Why Are We The Good Guys?: Reclaiming Your Mind From The Delusions Of Propaganda by Cromwell David

Author:Cromwell, David [Cromwell, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781780993669
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2012-09-28T05:00:00+00:00

7

Endless Echoes

It is 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.

US Admiral William D. Leahy1

One of the major events of the twentieth century, with reverberations that reach today, was the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan by the United States in 1945. The top officials who ran the Manhattan Project, the US-led programme that developed the atomic bomb, warned President Harry S. Truman before the bomb was used: ‘The world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.’2

Many people, and I am one of them, believe that the moral ‘justification’ of using the atomic bomb in the Second World War, and the threatened use of nuclear weapons in succeeding decades, has no basis in civilised society. But what about the conventional argument that the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan did, nonetheless, bring about the end of the war? I was confronted with this view in a compelling and personal way when I was a student at Glasgow University. One of my friends there was, like me, studying physics and astronomy. I used to visit him quite often at his parents’ home where he still lived. (I was still living at home, too; not unusual for students in the west of Scotland.) His father had been in the Royal Navy and during the war had been serving in the Pacific. He told me personally that he was convinced that he owed his life, as did many others, to the atomic bombs; because they were dropped no costly invasion of Japan was required to end the war. That is certainly the view presented in history lessons and propagated to this day in the media. But how accurate is it?

The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and the second on Nagasaki three days later. Soviet armed forces invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria on 8 August. On 15 August, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan in a radio address to the nation.

Broadly speaking, there are three different schools of thought as to why the US government used the bomb. We may refer to these as the orthodox, the revisionist, and the neo-orthodox or anti-revisionist schools.

Orthodox historians argue that dropping the atomic bombs was necessary and justified because this led directly to Japan’s surrender, thus saving millions of American and Japanese lives that would have been otherwise lost during the US invasion of Japan, planned to begin on 1 November 1945. Revisionists disagree. The bombing was neither necessary nor justified, they say; Japan had already been comprehensively defeated. Some revisionists even argue that the United States

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