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| 5/17 |
| 2005/7/21-23 [Reference/History/WW2/Japan] UID:38754 Activity:low |
7/21 Historians suggest that Truman dropped the bomb in order to
impress the Soviets not to force Japan to surrender:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7706
\_ historians also suggest Hitler lives deep under the
sea with Flipper. - danh
\_ And don't forget Elvis being alive.
[ NOTE: MacArthur couldn't have advised Truman not to use
the bomb, b/c he didn't know about it until it was dropped. ]
\_ use WMD on civilians... hmm... what makes us different than
those who we called "terrorist" again?
\_ This simple little concept called 'war'. Use a dictionary,
dipshit.
\_ n : the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence)
against civilians in order to attain goals that are
political or religious or ideological in nature; this is
done through intimindation or coercion or instilling fear
[syn: {act of terrorism}, {terrorist act}]
Hmm, no mention of "war" in that one...
\_ Oh my god, you're so stupid or are being intentionally
obtuse. You know, WWII? The US involved in a war???
*sigh* You win trollboy, I guess your trolling skillz
exceed my self-restraint.
\_ Good. We killed two birds with one stone. I think it was both to
impress he Soviets AND to force Japan to surrender.
\_ And talk about how effective it was! What are we doing wrong
here?
\_ I agree. Saw a documentary on this too. There was a very
influential advisor to Truman who suggested this.
\_ I saw a documentary on the Histroy Channel that the Japanese
sccheduled to drop an A-bomb on the US west coast around the same
time with the nuclear core coming from Germany via submarine. The
bomb was to be dropped by a plane with folded wings launched from a
submarine. It said we only beat the Japanese by 13 days or
something like that, I don't remember exactly.
\_ I've heard there were some plans, but I don't think they
had a bomb, so it seems unlikely they could get it going in
13 days. Anybody got a link?
\_ I agree. I don't think they had the bomb. Germany
was probably closer to having one than Japan.
\_ They were still totally off. The OSS dispatched an agent
during a war to kill a top German scientist suspected of
working on their bomb in a conference in Stockholm (?) but
he didn't, as he didn't feel there was even a hint that
they were close. Remember that the German bomb project
relied mainly on heavy water, and what was found after the
war was pretty far from completion. -John
\_ Heh, on the other hand, maybe the bomb design was just to
have a Kamikaze guy hold two pieces of uranium and hit
them together when he gets close.... |
| 5/17 |
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| www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7706 Advertising The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 wa s meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence back ing the controversial theory. Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress th e Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who too k the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add. "He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species," sa ys Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. According to the official US version of history, an A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later, t o force Japan to surrender. The destruction was necessary to bring a rap id end to the war without the need for a costly US invasion. But this is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US. They are presenting their evidence at a meeting in London on Thursday organised by Greenpeace and others to coincide with the 60^th anniversary of the bombings. Looking for peace New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest th at Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick c laims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a fe w days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs them selves, he says. According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary o f state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the b omb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace". Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb. "Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," says Selden. Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting mon ey on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bom b was not used, he adds. Kuznick and Selden's arguments, however, were dismissed as "discredited" by Lawrence Freedman, a war expert from King's College London, UK. He sa ys that Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima was "understandable in the c ircumstances". Truman's main aim had been to end the war with Japan, Freedman says, but adds that, with the wisdom of hindsight, the bombing may not have been m ilitarily justified. Some people assumed that the US always had "a malic ious and nasty motive", he says, "but it ain't necessarily so." |