Japanese official: Dropping the A-bomb was inevitable

Originally posted by Zanzibar
In other words, it was one big, sick, science experiment.

Its debatable and it part and parcel with revisionist history. people seem to lose sight that we were involved in a all out war. Also, attempting to apply current values and morality to a different time frame is futile at best.

City busting and targeting the civilian population was legitimate tactics in war. Funny, the firebombing of Tokyo which destroyed mroe area and killed over 72000 people is hardly mentioned. I realise there is a viceral reaction to the use of nuclear weapons but how are the different in terms of deaths? I do realize radiations lingering effects, but those were not know.

Would you have felt any better if LeMay was (as he wanted to do) burn the entire country down to bedrock? people would be just as dead no?

Originally posted by Zanzibar
... massacring countless thousands of civilians is not a way to end a war. Just sit and imagine a schoolkid, saying goodbye to his mother...

So next time you talk about these attacks, just sit there and think about the people who were affected, those that were killed instantly, those that died slowly.

Women, children, the elderly.

Yes, I think about the countless thousands killed in horrible ways...
By the Japanese

Biological warfare conducted by the Japanese in China killed at least many tens of thousands, up to 200,00. Civilians, elderly, and children. They attempted to spread these plagues to the U.S. mainland. Had they found a reliable way to spread the diseases, the numbers would have been just as high in the U.S.

Source article

In 1940, a plague epidemic in China and Manchuria followed reported overflights by Japanese planes dropping plague-infected fleas. The Japanese attacked hundreds of heavily populated communities and remote regions with germ bombs. There appears to have been a massive germ war campaign in Yunnan Province bordering Burma. Planes dropped plague-infected fleas over Ningbo in eastern China and over Changde in north-central China, and Japanese troops also dropped cholera and typhoid cultures in wells and ponds. In all, tens of thousands, and perhaps as many 200,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases.

FredT, eaglewingz, thank you.

I can admit to being woefully ignorant to the military actions of the other nations. What the Japanese did and were planning to do, is equally, if not more horrific.

Now no-one will ever be able to shift my views on the A-Bomb attacks, but at least I know both sides of the story now. World War 2 was indeed one of humanities darkest times and the atrocities dealt by every side don't bare thinking about.

"Kamikaze"

The Jaqpanese 'invented' the suicide bomber.

What this implies, is that the Japanese would not accept defeat under any circumstances. Period. The kamikaze bombers were viewed as national heroes....

What if the dropping of the bomb was meant to illustrate the fact that their tactics could not win? What if the unfortunate devastation of several hundred thousand people was in actuality a means to stop them from decimating their own way of life?

I have no support for this thought...merely a rumination...

[edit on 30-6-2007 by MemoryShock]

The Japanese of that day were extremely fierce and considered their emperor to be god on earth. Japan would have never surrendered otherwise without a full scale invasion of Japan that would have killed far more on both sides. I think it would have been immoral for Truman to not use the bomb since it saved so many American lives in ending the war without invasion.

Tokyo Bay was actually considered for a demonstration, but given the very limited amound of fisile material an all or nothing approach seems to have been taken. people forget it would have been a while before a 3 bomb and beyond would have been ready. It took alot of time just to develop the fissile material for the three that were detonated.

Thanks for showing up, dj....

They could have dropped a couple just off the coast of Japan and they would have obtained the exact same results.
They needed to see what kind of damages an A bomb would have inflicted in a real case scenario. Justifying the A bomb its impossible.

Originally posted by piacenza
They could have dropped a couple just off the coast of Japan and they would have obtained the exact same results.

We only had the two, if the demonstration didn't work we'd have had to wait months if not years to produce more, meanwhile the fighting would have continued.

Originally posted by piacenza
They could have dropped a couple just off the coast of Japan and they would have obtained the exact same results.

How do you know that? I mean this is the standard mantra for the revisionist historian, but you do not know what Japan would have done do you? Nor were you fighting island to island with an enemy that basicaly perfected the suicide aircraft attack 50+ years before 911. So to try to hindsight how Japan and her leadership would have responded is at best grasping at straws.

The bombs were justified in thier use. When fighting a war you look out for your side first. Attacking the home islands would have resulted in untold casulties. Or worse, don't land troops and let Curtis Lemay firebomb the entire country.

I'm not condoning the action, but be aware that Japan had its own nuclear program

Some people believe that they even detonated a small weapon off the coast of Korea. I think if Japan had the bomb first they would have used it against the US in a heartbeat.

So it may have been the less onerous of two bad choices to use the bomb first.

Lest we forget and sadly most of you don't ever seem to have heard of the rape of Nanking. Katsumi certainly hasn't because it is written out of Japanese history books, in 1937 after creating a hoax conflict in Manchuria, Japan attacked the city of Nanking. there they deliberately slaughtered 300,000 civilians. Innocent people were tied to posts and used for army bayonet practice.

en.wikipedia.org...

Because of Japanese atrocities in China and Vietnam, Britain, Holland and America formed a joint military naval force to blockade oil supplies to Japan in July 1941.

It was in response to the blockde that Pearl Harbour happened.

Nazi Germany most certainly was working on it's own A-bomb and Germany did ship Uranium oxide to Japan in 1944 by U-boat. There are decrypts of "Magic" signals now declassified from General Touransouke Kawashima from 7 July 1943 to the Japanese embassy at Berlin, requesting shipments of Uranium oxides. USA knew perfectly well from intercepting signals that Japan was also working on the A-bomb.

www.zmag.org...

If you like, go to the author's website. Scroll down the screen on this link to the book "Japan's Secret War."

www.robertkwilcox.com...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

US Army intelligence records stored at the NARA archives in Suitland, MD disclose that Japan successfully test fired it's own A-bomb on 8 August 1945. Japan was building a six engined plane dubbed Fugaki specifically to bomb New York on a one way mission with a nuclear weapon.

The radio operator of U-234, a man named Hirschfeld who is still alive today and whom can be contacted at Sharkhunters.com claimed that Japan successfully tested an Atomic bomb in July 1943.

Back to Germany, Prof. Werner Heisenberg is the source of claims that Nazi Germany wasn't working on an A-bomb. That is a false claim.

The Nazi nuclear effort split into two groups in 1942 when the Reich Research council stopped a civil project to develop the bomb. Funding however continued for the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG) team under heisenberg to study nuclear reactors. Scientist Fritz Houterman's however was quite focused on using a workable reactor to harvest Plutonium for a nuclear weapon had Heisenberg succeeded.

The other research on A-bombs was continued under a clandestine military project of Heereswaffenamt (HWA) funded directly from the Nazi party.

The HWA project was led by two men, Dr Kurt Diebner and Dr Paul Harteck. The process which Iran is using today to enrich Uranium is developed from the Harteck process. Nazi scientists learned in 1942 how to enrich Uranium following experiments at Keil university of Dr Erich Bagge.

Japan was very close to using the A-bomb on USA. Japan simply ran out of time.



[edit on 30-6-2007 by sy.gunson]

It's a shame so many innocent people died, but Truman did the right thing.

Judging what happened then in 2007 is a luxury for us.

It was tragic but then everything abut WW2 was a tragedy.

Originally posted by shrunkensimon
.. yet the Nazis never were developing nuclear weapons..

Not true. They were developing an atomic bomb but were further away from that realization than the West thought. In fact, the USA confiscated 100kg of uranium from the Germans, which they then used to develop their own bomb.

While it's true that we will never know what would have happened, and therefore can say (with the safe insulation of sixty two years between us and the decision to use the nuclear weapons) that they shouldn't have been used at all, or should have been used as 'demonstration' weapons (by dropping one into Tokyo Bay or some other harmless but visible target), it's also true that, even after the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the decision to surrender wasn't exactly a landslide vote. In fact, had Emperor Hirohito not taken the almost unprecedented step of personally intervening, the surrender wouldn't have happened.

This implies rather strongly that the use of nuclear weapons in a 'demonstration' role would have been a complete waste...if the leveling of two cities wasn't enough to prompt an immediate surrender, turning Tokyo Bay into the world's biggest kettle of shark-fin soup certainly wouldn't have made any real impact.

The question of not using the atomic bomb at all is also a much easier one to debate from the safe distance of sixty plus years. We aren't in President Truman's chair, looking at a stack of plans for Operation Downfall (and its sub-parts, Olympic and Coronet) and their projected casualty counts (According to Richard Frank's "Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, up to 1.2 million Allied casualties, and God only knows how many Japanese). That makes it much easier for us to be critical of the decision to kill half a million Japanese. It's also easy for us to decry the 'immorality' of killing all of those women and children...but do you think that any fewer would have died in an invasion of the Home Islands?

The decision to use The Bomb was, of course, driven by politics, just as most major decisions are. Was it a 'good' decision, in a moral sense? Probably not. What it was, though, was a 'lesser of two evils' decision that, in the long term, saved lives on both sides of the conflict.

People often forget that there were other air raids of Japan in WW2 which resulted in more casaulties than Hiroshima. I don't understand why it is oh so much worse than conventional means as the same amount of people were killed as other raids.


At the end of the day, the victim will not care if he is vaporised or if he is blown to bits.

True the Tokyo fire raids killed far more people.

Comte wrote:

In fact, the USA confiscated 100kg of uranium from the Germans, which they then used to develop their own bomb.

I think you're referring to 560kg of Uranium oxide taken from U-234 after VE day ?

The Nazi A-bomb project was not so far behind as is supposed. The problem is that the Nazi nuclear scientific elite was compromised by an MI-5 spy called Paul Rosebaud, who leaked information through Lise Metzinger to Operation Epsilon in Stockholm.

It was not that Kurt Deibner did not know how to build an A-bomb. It was that everywhere the Nazis attempted to set up Uranium centrifuges, Allied intelligence pinpointed the locations and had the sites bombed.

The Harteck centrifuge project had ten times the funding of Heisenberg's KWG reactor project.

In the same way that the Allied schem was known by a code name, Germany had it's own codenames.

Nazi Germany's centrifuge project was known various German codenames... As "Volmer's Furniture Factory" and later when it shifted to Kitzbuhel in Austria as the "Angora Farm."

As to the amount of uranium, I am probably off. I am going by memory of a program I watched a while ago.

Also, I know only of the Farm Hall documents and how they explain Germany's lack of a bomb.

www.taivaansusi.net...

[edit on 1-7-2007 by TheComte]

The scientists locked up at farm Hall were no dumbies. Kurt Deibner is recorded in conversation with Heisenberg trying to warn Heisenberg that they were being recorded.

Heisenberg denied that the British would be smart enough and totally hammed it up suggesting over several days to colleagues that he had no idea how much material was needed for a critical mass.

In fact the critical mass had been accurately worked out by other Nazi scientists as early as 1941.

Heisenberg was aware that Nazi Leaders had been arrested for war crimes trials and was furiously backpedalling to distance himself from the war effort. This was disinformation by the nazi scientists.

Diebner and Harteck would not co-operate with interrogators and kept silent at Farm Hall. After the war they were not allowed to re-enter their scientific careers. During the late 40s and early 50's one had to be approved by the "de-Nazification tribunals" to gain work in trusted post war jobs.