Dropping “The Bomb” On Hiroshima and Nagasaki Was Never Justified

• Dropping “The Bomb” On Hiroshima and Nagasaki Was Never Justified
  by Naji Dahi, http://theantimedia.org/
  (ANTIMEDIA) Long Beach, California— August 6th and 9th of 2015 mark the 70th anniversary of the U.S. dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the first and only time a state used a nuclear device on cities (or civilians) of another state. Some conservative estimates put the immediate death toll of the two bombs at 200,000 people. This is more than the total number of American soldiers killed in the Pacific front of World War II.
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  Since the bombs were dropped, the U.S. government, U.S. high school history texts, and the American public have asserted that dropping the bombs was necessary. According to one review of American textbooks by Satoshi Fujita, an assistant professor of U.S. modern history at Meiji University,
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  …most of the textbooks published by the early 1980s carried the U.S. government’s official view that the nuclear attacks allowed the U.S. troops to avert the invasion of Japan’s mainland and minimize American casualties, thus contributing to an early conclusion of the war.”
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  American politicians have continued to espouse this view. Primary among them was Harry S. Truman, the one-term president responsible for making the decision to drop the bombs in August of 1945. In his 1955 memoirs, Truman claimed the bombs saved half a million American lives. Truman insisted he felt no remorse and bragged that “he never lost any sleep over that decision,” while simultaneously referring to the Japanese as “savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic.” By 1991, George H.W. Bush claimed dropping the bombs saved millions of American lives. Historian Peter Kuznick sums up the ever-increasing number of American lives saved due to these actions:
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  Of course, none of these figures about saved American lives are true. When President Truman was contemplating dropping the bomb, he consulted a panel of experts on the number of American soldiers that would be killed if the U.S. launched an invasion of the two main Japanese islands. According to historian Christian Appy,
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  “[Truman] did…ask a panel of military experts to offer an estimate of how many Americans might be killed if the United States launched the two major invasions of the Japanese home islands…Their figure: 40,000 – far below the half-million he would cite after the war. ”[emphasis added]
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  … dropping the nuclear bombs was totally unnecessary from a military standpoint. America’s leading generals voiced their concerns before and after the bombs were dropped. General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Western Europe, reacted to the news in a way that contradicts politicians’ narratives:
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  “During his [Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson] recitation of the relevant 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 world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives ,” he said. [emphasis added]
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  General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, was not even consulted about the use of the bomb. He was only notified two days before the first bomb was dropped. When he was informed he thought “‘…it was completely unnecessary from a military point of view.’ MacArthur said that the war might ‘end sooner than some think.’ The Japanese were ‘already beaten.’”
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  Tough, cigar-smoking “hawk,” General Curtis LeMay—who was responsible for the firebombing of Japanese cities—was also disappointed with the decision to drop the bomb. In an exchange with reporters he said,
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  “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. [emphasis added]”
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  “You mean that, sir? Without the Russians and the atomic bomb?” one journalist asked.
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  “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all,” LeMay replied.
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  Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, sent out the following public statement: “The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan [emphasis added].”
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  While Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, and Nimitz believed the dropping of the bombs to be unnecessary, Chief of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy went even further, insisting that even the contemplated invasion of Japan was unnecessary to end the war. He said,
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  “I was unable to see any justification…for an invasion of an already thoroughly defeated Japan. My conclusion, with which the naval representatives agreed, was that America’s least expensive course of action was to continue to intensify the air and sea blockade…I believe that a completely blockaded Japan would then fall by its own weight. [emphasis added]”
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