60th Anniversary: Americans Divided on Use of A-Bombs in 1945

Poll Shows Americans, For First Time, Divided on Use of A-Bombs in 1945

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000990612

By Greg Mitchell

Published: July 24, 2005 12:15 PM ET

NEW YORK As the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan approach in two weeks, one major poll shows that Americans, in a historical switch, now appear about equally divided on the decision to use the bomb.

Polling by the Associated Press, announced today, found that 24% of Americans "strongly approve" dropping the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and another 24% "somewhat approve." But 23% "somewhat disapprove" and 24% "strongly disapprove." Another 6% are not sure.

Polls in past years have generally shown strong majority support for the use of the bomb, although the "pro" count has slowly subsided over the years.

The poll of 1,000 adults in the United States was conducted for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling company, from July 5-10. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The polling, and a separate survey in Japan carried out by Kyodo, also found that more Americans than Japanese expect another world war in their lifetime. Most people in both countries believe the first use of a nuclear weapon is never justified, although nearly half of the Americans obviously make an exception for the 1945 examples, which killed at least 200,000, the vast majority of them civilians.

Japan surrendered within days of the use of the atomic weapons, but historians differ on whether that country would have given up, in the same time frame, even if the bombs had not been used, due to the Russians' entry into the war against them and other factors.

 

Never again? How the war in Iraq spurred a new nuclear arms race

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article303776.ece

As the world prepares to mark the anniversary of Hiroshima, Iran is poised to go nuclear amid a new global arms race

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Published: 05 August 2005

Tomorrow at 8.15am, a minute's silence will reverberate around the world. The people of Japan will commemorate the victims of the first atomic bomb, which was dropped by an American B-29 on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

Half a world away, in Tehran, the new hard man of Iranian politics, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will take the oath of office before the country's parliament. His presidency heralds a new era of uncertainty in Iran's fraught relations with the West over its nuclear ambitions.

In Beijing, urgent talks on curbing North Korea's nuclear weapons programme are close to collapse. And in Pakistan, efforts are still being made to roll up the world's biggest nuclear proliferation scandal. Sixty years after Hiroshima, whose single bomb killed 237,062 people, a new nuclear arms race has begun.

A crisis is deepening with Iran over its suspected nuclear weapons activities. Tehran is threatening to resume uranium conversion next week, prompting an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency which could result in Iran being referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

At the six-party talks in Beijing, North Korea is refusing to abandon a nuclear weapons programme that could lead to another mushroom cloud over Asia.

International investigators are struggling to wrap up the lucrative black market that spread a web of proliferation across at least two continents thanks to the greed of one man: the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.

The scientist A Q Khan, who sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and possibly others, is now under house arrest.

Al-Qa'ida has still not been vanquished in its hideouts, while there are still fears that the terrorists could be working on the production of a " dirty" bomb that would spread radiation and panic in major cities.

In the light of the war on Iraq, which did not have nuclear weapons, second-tier nations have judged that North Korea was spared invasion because of its nuclear deterrent, and drawn their own strategic conclusions.

International attempts to renew a global pact banning the proliferation of nuclear weapons have foundered. In short, the system of safeguards aimed at preventing a repeat of the horrors of Hiroshima is in disarray.

The review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by 189 states collapsed two months ago amid recriminations and accusations that the nuclear five had no intention of living up to their treaty commitments to pursue nuclear disarmament.

All signs are that the treaty intended to protect the world from nuclear peril is dead. Pyongyang has pulled out, boasting that it now has nuclear weapons, and other members such as Iran, Egypt and South Korea have been caught cheating.

But the regime had already been seriously undermined by states that remained outside the NPT and became nuclear powers: Israel, India and Pakistan. The NPT review at the UN in the spring provided a timely opportunity to tighten nuclear safeguards. Instead, the month-long conference turned into a bitter slanging match in which the US administration ignored its own record and turned up the heat on Iran and North Korea.

At the heart of the four-decades-old NPT is a "grand bargain". The five nuclear powers - US, Britain, France, Russia and China - agreed to work towards nuclear disarmament. In return, the non-nuclear states gave up any ambition to develop nuclear weapons; they agreed to open up all their facilities to inspection; and in return they were guaranteed the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology.

The big five have always been open to the charge of hypocrisy. Behind the rhetoric of disarmament, they have tried everything in their power to prevent second-tier powers from obtaining nuclear arms, while clinging on to their own nuclear arsenals despite strategic cuts. Both the US and Britain are upgrading: the Bush administration is developing nuclear "bunker busters" that can strike deep underground, while Britain has ordered a new generation of Trident missiles.

With the NPT seriously weakened, the challenge now is to keep the genie in the bottle, as regional rivalries in the Middle East and Asia risk going nuclear.

For the Bush administration, openly hostile to a UN solution, the answer has been talk or bomb: negotiate with states that already have a weapon (such as North Korea), or to take preemptive strikes against those that do not (such as Iraq). US officials say acting outside the treaty has produced results: it brought Libya back into the fold in 2003, when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi decided to scrap his weapons of mass destruction.

Yet this approach contains the risk of opening the path to nuclear blackmail, which is how North Korea has coaxed the West into compensating the hermit state in return for concessions on its nuclear programme.

As with Iran, negotiations have stalled on the North Korean insistence that it has the right to a civilian programme, if it renounces nuclear weapons.

Iran, an NPT member which insists on its treaty right to pursue nuclear power, has been infuriated by US co-operation with India, a non-member of the NPT, which blasted its way into the nuclear "club" in tit-for-tat tests with Pakistan in 1998.

In a world no longer guided by a universally accepted regime, countries are weighing the nuclear option. Arab states consider nuclear-armed Israel, and are drawing their own conclusions. Iran is hemmed in by hostile neighbours such as Israel and Pakistan. A nuclear test by North Korea could prompt Taiwan and Japan to follow down that road.

Preoccupied with Iraq, the US has decided to follow a diplomatic route in dealing with Iran. But if the Security Council fails to reach agreement on punishment for Tehran's infringement, the military option would loom again.

Israel has made no secret of its intention to halt militarily the Iranian nuclear weapons programme, as it did when it struck Iraq's Osiraq reactor in 1981, delaying but not ending Saddam Hussein's nuclear quest. But if Israel did strike, the Iranians could hit back anywhere in the region. Its nuclear programme would go underground, and the hand of the hardliners in Tehran would be reinforced. As one expert put it, an Israeli attack would be " a free pass for the mullahs".

The question now is whether nuclear deterrence works. The threat of American nuclear attack, albeit veiled, did not deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait. On the other hand, North Korea's boasting of a nuclear arsenal saved it from invasion. And nuclear weapons have not - yet - been used on the battlefield.

Today, the "official" nuclear powers could annihilate the world many times over. And 40 other countries have the know-how to join their club. Sixty years after Hiroshima, who can say with confidence: "Never again"?
Never again?

60 years since the first use of a nuclear weapon in war. 160,000 people died when the bomb was dropped at 8.15am on Hiroshima, with another 77,062 dying later.

$27bn is spent each year by the US on nuclear weapons and related programmes

11, 000 active, deliverable nuclear weapons in the world. The US has 6,390, Russia 3,242 and Britain 200

15,654 sq miles, total land area used by US nuclear weapons bases and facilities

4 other states known or thought to have nuclear weapons: India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea

5 acknowledged nuclear states: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States

1 number of islands vaporised by nuclear testing: Elugelab, Micronesia, 1952

16 in length of 'Davy Crockett', the smallest nuclear weapon ever produced

40 states with technical ability to make nuclear weapons, including Egypt and South Korea

30,000 Kazakh conscripts served at Semipalatinsk, the Soviet test site. There were 456 tests conducted between 1945 and 1991 at the site

100 maximum number of those Kazakh conscripts still alive today

200 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by Israel

0 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by all the Arab states

100,000 people were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1984

150 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by India

75 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by Pakistan

40,000 people are currently members of CND

900 years is the time it will take for radioactive elements in Pripyat, near Chernobyl, to decay to safe levels following the disaster 19 years ago

 

Evidence shows atomic bombs were unnecessary

http://www.winonadailynews.com/articles/2005/08/05/opinion/bomb1_05.txt

Published - Friday, August 05, 2005
By Gar Alperovitz / Columnist

Sixty years ago, on Aug. 6 and 9, atomic bombs destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Americans think the bombings forced Japan to surrender. And further, most believe that they were necessary as the only way to end World War II without a costly invasion.

But new research findings suggest both judgments are wrong.

A just-published Harvard University Press volume by Professor Tsuyoshi Hasegawa of the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the most comprehensive study yet undertaken of Japanese documentary sources. The highly praised study argues that the atomic bomb played only a secondary role in Japan's decision to surrender. By far the most important factor, Hasegawa finds, was the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan on Aug. 8, 1945, two days after the Hiroshima bombing.

Japanese military leaders had long been willing to sacrifice civilians and cities to American conventional bombing. What they really feared, Hasegawa points out, was the Red Army, a force that would directly challenge what was left of Japan's dwindling military capacity both on the home islands and in Manchuria. The traditional myth that the atomic bomb ended the war, he writes, "cannot be supported by historical facts."

A similar conclusion has been reached in a recent publication by another eminent Japanese scholar, Professor Herbert Bix, author of a biography of Hirohito, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2000.

Long before the bombings, top American and British policy-makers were aware that a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, combined with assurances for the Japanese emperor, would likely end the conflict.

As early as April 29, 1945, for instance, U.S. intelligence advised that entry of the Soviet Union into the war would "convince most Japanese at once of the inevitability of complete defeat," and further, that if they were persuaded that unconditional surrender "did not imply annihilation, surrender might follow fairly quickly."

Many scholars have wondered about the timing of the bombings. The invasion of Japan was set to begin in November 1945, three months off. There was plenty of time to test whether the intelligence estimates of the impact of a Soviet declaration of war were correct before striking civilian targets.

In fact, making sure the Soviet option was available in case the atomic test failed was a major U.S. priority for the first half of 1945.

Once the test succeeded in July, however, the atomic bomb was preferred because, Hasegawa and others argue, U.S. leaders, for political reasons, no longer wanted the Soviets to enter the war.

Strikingly, many American military leaders also believed the atomic bombing was unnecessary. On numerous occasions then-Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that he had urged the bomb not be used against an already defeated Japan. After the war, he put it bluntly: "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

The diary of President Truman's chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy, shows that he believed the war could be ended on acceptable terms in June 1945. After the war, Leahy, who also presided over the Combined British and U.S. Chiefs of Staff, wrote that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. ... In being the first to use it, we ... adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."

The well-known hawk Gen. Curtis LeMay publicly declared shortly after the bombings that the war would have been over in two weeks, and that the atomic bomb had nothing to do with bringing about Japan's surrender.

Sixty years later, the moral challenge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and the ongoing threat of future nuclear horrors — still haunt us.

 

Suppressed footage of Hiroshima after the bomb to air on cable TV

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12314715.htm

Posted on Fri, Aug. 05, 2005
By Sadia Latifi
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Sixty years after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, a film documenting the aftermath is reminding Americans about the horrors of nuclear war.

Footage from a U.S. government-produced film, which was labeled top secret and kept out of public view for decades, is included in "Original Child Bomb," a documentary that will air on many cable stations Saturday, the 60th anniversary of the day that Hiroshima became the first city to suffer atomic attack.

Its release on the Sundance Channel is the culmination of years of effort to bring the government footage before a large American audience. It's the most extensive exposure yet of this long-suppressed footage in the United States. Some anti-war activists see the film's appearance on cable television as a crucial step toward an open discussion about the controversial bombings that ended World War II.

The young soldiers who shot the film in Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month after the dawn of the atomic age were unprepared for what they found.

"It was to me the most horrendous, terrifying thing I had ever seen," camera operator Herbert Sussan, who's now deceased, said in a 1983 interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "I finally convinced myself and some of these people that there was some value for the rest of the people of the world to see what had happened in this first bombing."

Showing their work to the rest of the world was no easy task. The nine hours of film, shot in color, captured horrifying scenes of destruction and human suffering, including a woman with the pattern of her dress burned onto her back and the shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls.

U.S. government officials deemed it too sensitive to release. They also confiscated black-and-white footage that a Japanese film crew shot before the Americans arrived.

When Lt. Col. Daniel McGovern, the head of the U.S. film crew, learned about the Japanese crew's earlier effort to document the carnage, he was able to obtain their film and lobby successfully to hire some of them for his project.

"I felt there was a need to tell this story," McGovern told the BBC for a 1983 report that used footage from the American film project. "If it were not captured and shown to people, no one would ever know what happened."

McGovern and Sussan were appalled when their footage was kept from public view and used only for military-training videos. Over the years, Sussan repeatedly asked for its public release, appealing as high as President Truman and Robert F. Kennedy.

"Every time I sought to obtain the footage, I came up against a brick wall," he told the BBC.

Sussan, who was 24 when he went to Japan, paid a personal price for his involvement in the project. Like many of the people he filmed, he developed lymphoma, a form of cancer, and died in 1985. He wanted his ashes to be spread at ground zero in Hiroshima, but when his daughter traveled there a year later to fulfill his wish, she was told that it would be illegal.

The Japanese government continually asked the United States for its footage, which had been transferred to the National Archives in Washington by September 1967. After negotiations with the State Department, a copy of the black-and-white newsreel was shipped to Japan in the summer of 1968.

Erik Barnouw, a film historian, created a moving 16-minute montage from the Japanese footage that screened in New York for the news media; all three major TV networks rejected it. Editorials criticized the move, and on Aug. 3, 1970, a public broadcast station aired the short to mark the 25th anniversary of the bomb. It would be nearly 10 more years before the American footage would emerge.

Greg Mitchell, who detailed the story behind the Hiroshima footage in a recent issue of Editor & Publisher magazine, said the postwar movie should be part of any debate about nuclear war.

"These guys weren't anti-nuclear, they were for frank showing of what the truth was," he said of Sussan and McGovern. "It's the right of people to see what's done in their name."

---

"Original Child Bomb" will premiere on the Sundance Channel this weekend, along with two other movies related to nuclear power, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bombing in Japan.

Airtimes according to the channel's Web site:

Saturday at 8 p.m.

Tuesday at 4:30 p.m.

Aug. 14 at 3:30 p.m.

Aug. 19 at 2 p.m.

Aug. 24 at noon.

Check your local listings for more up-to-date information. The Sundance Channel is available via satellite television and cable television. To find out if your provider offers Sundance Channel, call (800) SUN-FILM.

 

Hiroshima bomb may have carried hidden agenda

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7706

13:46 21 July 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Rob Edwards

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was 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 backing 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 the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

"He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species," says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. "It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."

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, to force Japan to surrender. The destruction was necessary to bring a rapid 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 60th anniversary of the bombings.
Looking for peace

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb 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 money on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb 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 says that Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima was "understandable in the circumstances".

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 militarily justified. Some people assumed that the US always had "a malicious and nasty motive", he says, "but it ain't necessarily so."