For the record.....
I need no stinking neocon to tell me I am 'ill-suited' for rational discussion....
If I see a stupid argument (such as supporting the idea of using a nuclear device on TWO cities in Japan as "ok" and 'justifiable'), the only rationale I need to use is that of common sense and clear vision to get past the idiots who in the name of "patriotism" are willing to forgive the acts of a barbarian just because they were born in the same soil and .... Play in the same team wearing the same 'colors'....
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Please read the entire article...
mind.net
From the Pew
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War Against the Innocent
Reflections on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs
War has never been kind to the innocent and few soldiers could ever claim to be chivalrous in any meaningful sense. But there was a time when soldiers fought against soldiers and civilian casualties were both few and unintended. World War II brought an end to that fiction. Since that war it has become clear that the primary enemy of soldiers are civilians, and, thus, modern soldiers are like terrorists. In 1914 the U.S. Senate confirmed a new Army manual, Rules of Land Warfare. In an effort to speak to the declarations of the International Red Cross at Geneva to protect the innocent who were prisoners of war and the declarations from the Hague Congresses to reduce the needless havoc of war, this manual assured the world that our soldiers would not attack civilian centers. Perhaps we could take some comfort in the fact that in World War I only 5% of the casualties were civilians. A new revision of this manual, Rules of Land Warfare, was issued in 1940 with the same promise to protect civilians. However, 48% of the casualties in World War II were civilians, shaking any confidence that we really cared about the innocent. Indeed, carelessness continued to increase. In the Korean War civilian casualties were 84%, and in spite of the new Army manual, The Law of Land Warfare (1956), still promising that we would spare the innocent, 90% of the deaths in the Vietnam War were civilians. In spite of the war crimes trials of German and Japanese after World War II, the only clear lesson we can now draw is that soldiers are now obligated and permitted to commit war crimes and crimes against humanoity by making deliberate and primary war against the innocent.
On this 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we should reflect on this paradigm: the degree to which modern wars are against the innocent. The atomic bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki raise two questions generally forgotten on this 50th anniversary of the war that took the lives of 29 million civilians (and 31 million soldiers). The first question, a moral one, is whether we can feel morallhy proud to have "won" a war at the cost of these 60 million deaths. The 250,000 Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a paradigm of our decision to justify winning wars at any cost. this "any cost" principle included the deliberate killing of American prisoners of war held in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have descended a long way from the promise in the 1914 Army manual that we would spare civilians and accept the 5% collateral civilian deaths as excusable since they were not intentional. Now, however, civilians are the primary and intended victims. The second quesiton is a military/political question: is such monumental civilian slaughter militarily required for victory? The ease with which the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were proposed as militarily required by President Truman and accepted as such by the American public suggests that the ill-famed doctine of "military necessity" must be abandoned as an excuse for immoral acts of war.
It is a trusim in modern society that what must be done cannot be judged immoral to do. Our economic, political, as well as military, enterprises all rest comfortably with this confusion. Whatever is required must not be forbidden. To be sure the accused at the Nuremberg trials tried this argument and failed to persuafde the judges, who, on the contrary, affirmed that there were some acts which ought not to be done even if they were deemed necessary.
The Smithsonian display which opened June 28 is sad for two reasons. Under social and political pressures the remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be sanitized of any feelings of moral regret by eliminating any pictures of the damage done. This is bad enough, but the history of the military story has been falsified so that those who go to the Smithsonian display will comfort themselves with a lie. Without belaboring the motives of President Truman, or Secretaires Byrnes and Stimson in authorizing the dropping of these bombs, we should not forget that Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Omar Bradley, Curtis LeMay, Henry Arnold, and George Marshall, and Admirals Lewis L. Strauss, Ernest King, and William D. Leahy all opposed the use of these bombs on both the grounds that they were militarily unnecessary as well as morally repugnant. We may not wish to apologize, indeed no apologies could ever be sufficient, but we must not forget that modern war is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and a crime against the peace. --Donald A. Wells
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The Decision to Drop the Bombs
On December 2, 1942 the first nuclear chain reaction using U-235 was produced at the University of Chicago under physicists Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, and others. The formal development of atomic weapons was undertaken under the Manhattan Engineering Project established in 1942 under the scientific direction of physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and under the military control of Brigadier General Leslie Groves. Its headquarters were in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Uranium enrichment was conducted at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and plutonium was produced at Hanford, Washington. The project was so secret that it was successfully kept from the public, from nearly every member of Congress, and most cabinet members. Even the Secretary of State did not learn about it until seven months before Hiroshima. General Marshall and Secretary Stimson knew. When Senator Harry Truman, as chairman of a Senate investigating committee, tried to pry into the details of what was going at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he ceased when asked to do so by Stimson.
Roosevelt never fully informed Churchill of the project although the two leaders agreed not to inform Stalin at all. The decision to use any weapons produced was probably established at the same time as research was begun.
President Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, and Vice President Harry Truman took office completely unaware of the entire project. Twelve days later, April 24, 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote Truman asking for a meeting to discuss "a highly secret matter." At that meeting was Truman, Stimson, and Brigadier General Leslie Groves. Stimson, the man primarily responsible for urging Truman to use the bomb, said that there may come a time when such a weapon could and should be used to stop a war. He argued that it should be used against Japan and that if it worked, it might shorten the war and thus "save American lives." These claims were taken by Truman as his primary motive for its use. This meeting adjourned with the President agreeing to the formation of a panel, The Interim Committee, to draft post-war legislation and advise on all aspects of atomic energy. The Committee included Stimson as chairman, Vannevar Bush, Karl Compton, Ralph Bard, an investment banker, James Byrnes, and William Clayton, an assistant Secretary of State. The question of whether to use the bomb was never on the agenda. Arthur Compton recalled that it seemed a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used, and the only question was when and under what circumstances.
In an effort to stifle or restrain protests which arose from some of the working scientists troubled about their role, Stimson also appointed a four member Scientific Advisor Panel composed of Enrico Fermi, E.O. Lawrence, Arthur Compton, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. This Panel was not informed about the military situation in Japan, they did not know how close Japan was to surrender, nor did they know the arguments pro and con any possible invasion, they had been told that an invasion was inevitable, although they were not told that the proposed invasion wasn't planned until the next spring in 1946. This lack of information influenced the report they gave on June 1 to the Interim Committee.
Oppenheimer reported on behalf of the Scientific Advisory Committee and stated that such a bomb might kill up to 20,000 people. He reported, further, that before the weapons were used our allies Britain, Russia, France, and China be advised and their suggestions solicited. Oppenheimer further urged that Japan be told of the imminent Soviet invasion and assured that the role of the Emperor would not be threatened when they surrendered. He stated that the members of his committee were not unanimous. Some preferred a purely technical demonstration since they opposed any military use of atomic weapons. Others concluded that a purely technical display would not serve the purpose and that, therefore, a direct military use should be made. No minutes were taken at this meeting, but Arthur Compton said later that he had asked Stimson if a nonmilitary demonstration might do just as well. Both Oppenheimer and Lawrence opposed the idea of a nonmilitary use. The decision as to what to recommend to Truman was left to Stimson.
On May 8, 1945 Truman broadcast the unconditional surrender of Germany, and accepted the view of Roosevelt that only unconditional surrender should be allowed for Japan. Inside the State Department, however, were two views: a. Modify the unconditional requirement so that the surrender of Japan would come before the Soviets came on the scene, and b. The hard line unconditional view.
The Committee's final recommendations to Truman were: 1. Drop the bomb as soon as possible. 2. Use it on a military installation surrounded by houses or buildings most susceptible to damage. 3. Use it without explicit warning as to the nature of the bombs. Other views, however, surfaced. On June 12 seven scientists from the University of Chicago laboratory and several others submitted a petition, (The Franck Report), that the demonstration be held in an uninhabited area before observers from many countries. The signatories included James Franck, Leo Szilard, Eugene Rabinowich, Victor Weisskopf, I.I.Rabi, Donald Hughes, J.J. Nickerson, Glenn Seaborg, and Joyce Stearns. Also on June 12 Stimson asked General Groves for the names of cities on which the bombs might be dropped. Groves did not want to show the list to Stimson until General George Marshall had seen it. Stimson overruled Groves and stated that the decision was his, Stimson's, and not Marshall's. The list was :
1. Kyoto: Stimson vetoed this because of its religious and historic significance and replaced it with Nagasaki.
Groves favored Kyoto. 2. Kokura. 3. Niigata. 4. Hiroshima.
On June 14-15 the Joint Chiefs discussed two invasion plans: a) "Olympic," which called for an initial attack on Kyushu with 815,548 troops on November, 1, 1945 (an estimated 31,000 casualties in the first thirty days was made) and b) "Coronet," which called for an attack on Honshu in April 1946 with 1,171,646 troops. There was no final agreement that either invasion plan would ever be put into effect. Indeed, as we shall note later, major opposition existed to both plans from the Joint Chiefs. That night Truman met with Secretary of State Byrnes, Admiral Leahy, and the Joint Chiefs: Generals Marshall and Arnold, and Admiral King. June 16 the Interim Committee considered and rejected the Franck Report. Members of the Interim Committee supporting the rejection included J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, George Gamow, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Robert Jastrow, and Harold Brown. On July 16 Truman was notified that the bomb test at Alamogordo had been successful. Churchill was told but the fact was kept secret from Stalin. James Byrnes had successfully persuaded the Interim Committee to withhold the information from Stalin and it was he who had proposed and the Committee accepted the recommendation that for maximum psychological effect the atomic bomb be used as soon as it was ready, and without warning on an industrial area surrounded by civilian housing. Truman accepted the caution expressed by Admiral Leahy that "the fool thing" might be "no more significant than smokeless powder," and he went ahead with plans for the Soviet entry into the war in the East and continued plans for an invasion of Japan. On July 25 General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz were told for the first time about the plans for the use of the bombs.
The decision was to bomb Hiroshima first (because it was believed that it had no Allied prisoners of war), and the second city would depend on the weather. Stimson was told that Nagasaki had a prisoner of war camp with US soldiers, and that Hiroshima had no such camp. This information was in error since it was determined later that 23 American soldiers were imprisoned in Hiroshima Castle. Indeed, there were prisoner of war camps in all four cities. General Carl Spaatz had this information and wired Washington asking "Does this influence the choice of the target?"That same day the War Department replied, "Targets...remain unchanged." On the day of the bombing, of Hiroshima, August 6, about 280,000 civilians were at home out of the original 340,000. The city of Hiroshima officially estimated that at least 80,000 were killed instantly and by December the number had reached 150,000. By 1950 the delayed deaths brought this number to about 200,000. Furthermore, 180 of the city's 200 doctors, 1,654 of the city's 1,780 nurses, and 52 of the 55 hospitals were destroyed. Yet, writing in 1949 Vannevar Bush was still able to claim, "It is useless to argue how much they advanced the end. Certainly enough to save more lives than they snuffed out and more treasure than their use cost." His predictions for the future were equally misinformed when he claimed that there would be quite a few years before any other nation could repeat what America had done and produce nuclear weapons. He completely misunderstood how different these new bombs were, and he naively claimed that "there is a defense against the atomic bomb. It is the same sort of defense used against any other type of bomb."
Truman had delayed the meeting at Potsdam hoping that word of the success of the test at Alamogordo could be used to strengthen his hand in advising that Soviet assistance would not be needed. He arrived at Potsdam on July 15 and was informed July 16 that the test at Alamogordo had been successful. A detailed report arrived at Potsdam July 21 informing Truman that the implosion-type bomb had been in excess of 15,000-20,000 tons of TNT. This information encouraged Truman to make clear that Soviet aid would not be needed. Churchill saw this clearly.
When the plane loaded with "Fat Man" took off the second target was Kokura which had four Prisoner of War Camps, but the weather was so bad that after three trial runs without a visual sighting, the pilot headed for Nagasaki. Was the second bombing, of Nagasaki, necessary? On August 8 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and its forces moved into Manchuria and toward Korea. On August 9, before the bomb was dropped, the Japanese Prime Minister had decided to accept the Potsdam declaration, provided that the role of the emperor remained. Yet, on August 9 the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The city officials of Nagasaki estimated 75,000 killed and another 75,000 wounded. (The "official" US State Department estimates were 70,000 deaths at Hiroshima and 40,000 deaths at Nagasaki). The ultimate death toll for the two bombings approached 200,000.Even after the bombing of Nagasaki the U.S. continued heavy bombing and the next day 114 B-29s dropped their loads on Japan. The Japanese surrender was accepted on August 14, 1945. The administration arguments for dropping the first bomb do not support the dropping of the second one. The plans from the start had been to use both of them and the process seemed self-propelled independently of the massive consequences from the bombing of Hiroshima which exceeded all expectations of the scientists and military tacticians.
The motivations for dropping the bombs have remained murky and complex. Serious doubt existed at the time that there was any military urgency, and many top US military leaders believed that the outcome of the war was a foregone conclusion. National survival of America was not at stake. <>From the beginning both Truman and Churchill saw the bomb as a way of flexing U.S. muscle at the Soviets. Reactions of revulsion at the dropping of the bomb appeared. The Catholic journal, Commonweal, remarked, "We will not have to worry about keeping our victory clean. It is defiled.... The name Hiroshima and the name Nagasaki are names for American guilt and shame." The Protestant Christian Century called the deeds "America's Moral Atrocity." Truman, however, stoutly defended his decision and vowed later that he would do it again under the same circumstances. He wrote, "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used." When in 1958 Hiroshima city sent him a resolution deploring his televised statement that he would do it again, he drafted a no-compromise response. He said to his secretary Rose Conway, "We'll send it air mail. Be sure there are enough stamps on it." Unfortunately the American public was not aware of the military aversion at the time and these data did not come until the retirement of the major figures.
For example, many major military leaders, while supporting dropping the bombs, insisted that it be done in an isolated area or on a clearly military site with no civilians surrounding. If there was any danger to civilians they should be warned several days ahead of time so that they could evacuate to safe havens. Obviously no one knew the real scope of damage the bombs would cause and that there would be no safe havens within many miles of the epicenter. The recommendation of the Franck Committee in support of this has already been noted. Lewis L. Strauss, Special Assistant to Secretary of the Navy, Forrestal, and a member of the Interim Committee, recommended that a bomb be dropped in an unpopulated area. So did General George Marshall, who also had urged that the Soviet Union be invited to the Alamogordo test. Many major American military leaders, however, opposed using the bomb militarily at all, especially in the manner in which it had been proposed by Stimson and Truman and the majority of the Interim Committee.
For example, when General Eisenhower was told by Stimson in a visit to the General's headquarters in Germany that atomic weapons would be used against Japan, he said:
"I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of the 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 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.'"
He expressed these same views to President Truman on July 20 in a meeting attended also by General Omar Bradley. Unfortunately these views were not shared with the American people until his retirement almost twenty years later.
General MacArthur had been kept out of the entire process and was not informed of the intention to bomb nor was he invited to the Potsdam Conference where the decision was discussed. He commented, "Use of the bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view." Indeed, had he been at the Potsdam meetings he said that he would have urged that the Japanese people be assured that on surrender they would be able to keep the role of the Emperor. The fear that unconditional surrender meant loss of the Emperor had been a major factor in stiffening Japanese resistance to surrender. When surrender finally came, in part due to MacArthur's leadership, the Emperor's status was allowed, indicating that U.S. intransigence had needlessly prolonged the war.
Admiral William D. Leahy, who had been close to Truman through the entire atomic plans, opposed the use of the bombs from the start, but again the American public was kept uninformed until Leahy's memoirs were published after his retirement. In July, 1944, sailing for Honolulu with Roosevelt, he engaged in a heated discussion of the possible use of biological warfare. He recalled:
"Personally I recoiled at the idea and said to Roosevelt: 'Mr. President, this would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all known laws of war. It would be an attack on the noncombatant population of the enemy....To me the atomic bomb belongs in exactly the same category.' "
Roosevelt was noncommittal, but in any event the US did not use biological weapons although we possessed them in our arsenals. In the spring of 1945 Truman had to decide whether to use atomic bombs and when he did so, Leahy reflected:
"It was my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender....My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.... Employment of the atomic bomb in war will take us back in cruelty toward noncombatants to the days of Genghis Khan."
Air Force General Curtis LeMay had argued in July at Potsdam that the war would have ended in two weeks independently of whether the bomb was used or the Russians entered the war. "The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war." Back in April he had maintained that the war would be ended in September without a U.S. invasion. He was not alone in this judgment since in June the representatives of the Strategic Bombing Survey had affirmed that the invasion of Japan was militarily unnecessary. General Arnold also speaking at Potsdam read into the record his judgment that Japan would be compelled to surrender by October without any invasion. Under Secretary of the Navy, Ralph Bard, as a member of the Interim Committee, had submitted a 42 page memo back in May 31, 1945 opposing the use of either the bomb or an invasion: "The Japanese war was already won." Admiral Lewis L. Strauss believed back in the spring that the war was over and neither an invasion nor the use of atomic bombs were militarily called for. Churchill, who had been apprised of the US plans to use the bombs, opposed it at the time and insisted in his memoirs that:
"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, and was brought about by overwhelming maritime power. This alone made it possible to seize ocean bases from which to launch the final attack and force her metropolitan Army to capitulate without striking a blow."
Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations believed that the dilemma between losing American troops in an invasion or using the bomb was a false one. He believed that had the U.S. been willing to wait the naval blockade would have compelled Japan to surrender without either an invasion or the use of the bombs.
In 1981 the psychologist-theologian, Kai Erikson, asked: "What kind of mood does a fundamentally decent people have to be in, what kind of moral arrangements must it make, before it is willing to annihilate as many as a quarter of a million human beings for the sake of making a point." Citing there marks attributed to the Old Testament God he suggested that the willingness of Christians to commit genocide is barely beneath the surface. The nuclear arming by the nations of the world makes clear that we would be willing to do it again. Few saw the paradox a short time later when the U.S. along with the other major Allies involved itself in the war crimes trials of Japanese and Germans for offenses, many of which were less heinous than what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More importantly, policy makers at the time thought, mistakenly, that the bomb would strengthen U.S. foreign and policy and be a factor for world peace. Subsequent events proved both of these assumptions false.
We must not think in Hiroshima terms when contemplating present nuclear bombs. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima weighed about 5 tons and contained about 25 pounds of uranium. The bomb was so inefficient that only about 4 ounces of the uranium actually fissioned, and only about 1/30 of an ounce was converted into energy. This was, however, enough to create temperatures of about 100 million degrees and kill up to 200,000 people. The 12.5 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the 22 kiloton bomb dropped on Nagasaki were tiny by current standards. The US has "tactical" nuclear weapons up to 400 kilotons and ICBM weapons up to 10 megatons=10,000 kilotons. It may be assumed that the newer bombs are more efficient than the primitive bombs used in 1945. The damage potential of these newer weapons is incalculable and prompts most scientists and military experts to conclude that atomic bombs are not "weapons of war." A B-52-G bomber carries a payload of four (4) one (1) megaton bombs, four (4) two hundred (200) kiloton bombs, and twelve(12) three hundred (300) kiloton bombs. The potential destruction makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki "infinitesimal," and makes the subsequent nuclear arms race, the claims of "deterrence theory," and current talk of the need for nuclear weapons absurd.
Donald A. Wells
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
1994
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