‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of premeditated mass murder unleashing a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the bedrock of 21st century U.S. war propaganda‘ – John Pilger
Seventy five years ago this week, the sickest dregs of humanity carried out a planned experiment on human flesh. The sociopathic ambitions of the White House and the robotic minds within the Pentagon, were fearful that Japan would surrender before the USA had time to test its new and most barbaric weapon, therefore plans were rushed forward to incinerate the people of Hiroshima, then three days later, before new surrender terms could be considered, a second incineration at Nagasaki.
The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the U.S. made clear the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Nothing was done. (excerpt from John Pilger’s ‘Atomic Bombings at 75’
The Japanese government had been trying to surrender for some time but the USA would not accept the exemption of Emperor Hirohito from war crime charges – one condition that they endorsed wholeheartedly after the experiments were completed. In fact they insisted upon his continuation in that position, which he maintained until his death in 1989.
“Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” (Ibid)
President Truman was as much a puppet of the military, industrial complex as has been every President since. He knew the bombing was unnecessary, just as his military leaders, Eisenhower, MacArthur and many other leading figures within the US military did. Even ex-Republican President Hoover advised that it was totally unnecessary to obtaining surrender and later wrote “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”
‘Looking ahead to the post-war era they were then shaping “in our image”, as Cold War planner George Kennan famously put it — made clear they were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the [atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” (Ibid)
If the perpetrators of this atrocity were capable of understanding the banality of the evil they were responsible for, it may have added to the need to censor future reporting and in setting up war crime tribunals in Japan and Germany, to divert attention and blame from this and so many other Allied war crimes. In the early 1960s, at 17 years of age, I searched public libraries and book shops for insight into the reasons for the nuclear bombing of Japan.
There was little to find beyond the 1946 book ‘Hiroshima’ by John Hersey which offered no explanations, no accusations, no moral outrage, just an easy journey through the personal tragedies of a handful of survivors without dwelling too much on the tragedy part, and ‘Children of the Ashes’ by Robert Jungk, published 1961 and almost as bland, though I do recall a moving Japanese poem in the foreword. Nothing else anywhere.
Those two books were difficult to locate and if any others existed they must have been deliberately omitted from the shelves. Even today there is very little literature that dwells upon the horror and depravity of those experiments. To add value to the atrocities and gain insight into their new found power, the USA set up Hospital facilities seizing on what it saw as a critical and unique opportunity to conduct long-range scientific and medical research, which a leading student on atomic bomb effects had believed “may not again be offered until another world war.”
To this end, President Harry Truman signed an order to establish the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) which would blatantly ignore the medical needs of the survivors, conducting research only and failing to provide treatment of any kind – U.S. leaders believed treating the victims of its experiments would be equivalent to admitting guilt – unthinkable! But the Hiroshima/Nagasaki experiment elicited insufficient useful evidence from which to assess the possibilities for their new genocidal capabilities and their next world war couldn’t be manufactured easily and so a series of horrendously moronic experiments on other beings, other environments, other cultures were set in motion.
‘Operation Crossroads’ destroyed much of the natural world at Bikini Atoll less than a year later. As well as destroying the coral reefs and all that dwelled therein just to make room for the atomic bombs, ‘Military Intelligence’ imported 200 pigs, 200 goats, 5,000 rats plus countless ‘lesser’ species to test the blast, the burns and the radiation. Later tests were much more destructive and would use military personnel as cannon fodder for these insane tests, ‘Operation Plumbbob’ 1957, used up 1,200 pigs and deliberately exposed 16,000 US troops forced to watch and then be assessed for damage in the preparation for Armageddon.
‘Between 1946 and 1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12 years…Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap’s skies darkened and it rained what first appeared to be snowflakes. Food and water were contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still true today….
U.S. official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders as “amenable savages” (John Pilger)
The final totals for death and desolation from nuclear testing dwarf Hiroshima and Nagasaki a hundred times over. Even now, in spite of all the horrors experienced, the USA and its more servile allies prepare and encourage a conflict where they can use the full potential of their hideously idiotic arsenal to destroy all of life that industrial Capitalism hasn’t already consigned to Hell. – BASTARDS!
