By John LaForge
This August 6 and 9 are the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima[1] was the effect of jolting the city with a 60-million-degree (Celsius) explosion (ten thousand degrees hotter than the surface of the sun)[2]. Richard Rhodes, in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, explained, “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away….”[3]
The use of the atomic bombs against population centers without warning was rationalized after-the-fact using expert propaganda in the February 1947 Harper’s magazine, which transformed the burning of vast numbers of children[4] into a positive good that “ended the war” and “saved lives, and which has since become gospel truth to generations. This in spite of the front-page New York Times story about Secretary of State James Byrnes August 29, 1945, with the headline: “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.”[5]
The pretext of “saving lives” is now known to have been fabricated. Gen. (and later President) Dwight Eisenhower, who had been Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told Secretary of War Henry Stimson before the July 17, 1945 Potsdam Conference he opposed using the bomb because it “was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” according to his memoir Mandate for Change.[6] The general told Stimson, “…Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary….”
Broad declassification of wartime documents and personal diaries has made it possible to learn the facts. In one key example, Gar Alperovitz reports in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb that the April 30, 1946 report by the Intelligence Group of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division (“Use of Atomic Bomb on Japan”), first discovered in 1989, found “almost certainly that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war…”[7] which occurred on August 8. Japan surrendered a week later.
Likewise, the authoritative U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in its official 1946 report “Japan’s Struggle to End the War”: “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts…it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”[8]
Because the formerly secret documents show that the United States knew by the summer of 1945 that Japan was already defeated, the historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission J. Samuel Walker could report in the winter 1990 edition of the journal Diplomatic History, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time.”[9]
Many of the leaders who conducted the war have said the atomic bombings were needless. Winston Churchill wrote in his history of WWII, “It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell.”[10]
Adm. William Leahy, the wartime Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, wrote in I Was There, “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”[11]
Gen. George Kenny, a commander in the Pacific theater, said in 1969, “I think we had the Japs licked anyhow. I think they would have quit probably within a week or so of when they did quit.”
Gen. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force, wrote in Global Mission (1949), “It always appeared to us that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”
Adm. Noel Gayler, a commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, speaking in 1987 about the atomic bombings said, “The Japanese were essentially defeated.”[12]
Likewise, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers wrote in Reader’s Digest, “Obviously … the atomic bomb neither induced the emperor’s decision to surrender nor had any effect on the ultimate outcome of the war.”[13] And the renown Gen. Douglas MacArthur, said, “he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb.”[14]
Even more emphatic was Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay who, as head of the 21st Bomber Command, directed the devastating incendiary destruction of Japan’s 67 largest cities prior to August 1945.[15] LeMay said at a Sept. 20, 1945 press conference, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” Asked, “Had they not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” Gen. LeMay answered, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”[16]
Religious, political, and cultural leaders also spoke out contemporaneously against the massacres. On March 5, 1946, the Federal Council of Churches issued a statement signed by 22 prominent Protestant religious leaders titled “Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith,” which said in part, “We are agreed that … the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible. They repeated in a ghastly form the indiscriminate slaughter of noncombatants that has become familiar during World War II. … Both bombings, moreover, must be judged to have been unnecessary for winning the war. ”[17]
James Martin Gillis, editor of the journal Catholic World also condemned the attacks, writing: “I here and now declare that I think the use of the atomic bomb, in the circumstances, was atrocious and abominable, and that civilized peoples should reprobate and anathematize the horrible deed.”[18]
Nuclear weapons are still protected by lies like “limited nuclear war,” “deterrence,” and “low-yield warhead.” This month’s anniversaries remind us to rebel against the lies, to demand that the United States apologize to Japanese and Korean survivors and their descendants for the war crimes; to push the U.S. to abandon its nuclear attack plans and preparations; and to finally stands-down and eliminate the crown jewels and poisoned foundation of all government waste, fraud, and abuse ⸺ nuclear weapons.
John LaForge, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.
6 August 2025
Source: countercurrents.org