This August marks the 70th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history. On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. ruling class dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering over 300,000 civilian men, women and children. In 2004, a report from Hiroshima set the cumulative death total at 237,062 (CBS News, 8/6/2005), plus another 75,000 from the after-effects in Nagasaki.
The racist U.S. rulers were more than ready to launch these horrific attacks on an Asian population. These atrocities had nothing to do with ending World War II—or “saving lives,” as the bosses’ media constantly claims. They were actually a political warning from U.S. imperialism to the then-socialist Soviet Union, the first shots of the Cold War. According to A-Bomb scientist Leo Szilard, who met with Secretary of State James Byrnes:
“Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb…in order to win the war….Mr. Byrnes’s….view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe” (A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb, Leo Szilard, 1949).
Japan Was Already Beaten
U.S rulers pushed the falsehood that the A-Bomb attacks were necessary to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion that would have led to one million U.S. casualties. In fact, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before the atomic bombings:
• The United States Strategic Bombing Survey reported: “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated” (Survey: “Japan’s Struggle to End the War”).
• In “The Myths of Hiroshima” (8/5/2005), the Los Angeles Times reported: “The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of the air to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper’s Magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry Stimson.”
• On March 9, 1945, “100,000 to 200,000 men, women and children died when the U.S. Air Force doused Tokyo with jellied gasoline….In the months before Hiroshima [conventional] bombs killed up to 500,000 in Japanese cities and left 13 million homeless” (U.S. News & World Report, 7/13/1995).
• By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”
• President Harry Truman’s diary referred to a decoded Japanese cable indicating that Japan was about to surrender unconditionally.
• On July 17, 1945, three weeks before Hiroshima, Truman’s diary shows that he believed the Soviet Union would “be in the Jap[anese] war by August 15. Fini Jap[anese] when that comes about.” At the Yalta Conference in May 1945, Soviet leader Josef Stalin had promised Truman that the Red Army would enter the war against Japan within three months of the Nazi surrender in Europe. The latter occurred on May 8, 1945; the Soviets swept into Japanese-occupied Manchuria on August 8 and were preparing an invasion of homeland Japan.
• Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. general who later became president, said it was his “belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…and no longer mandatory to save American lives” (Mandate for Change, Dwight Eisenhower, 1963).
• General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, believed the dropping of the bombs was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II, James Clayton).
U.S. War Crimes
So why were the the bombs dropped? With the Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier. The U.S. rulers believed an official Japanese surrender would demonstrate to the Soviets that the U.S. had what War Secretary Stimson referred to as a “master card”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson’s diary).
Secretary of State Byrnes told Stimson, “The atomic bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.” (Year of Decision, Harry Truman).
Earlier, on June 6, 1945, Stimson told Truman he was “fearful” that the U.S. Air Force would have Japan “so bombed out” that the A-Bomb “would not have a fair background to show its strength.” Obviously, U.S. rulers would be “showing that strength” to the Soviets, a “show” that slaughtered more than a quarter-million Japanese civilians.
As the U.S. continues to prosecute a “war on terror” and negotiates to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, Barack Obama’s hypocritical pronouncements about a world “free of nuclear weapons” ignore the fact that only the U.S. rulers he represents stand guilty of this genocidal act.
In what amounted to an indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, atomic scientist Szilard stated: “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremburg and hanged them.”
It remains for the international working class to mete out this justice to the most murderous war criminals the world has ever known. United beyond the rulers’ borders, workers must turn the guns and bombs around and smash imperialism in the fight for a communist world.