Originally posted by Havick007
Hello ATS,
Yes so first of all i will admit and understand this is a touchy subject for both people of the US and Japan. However, to get straight to the point.
Although Japan was the first to break the rules of engagment with the sneaky and blatant attack on Pearl harbour, along with all the fighting and
trench battles of WW2 that followed. Does this justify the means that stopped the war with Japan?
The means i speak of is the Atomic weapons used on the population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
Now fair enough there were some military casualties in these missions but what needs to be addressed are all the civilian casualties. How could the US
governement at the time justify such a radical use of force against a majority civilian population??
As long as you practice selective morality Havick007 and remain in a bubble you will never get it, but for the benefit of the rest of us, the
justification is pretty straight forward.
In a series of diplomatic signals between the Japanese embassy in Berlin with General Touransouke Kawashima, Kawashima requested shipments of Uranium
from Germany from 7 July 1943 onwards. Another discussion of this in diplomatic signals occured 24 August 1943. A final signal was dated 18 November
1943. In these successive signals the Germans demanded to know why Japan needed uranium and Kawashima was forced to confess that Japan had a project
to develop an Atomic Bomb.
These signals were decrypted by the Allies. These ULTRA decrypts have been declassified and have been available to read for decades now.
The Manhattan project was created to counter Germany's nuclear weapons project and you may be certain that had either Japan or germany been able to
do so they would have used their nukes first.
There is evidence that Japan succeeded in creating a working nuclear reactor at Kyoto during WW2. A.H Compton's investigation report for the
Manhattan Project notes that Japan made far more progress in the field of developing nuclear energy than Germany did. (source: Wilcox, Robert K.
Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb, Morrow Publishing, NY 1985)
There is a historical controversy based on shreds of evidence, interviews with participants in Japan's nuclear project such as Prof Bunsuku Arakatsu,
David Snells' interview with Capt Wakabayashi, wartime chemist Dr Kazuo Kuroda and chemical engineer Otogoro Natsume who escaped Soviet occupation in
northern Korea in 1946. These sources all claim that Japan successfully test blasted a nuclear weapon in the closing days of WW2 on an island in this
general area: (see Map)
JAPANESE PHYSICIST, 83, SAYS JAPAN TRIED TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB—Associated Press, dateline Tokyo, 20 July 1995.
Japan’s World War II atomic research team had no ethical qualms about its goal—building an atomic bomb and unleashing it on America, a team leader
said Wednesday. “We had no doubts about using it if we could. No one ever contemplated how terrible it would be,” physicist Tatsusaburo Suzuki,
83, said Wednesday. “We were just doing our best to put it together.”
Suzuki was a leading researcher in Japan’s wartime effort to construct an atomic bomb. He spoke Wednesday in a rare and candid explanation of
Japan’s World War II atomic bomb research.
Scientists in Japan developed theories of how to build a bomb, he said, but never came close to actually making one because they lacked money and
materials.
So desperate were they for parts that military officials discussed scrapping a battleship and using the steel for the atomic experiments, Suzuki said.
“I was confident at the time we could have built a bomb if we had better equipment,” he said.
The projects was supported by Japan’s imperial household, and the emperor’s brothers were among the leaders who inspected and encouraged their
work, he said.
Suzuki was part of a team of 50 scientists culled from Japan’s army and top universities to work on developing the bomb. They made about 11 pounds
of enriched uranium, he said—far short of what would have been needed to produce an atomic weapon.
Americans found evidence of the project after the war and dumped the research equipment into Tokyo Bay. But few Japanese have provided detailed
descriptions of the program, and the Japanese army destroyed all records of the project.
He said none of the scientists working with him on the Japanese atomic bomb ever mentioned any ethical concerns about their project.
His attitude changed, he said, when he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after they were devastated in August 1945 in the world’s only atomic
attacks.
He was not clear about his reasons for calling a news conference now, almost 50 years after the end of the war, to describe in detail the effort to
build an atomic bomb.
Japanese officials had discussed targets including US air bases that were being used to bomb Japanese cities.
