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Hiroshima: What People Think Now

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tags: Hiroshima





Hiroshima Peace Memorial, also known as the A-Bomb Dome. The atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima detonated almost precisely above the building. Credit: Wikipedia

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Related Links

  • Links to Sites on the Internet Concerning Hiroshima (HNN, 1-15-10)
  • Truman on Trial (HNN, 8-9-05)
  • HNN Hot Topics: Hiroshima at Sixty-Five
  • What Recent Scholarship Concludes About Hiroshima (8-12-05)
  • Harry S. Truman's Hiroshima Dilemma Rumbles Down the Decades (8-10-05)

  • News

  • The health effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, 70 years later (8-10-15)
  • How the Hiroshima bombing is taught around the world (8-7-15)
  • On 70th Anniversary of Nagasaki Bombing, Atomic Debate Yields Little Consensus (8-9-15)
  • The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction (8-6-15)
  • The Radio Broadcast That Ended World War II (8-7-15)
  • The Man Who Survived Two Atomic Bombs (8-7-15)
  • As Hiroshima’s legacy fades, Japan’s postwar pacifism is fraying (8-6-15)
  • What it would look like if the Hiroshima bomb hit your city (8-5-15)
  • The average age of survivors is now 80. In five years, very few of these first-hand witnesses will be around to remember the event. Many of their stories are in danger of being lost forever. (8-6-15)
  • At Hiroshima’s 70th Anniversary, Japan Again Mourns Dawn of Atomic Age (8-6-15)
  • Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Survivors Pass Their Stories to a New Generation (8-6-15)
  • Hiroshima marks 67th anniversary of A-bomb attack (8-5-12)
  • Was the use of nuclear weapons against Japan justified? D.M. Giangreco says yes (8-3-12)
  • Japan marks Nagasaki atomic bomb attack of 1945 (8-9-10)
  • Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Attacks Call for Nuclear-Free World (8-6-10)
  • Memorial service at Tinian's A-bomb assembly pit (8-6-10)
  • U.S. attends first Hiroshima atomic bomb anniversary (8-6-10)
  • Son of Pilot Who Dropped A-Bomb Opposes Plan to Send U.S. Delegation to Hiroshima Ceremony (8-4-10)
  • U.S. to attend Hiroshima anniversary for first time (7-29-10)
  • Morris 'Dick' Jeppson dies at 87; weapons specialist armed the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (4-7-10)
  • Jon Stewart Apologizes For Calling Truman a War Criminal (5-1-09)
  • Catholic Website Calls Hiroshima a Sin and the Complaints Fly (8-24-05)
  • Hiroshima bomb didn't win war, according to Soviet archives (8-12-05)
  • Koreans Also Died from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings (8-12-05)
  • Japan's Atomic Bomb Victims Complain that Their Government Still Neglects Them & Refuses to Take Responsibility (8-12-05)
  • Why the Atomic Bombing of Japan Is Missing from Our WW II Cultural Memory (8-1-05)

  • Commentary: Historians

  • Long Ago: A Total War in the Pacific Came to an Unimaginable End By Vaughn Davis Bornet
  • Marshall's effort to alter course of A-bomb history By Barton Bernstein
  • Why do we pay so much attention to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? By Matthew Seligmann
  • Setting record straight on atomic bomb By Robert James Maddox
  • When America’s Scientists Knew Sin By James Kunetka
  • How a Secretive U.S. Agency Discovered the A-Bomb’s Effect on People By Susan Southard
  • Nagasaki, the Forgotten City By Susan Southard
  • The Invisible Man at the Center of the Atomic Bomb Debate By Thomas Fleming
  • Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the single greatest acts of terrorism in human history? By Akil N. Awan
  • The War Was Won Before Hiroshima—And the Generals Who Dropped the Bomb Knew It By Gar Alperovitz
  • Harry Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: After 70 Years We Need to Get Beyond the Myths By J. Samuel Walker
  • President Truman and the Atom Bomb Decision: “Preventing an Okinawa from One End of Japan to Another” By D.M. Giangreco
  • Why Americans Have Been Duped over the Use of the Atomic Bomb By Paul Ham 
  • How "Five Old Men" Started the Roll-Back of Hiroshima Revisionism By D. M. Giangreco
  • Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica: Myth Versus Myth: Remembering Nagasaki (8-8-12)
  • Stanley Kutler: Hiroshima: Truman’s Choices Revisited (8-8-12)
  • Cynthia C. Kelly: Leslie R. Groves and the Unchecked Forces of Nature (8-6-12)
  • Murray Polner: Hiroshima & Nagasaki: 66 Years Later (8-15-11)
  • Jeff Tenuth: Hiroshima and Nagaski: Two Opinions (8-22-10)
  • John J. McLaughlin: The Bomb Was Not Necessary (8-10-10)
  • Jane Braxton: Coming of Age with Hiroshima's Mourning (8-6-10)
  • Stanley Kutler: 65 Years After Hiroshima: Truman’s Choices (8-6-10)
  • Greg Mitchell: Andrew Bacevich, His Lost Son, and Obama's War in Afghanistan (7-9-10)
  • Vaughn Davis Bornet: A Total War in the Pacific Came to an Unimaginable End (9-2-09)
  • Tom Engelhardt: As Another August 6th Approaches (8-3-09)
  • D.M. Giangreco: Did Truman Really Oppose the Soviet Union's Decision to Enter the War Against Japan? (11-20-06)
  • Robert P. Newman: Has the History Profession Awarded a Prize to Another Flawed Book? (4-30-06)
  • Sean L. Malloy: Four Days in May ... Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (4-4-09)
  • Robert James Maddox: The Greatest Hoax In American History: Japan’s Alleged Willingness to Surrender During the Final Months of World War II (7-28-08)
  • D. M. Giangreco: Was Dwindling US Army Manpower a Factor in the Atom Bombing of Hiroshima? (7-20-08)
  • Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan: Conservative Revisionists and Hiroshima (12-2-07)
  • Werner Gruhl: It's Time to Acknowledge that Hiroshima Followed Imperial Japan’s Decision to Launch a Terrible War on Its Neighbors (12-2-07)
  • Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan: Not Everyone Wanted to Bomb Hiroshima (11-5-07)
  • Richard Rhodes: The Manhattan Project: A Great Work of Human Collaboration (9-10-07)
  • Richard B. Frank: Review of Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, ed. Robert James Maddox (8-22-07)
  • William D. Hartung: Did We Miss the Lesson of Nagasaki? (8-12-07)
  • Lawrence S. Wittner: Why Hiroshima Day Events Matter (8-6-07)
  • Ronald Takaki: The Lessons of Hiroshima (8-6-07)
  • Peter J. Kuznick: The Decision to Risk the Future ... Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative (7-23-07)
  • Robert James Maddox: Why Another Book on Hiroshima? (5-16-07)
  • Tom Engelhardt: George Weller’s Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on the atomic bombing and Japan’s POWs (1-21-07)
  • Tom Engelhardt: Hiroshima Story (8-6-06)
  • Robert Newman: What Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin Got Wrong About Hiroshima (8-12-05)
  • Harvey Wasserman: Nagasaki, the Forgotten Atomic Target (8-9-05)
  • Thomas C. Reeves: The Bombing of Dresden (8-20-05)
  • Lawrence S. Wittner: 60 Years After Hiroshima: What We Need to Do to Make Progress Controlling Nukes (8-5-05)
  • Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin: The Myth of Hiroshima (8-5-05)
  • Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Hiroshima Wasn't Uniquely Wicked (8-5-05)
  • Gar Alperovitz: 60 Years Later, Historians Are Still Arguing (8-3-05)
  • Max Boot: Why Feel Guilty About Hiroshima? (8-3-05)
  • Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan: Why It's Time for Us to Confront Hiroshima (7-31-05)
  • Lawrence S. Wittner: Will We Still Remember Hiroshima After the Last Victims Die? (7-31-05)
  • Herbert P. Bix: Why Did the Japanese Delay Surrendering? (8-1-05)
  • Barton J. Bernstein: Why We Dropped the Bomb (7-31-05)
  • David Kennedy: Why U.S. Leaders Never Questioned the Idea of Dropping the Bomb (7-25-05)
  • Richard Frank: Sixty Years After Hiroshima, We Have the Secret Intercepts that Shaped the Decision (8-8-05)
  • Mark Selden: New Documents Show How the Story of the Bomb Was Suppressed (7-17-05)
  • Eric Rauchway: Why Kristof's Wrong About the Hiroshima Bomb (8-6-03)
  • Gar Alperovitz: NYT's Kristof Is Wrong (8-11-03)
  • Bill Witherup: Richland, WA ... Where They Made the Plutonium Used in The Bomb (6-05)
  • Michael Pearlman: Review of Robert P. Newman's Enola Gay and the Court Of History (3-05)
  • Brent Staples: What Godzilla Was Really All About (5-1-05)
  • Yuki Tanaka: Even in Japan People Are Forgetting the Memory of Hiroshima (2-21-05)
  • Mark Selden: Living With the Bomb ... The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Consciousness (1-26-05)
  • Tom Engelhardt: Hiroshima, 59 Years Later ... And Still There Are Silences We Can't Break Yes (8-6-04)
  • William Thompson: A Conversation with a Survivor of Hiroshima (4-19-04)
  • William Thompson: Revisiting Hiroshima (4-7-04)
  • William Thompson: Why Do We Have to Keep Dredging Up Old Stuff About Hiroshima? (4-7-04)
  • Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III: Hiroshima ... The Anniversary We Misremember (7-5-02)

  • Commentary: Media

  • Kazuko Hamada: Lessons Learned from Hiroshima and Fukushima (8-6-12)
  • Francis J. Gavin: Hiroshima -- An Uncertain and Contested Legacy (8-6-12)
  • Phil Strongman: Hiroshima Is A War Crime That Haunts My Family, 67 Years On (8-5-12)
  • Jennifer Lind: Apology Diplomacy at Hiroshima (7-16-10)
  • Mark Tooley: Religiously Remembering Hiroshima (8-13-10)
  • David Pilling: Hiroshima Still Clouds a Postwar Friendship (8-12-10)
  • Greg Mitchell: How Press Censorship Hid the Shocking Truth About Nagasaki A-Bomb 65 Years Ago (8-9-10)
  • Warren Kozak: A Hiroshima Apology? (8-9-10)
  • Daniel Bruno Sanz: Sixty-Five Years After Hiroshima, the Nightmare of Nuclear War Haunts Us Still (8-9-10)
  • Bruce McQuain: I Have Little Sympathy for the Japanese on this Subject (8-6-10)
  • Greg Mitchell: U.S. Sends Envoy to Hiroshima for First Time -- But Use of Bomb, Then and Now, Still Defended (8-6-10)
  • Kenzaburo Oe: Hiroshima and the Art of Outrage (8-6-10)
  • Jonathan Tobin: Hiroshima, Obama, and Truman (8-6-10)
  • Greg Mitchell: How the First Nuclear Blast, 65 Years Ago Today, Set Truman on Path to Hiroshima (8-16-10)
  • Greg Mitchell: Secrecy and Deadly Radiation: On the Birth of the Nuclear Age 65 Years Ago (7-14-10)
  • Oliver Kamm: Paul Tibbets and Enola Gay ... About those Obits (11-2-07)
  • Oliver Kamm: Hiroshima and Ethics (8-21-07)
  • Mark D. Tooley: The Methodist Church Mythologizes Nagasaki and Hiroshima (8-9-07)
  • Oliver Kamm: Hiroshima ... Terrible, but Not a Crime (8-6-07)
  • Fred Ikle: We Were Lucky After Hiroshima (8-5-05)
  • Greg Mitchell: Hiroshima Film Cover-up Exposed (8-12-05)
  • Nicholas Kristof: Hiroshima: Blood on Our Hands? (8-5-03)
  • Tadatoshi Akiba: Hiroshima (8-12-03)
  • Paul Olum: Memoir of a Bomb Maker ..."The Gadget" (7-5-02)

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    omar ibrahim baker - 10/19/2007

    The three A bombs dropped on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and a third that failed to explode were neither dropped to forestall a Japanese defeat of the USA military machine nor to address a crucial military imbalance that would lead to Japanese military occupation of the USA.

    Nor were these bombs used to break the back of the
    Japanese army compelling it to surrender and stop fighting.

    They were used to break the will of the Japanese nation through its civilian population by inflicting huge material damage, tremendous, immediate and prolonged, human suffering and countless civilian casualties.
    For the first time in modern, possibly all, history the most lethal means of war were directed consciously and specifically against the civilian population of the enemy; the crushing of which would lead its military machine to capitulation.

    The most "honourable" reason, the rationale, given for this act of unprecedented intentional mass killing of civilians was to minimize American military casualties had the war continued with conventional weapons; thus juxtaposing American military causalities with Japanese civilian casualties !

    This American breakthrough in strategic thinking and application; the all in war to break a nation's will to fight on by targeting and crushing its civilian population and NOT its military machine was also used by the USA in Viet Nam where the A bombs, for PR considerations, were supplanted by a judicious mixture of conventional, chemical (deforestation) and radioactive weapons aiming to achieve the same goal with an equal amount of lethality.

    By erasing the difference between civilian and military targets It seems inevitable to conclude that the American use of A bombs against Japan is the legitimate forefather, and legal precedent, of many things that followed including "terrorism" as with ETA, IRA, the PROVOS and Palestinian resistance movements.
    One thing though inevitably springs to mind: ETA, IRA, the PROVOS and the Palestinian resistance movements, irrespective of the justice of their respective causes, had no other alternative means of war, the USA had!


    James Jude Simonelli - 8/1/2005

    The use of singular weapons of incredible destruction were preceeded by firebombings of:
    LONDON, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo and others, where MANY, many more civilians died than military personnel.

    Let us address the Japanese attrocities in China, the Nazi genocide programs, Stalins millions-murdered BEFORE you question the actions of the nations that STOPPED those horrors from enveloping the world.

    JJS


    Scott Michael Ryan - 8/1/2005

    Mr. Baker:

    You tee up the straw man - and then you proceed to cut his head clean off!

    Where does one begin to address your sophistry?
    Three atom bombs dropped? You care to produce a source for the story of the 3rd one that didn’t explode?

    The use of these weapons was wrong because they weren’t used to, “forestall a Japanese defeat of the USA military machine nor to address a crucial military imbalance that would lead to Japanese military occupation of the USA.”? It counts for nothing in your world that the Japanese nation was the aggressor Word War II, does it? Or, that a conventional invasion of the mainland WOULD HAVE resulted in thousands of Allied casualties and millions of Japanese.

    A-bombs were not used in Vietnam for PR reasons? Proof? But “radioactive” weapons were used? Cite?

    And, at last, we come to the whole point of your ill informed screed; American action in WWII was the forefather of today’s terrorism. Your moronic attempt at moral equivalence while tearing up the trail markers of reasoned debate sickens me. The only thing you left out of your oh so predictable ant-American rant was a Hitler reference. I’m sure you’ll work one into the next post.


    James Jude Simonelli - 8/1/2005

    The horror of the two nuclear bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only the prelude to the unspeakable attrocities committed against the Earth.

    Japan got what it deserved for its aggression, insane Imperialism and submission to "warlords" of the military.

    The Earth did not deserve what it received in the aftermath of those first explosions at the USA test site and two Japanese bomb sites.

    We continued to contaminate the atmoshpere, the water, the earth, and the "genes" of tens of thousands with the dirty remnants of the atomic and subatomic particle fallout of the thousands of tests performed by the USA, USSR, China, India and others.

    We now await the decisions of the radicals and current rulers which city is next? Mecca or New York?

    JJS