"The Bomb made them surrender."
God, you are thick! You continue to pretend to believe that Eisenhower, Leahy, et al, were liars! Obviously, none of this is penetrating your thick skull, for the simple reason that you do not want it to penetrate!
"The real purpose of building the bomb was to subdue the Soviets." (Gen. Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project)
"The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons"
tenc.net
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom." (Thomas Payne "Common Sense" 1776)
On July 17, 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin met in Potsdam, Germany to discuss surrender terms for the Japanese and Russia's planned entry into the Pacific campaign. Stalin had received communications outlining a conditional surrender that would allow Japanese Emperor Hirohito to remain as a ceremonial functionary.
Hours earlier, approximately 230 miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico in the Jornada del Mueto valley at the "Trinity" test site, the world's first atomic bomb was detonated. After viewing the horrific explosion the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Scientists working on plutonium production at the "Metallurgical Project" laboratory at the University of Chicago debated whether the atomic bomb should be used against Japan. A committee chaired by Nobel laureate James Franck urged the United States to demonstrate the new weapon on a barren island. Conversely, another all-civilian group named the "Interim Committee", chaired by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, advised that the weapon be used directly.
However, Stimson also stated "I am inclined to think that there is enough such chance to make it well worthwhile our giving them a warning of what is to come and a definite opportunity to capitulate. We have the following enormously favorable factors on our side, factors much weightier that those we had against Germany: Japan has no allies; Her navy is nearly destroyed and she is vulnerable to a surface and underwater blockade which can deprive her of sufficient food and supplies for her population; She is terribly vulnerable to our concentrated air attack upon her crowded cities, industrial and food resources; She has against her not only Anglo-American forces but the rising forces of China and the ominous threat of Russia."
"During his (Secretary of War Henry Stimson's) recitation of the relative facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings: first, on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking the world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face." The secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude." (General Dwight D. Eisenhower)
President Truman's private journal and correspondence written at the time of the bombings indicate that contrary to his public justification of the bombings as the only way to end the war without a costly invasion of Japan, Truman had already concluded that Japan was about to capitulate. Whether or not he was correct in this estimate of when the war would end, the fact that he held this view at the time he made his decision to use the atomic bombs is clearly set down in his own hand.
"I cannot speak for the others but it was ever present in my mind that it was important that we have an end to the war before the Russians came in...Neither the President nor I were anxious to have them (the Soviets) enter the war after we had learned of this successful (atomic) test." (James Byrnes, Secretary of State 1945-47)
"Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war...Mr. Byrnes view (was) that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more managable in Europe." (Leo Szilard, Nuclear Physicist)
"The use of the atomic bombs was precipitated by a desire to end the war in the Pacific by any means before Russia's participation. I'm sure if President Roosevelt had still been there, none of that would have been possible." (Albert Einstein)
According to Admiral William D. Leahy, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman's Chief of Staff: "The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... In being the first to use it [the atomic bomb], we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
"It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell." (Winston Churchill)
"The real purpose of building the bomb was to subdue the Soviets." (Gen. Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project)
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The killings from the bomb were miniscule compared to the firebombing which had burned 66 cities and killed aproximately 10 times as many people as the bombs.
The Japanese surrendered when the wording of the surrender allowed that the Emperor would still act as head of Government rather than as a war criminal, albeit that he would be under the authority of General MacArthur.
Nor does any possible inflence of the bombs toward surrender have any bearing on the morality of their use. Such a stupid proposition would justify ANY act, without ANY limit or sense of proportion. This would remove ALL moral distinction and judgment from any and all decisions or actions, providing only that the goal was a desirable one. What an ugly conception.
That anyone would even attempt to justify the reckless and arrogant vaporizing of children, simply beggars comprehension.
oneworld.org
"...the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when considered in a historical perspective, were undoubtedly unnecessary and barbarous acts. Those who support this view include Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and General Dwight Eisenhower..."
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According to Admiral William D. Leahy, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman's Chief of Staff:
"The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... In being the first to use it [the atomic bomb], we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
April: General Curtis le May (US Air Force) expressed a belief that the war could be ended by September or October without an invasion.
May 12: William Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Studies, reported to President Truman that Shuichi Kate, Japan's Minister to Switzerland, wished to "help arrange for a cessation of hostilities."
Mid-June: "A surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America's defense against future trans-Pacific aggression." Admiral W.D. Leahy, President's Chief of Staff.
July 16: The US exploded a nuclear bomb secrety in the New Mexico desert to prove to themselves that it would work.
thenewamerican.com
"...but in fact the Japanese had sent peace feelers to the West as early as 1942, only six months after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. More would come in a flood long before the fateful use of the atomic bombs.
In her 1956 book, The Enemy at His Back, journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown supplied overwhelming evidence to counter the inaccurate views about the close of the war. Beginning in 1949, she plunged into dozens of wartime memoirs and congressional hearings dealing with the conflict. The wife of noted Washington Star columnist Constantine Brown, Mrs. Brown had access to many of "the men who were no longer 'under wraps,'" as she noted. She wrote, "With this knowledge at hand, I quickly began to see why the war with Japan was unprecedented in all history. Here was an enemy who had been trying to surrender for almost a year before the conflict ended."
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