Today marks the 69th anniversary of that fateful day in 1945 when the US B29 Stratosphere bomber nicknamed "Enola Gay" opened its bomb doors at approximately 810am in the morning from some 35000 feet altitude above the peaceful and non-military city of Hiroshima, Japan. At that point, an elongated Uranium powered nuclear explosive device known as "Little Boy" fell from the aircraft and begun its approximately 4 and 1/2 minute fall to the ground below. At almost exactly 815 am, Japan time, the device exploded in the atmosphere just above Hiroshima in a fireball measuring some 300 yards across. The resultant heat and blast from that 12.5 kiloton explosion leveled approximately 4 square miles of Hiroshima killing some 100000 people instantly and leaving another 100000 to eventually perish due to burns and radiation exposure.... It was the dawning of a new era of nuclear warfare and one that this planet's inhabitants still fear to this very day....For this article, I want to present the following report that comes from John Laforge, through the Consortium news online website at www.consortiumnews.com. It is entitled: "The Enduring Myth Of Hiroshima", and contains some very telling information about the real truths behind the usage of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima... I have that report right here, and of course my own thoughts and comments to follow: The Enduring Myth of Hiroshima
August 6, 2014
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on a populated area, the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed by a second on Nagasaki three days later. There then ensued a U.S. propaganda campaign to claim the slaughter of more than 200,000 people saved lives, writes John LaForge.By John LaForgeThe U.S. atomic destruction of 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki was never “necessary” because Japan was already smashed, no land invasion was needed and Japan was suing for peace. The official myth that “the bombs saved lives” by hurrying Japan’s surrender can no longer be believed except by those who love to be fooled.The long-standing fiction has been destroyed by the historical record kept in U.S., Soviet, Japanese and British archives — now mostly declassified — and detailed by Ward Wilson in his book Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).The mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.Greg Mitchell’s Atomic Cover-Up (Sinclair Books, 2011) also helps explain the durability of the “saved lives” ruse. Wartime and occupation censors seized all films and still photos of the two atomic cities, and the U.S. government kept them hidden for decades. Even in 1968, newsreel footage from Hiroshima held in the National Archives was stamped, “SECRET, Not To Be Released Without the Approval of the DOD.” Photos of the atomized cities that did reach the public merely showed burned buildings or mushroom clouds — rarely human victims.In Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial, (Grosset/Putnam, 1995) Robert Lifton and Mitchell note that Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, “left nothing to chance.” Even before Hiroshima, he prohibited U.S. commanders from commenting on the atomic attacks without clearance from the War Department.“We didn’t want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been won without the bomb,” Groves said.In fact, MacArthur did not believe the bomb was needed to end the war, but he too established a censorship program as commander of the U.S. occupation of Japan. He banned reporters from visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, expelled reporters who defied the ban and later said that those who complained that censorship existed in Japan were engaged in “a maliciously false propaganda campaign.”That most people in the United States still believe the “saved lives” rationale to be true is because of decades of this censorship and myth-making, begun by President Harry Truman, who said Aug. 6, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. … That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”In fact, the city of 350,000 had practically no military value at all and the target was the city, not the base three kilometers away.Taking President Truman at his word, the 140,000 civilians killed at Hiroshima are the minimum to be expected when exploding a small nuclear weapon on a “military base.” Today’s “small” Cruise missile warheads ¾ which are 12 times the power of Truman’s A-bomb ¾ could kill 1.68 million each.Official censorship of what the two bombs did to people and the reasons for it has been so successful, that 25 years of debunking hasn’t managed to generally topple the official narrative.In 1989, historian Gar Alperovitz reported, “American leaders knew well in advance that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not required to bring about Japan’s surrender;” and later, in his 847-page The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Random House, 1995), “I think it can be proven that the bomb was not only unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary.” The popular myth “didn’t just happen,” Alperovitz says, “it was created.”Kept hidden for decades was the 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s conclusion that Japan almost certainly would have surrendered in 1945 without the atomic bombs, without a Soviet invasion and without a U.S. invasion. Not long after V-J Day in 1945, Brig. Gen. Bonnie Feller wrote, “Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, said in his memoirs he believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”Adm. William Leahy, the wartime Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 1950, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”Feller’s, Ike’s and Leahy’s opinions were conspicuously left out of or censored by the Smithsonian Institution’s 1995 display of the atomic B-29 bomber “Enola Gay.”Admiral Leahy’s 1950 myth-busting and censor-busting about the Bomb could be an epitaph for the nuclear age: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion,” he said of Hiroshima’s incineration, “and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”John LaForge writes for PeaceVoice, is co-director of Nukewatch—a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group—and lives at the Plowshares Land Trust out of Luck, Wisconsin.I have long known that the usage of that Uranium powered device on Hiroshima was absolutely unnecessary and that Japan was already a beaten nation and absolutely willing to surrender to the United States... Japan was already being bombed day and night by B29's operating out of bases in both the Marianas and China, and their industrial and manufacturing facilities were collapsing... Worse, due to the incessant bombing there was fear of famine and massive starvation for its 90+ million wartime inhabitants... The Japanese government knew the "jig was up" and had been approaching the US, through neutral nations, wanting to surrender since the beginning of 1945.The reality is that the Konoye cabinet in Tokyo had already informed the United States government of its acceptance of every single term as laid out in the US surrender demands with the one request that the Japanese be able to keep their Emperor, Hirohito, as their head of state in a post-war Japan..... It is not surprising and in some ways very barbaric that the US purposely delayed the surrender of Japan just so they could drop these two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then have the audacity to agree to the exact terms that the Japanese had requested 5 days after the Nagasaki bombing, on August 14th 1945!It is sickening when we reflect back now at that period of history and now realize that the atomic bomb was not necessary and in fact was an act of genocide on innocent people. The constant lies that the atomic bomb was used to "save American lives" has now been proven to be a facade and a massive lie....Now with the world again on the verge of a new global war based on lies, history's lessons are forgotten... As I and others have always said: "If we do not learn from history, then we are doomed to repeat it". More to comeNTS
