sick individuals that just revel in the power of it and love the showmanship of shall we say the “Shock and Awe” of the bomb that makes them feel mighty through some distance attachment to their ego via nationalism. The typical rationalization is that the bomb actually saved lives in their bizzaro world. This is accepted on its face because it fits a predetermined conclusion that America is the good guy and can do no wrong. Any crime it does has to be for the greater good. So I guess the next time there is a school shooting just blow up the whole school, to protect the police. It pretends like the only other option was a ground invasion. It pretends like Japan had not already offered the terms the US ended up accepting after the bombings anyway.
As General MacArthur himself stated “I saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
Sub because there is a lot more.
