Thursday, August 04, 2005

Hiroshima Film Cover-up Exposed

"More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. 'The main reason it was classified was ... because of the horror, the devastation,' he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated." (Via UFO Reflections.)

And still we live in a nation where vehicles sport stickers advocating we "Bomb Mecca" and urging the patriotic to "Nuke the Bastards." This empathic vacuum, sick and absurd, is far more dangerous than the nuclear weapons themselves.

9 comments:

Kyle said...

Mac -

you wrote:
=======================================
"This empathic vacuum, sick and absurd, is far more dangerous than the nuclear weapons themselves."
=======================================

The truly sad thing is that we have been conditioned to believe that nukes can be used "for good" and that bombs can be "smart" and that strikes can be "surgical".

We were "protected" from the "real truth" in order to "protect" the "real truth".

I've already got the Tivo programmed...
:)

Thanks!

Kyle

JEFM said...

No Nuremberg trial, no condemnation ... the guys were received as heroes ... hell, the damm plane is in the Smithsonian ... in display ... I guess it's good to be the winner.

History is written by those who win ... how hypocritical of some american military, civil and goverment sectors.

Sad but true ...

W.M. Bear said...

Historians have also demonstrated that Truman didn't even need to use the infamous "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" fission bombs on the Japanese cities. The Japanese were ready to surrender but the decision was made to bomb them anyway, largely as simply a kind of demonstration of the power of the A-bomb (and because we'd spend billions developing it), a fact which makes the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki especially heinous.

As to pronouncements that we should "nuke 'em" (usually with reference to Arab cities) I don't even begin to understand the mentality behind this attitude. I actually even heard a conservative "shock jock" expressing this view on live radio not too long ago. Truly appalling.

W.M. Bear said...

The one "good" thing that possibly came out of this was that the scenes of devastation may at least have added to deterring nuclear war. If nuclear weapons had never been used in actual warfare, countries like the U.S. and Russia might have found it easier to contemplate using them in tense Cold War crises. I'm not at all saying this justified using the bombs in first place, only that, heinous as this was, at least some good may have come out of the sacrifice of lives.

JEFM said...

Maybe that's the only good thing Bear, the price was high, but it has enabled us to live.

Jon

JEFM said...

General Curtis LeMay should be considered along with the most horrible and heinous characters of the 20th century.

Jon

RJU said...

>>"Historians have also demonstrated that Truman didn't even need to use the infamous "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" fission bombs on the Japanese cities."

I would say this is a very questionable reading of history. The Japanese were not ready to surrender when Hiroshima was attacked. From Wikipedia:

"After the Hiroshima atomic attack (and before the Nagasaki atomic attack), President Truman issued the following statement:

"It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.""

Only after Nagasaki was attacked did the Japanese understand that the threat was real and that the U.S was prepared to carry it out, meaning they had no choice, but to surrender.

It seems to me that once we had the ability to make nuclear bombs, sooner or later someone would use them. I can't say that this justifies their use, but let us be thankful that since their power was demonstrated in Japan, the weapons have not been used again.

The coverup of the effects, talked about here seems somehow worse and to me inexplicable because it make the possibility of using the bombs again more likely. It would seem that making it widely known what the bombs could do, would only be to our advantage- no one would dare to challange us.

Ken said...

There are two sides to every coin. Do not let your very laudable humanitarianism blind you to reality. And please, do not infer from the following that I am a blood thirsty barbarian who wants to nuke 'em all - I'm not. But there IS another side to this. And remember, the folk who were there and then had to decide with the data they had. There was no luxury of 60 years' hind sight.

The Japanese militarists were absolutely NOT ready to surrender. In fact, according to the History Channel, a palace coup was attempted to prevent just that. Propelled by the code of Bushido, the militarists were prepared to fight to the very last Japanese.

Okinawa showed the US that the projected invasion of the Home Islands would have been bloody beyond anything yet seen in WWII, and would possibly have resulted in the extermination of the entire Japanese race, for all practical purposes. Additionally, the Japanese had made no little progress towards an atom bomb themselves, and had sufficient fissile material on hand to build one, and possibly several. Further, Unit 731, of biological warfare infamy, was also well on the road to perfecting projectable diseases - primarily by sending balloons over the Pacific to spread Plague, Smallpox, etc. Consequently, even though the Home Islands were entirely cut off, the militarists could have hurt North America badly with biowarfare. Also, a plan was in the works to send an A-Bomb equipped submarine to a Western port and detonate in an ultimate Kamikaze attack. So, we could not merely sit by and blockade Japan, hoping for the best. SOMETHING had to be done to eliminate both of these very real threats. The only route to that elimination was victory, and that soon.

An invasion of the Home Islands would have been awful beyond description, IMO much much worse than the horrific Fat Man and Little Boy. The best estimates of the day projected 100,000 plus American dead, 1,000,000 plus wounded, and unknowable millions of dead Japanese. All available options were bad, and IMO the bombs were the lesser evils. This is, of course, arguable. Sane reasonings can be made for either view point. But, if allowed, emotion can obscure fact.

As for LeMay being a war criminal, well, as much as I dislike writing this, he was a ruthless man who would stop at nothing for victory. To my mind, there are limits of permissibility within warfare, but not for him. So, war criminal? Close enough perhaps, but to my mind no. An argument can be made for that, I suppose, but we won, and winners make the rules of post war peace. E'en so, IMO the bombings were a necessary evil. Of which, admittedly, I am still somewhat ashamed. But I feel it had to be done. Certainly, the soldiers who were to hit the beaches had no problem with ending the war by any means available.

Now, I both hate and fear atomic warfare, and do not appreciate the use of them, even to end WWII. Even so, many more Japanese died in LeMay's fire bombings than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Also,I feel that secreting these films and informations was at the least inadvisable and unproductive, not to mention dangerous. As few Americans really knew the horrible effects of nuclear war, it was therefore considered a viable option - which it is most emphatically NOT! When I was a kid, we were taught to "Duck and Cover". At the age of 10, I thought this stupid beyond belief, which it of course is. People did not understand what the bombs could really do, and in this regard I consider the secreting of that info to be worse than a sin - it was a mistake.

We were not there, then. Folk had gone through years of incredibly vicious war, and simply wanted it to stop. IMO, they did what they had to do.

W.M. Bear said...

This is a test, this is only a test....