[ABOUT KAMM: I am an author, columnist and banker. I write regularly for The Times, and have written also for The Guardian, Prospect, The New Republic, Index on Censorship and The Jewish Chronicle. I am an advisory editor of Democratiya. My book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy was published in 2005. I was a contributor to Britain's Bomb: What Next?, edited by Brian Wicker and General Sir Hugh Beach, in 2006. I have worked at the Bank of England, HSBC Securities and Commerzbank Securities, and am a founder of an asset management and advisory firm, WMG Advisors LLP, based in London.]

Gentlemen,
It is past time that I concluded my review of your excursions in the historiography of the Pacific War. I invited you to confirm what you seemed diffident about stating explicitly, viz. that you had no intention of writing to the film critic David Thomson or the BBC director Stephen Walker to apologise for having lectured them with"information" that you now know to be unreliable. It is 14 months since you learned, from my blog, that historians have known since 1995 that the conclusion of the US Strategic Bombing Survey - the counterfactual of an early Japanese surrender even if the A-bomb had not been used - is not supported by the same survey's body of evidence, and that citing that conclusion is a nice example of swallowing official propaganda because you wanted to believe it. You have since had the dispiriting experience of finding that academic historians confirm what I told you in the first place.

So far as I understood your position, you believed that no correction of your erroneous historical claims was necessary; and the reason none was necessary was that I am a supporter of the Iraq War. My readers will be unsurprised, as I am unfazed, that you decided against stating this position explicitly. I would have been genuinely and pleasantly astonished, however, if you had taken the reputable course of apologising to the journalists you'd harangued and who turned out to be better informed than you. Media Lens is known for never owning up to errors and never publishing corrections - a standard part of the way journalists operate. As George Monbiot told you last year:"Rather than offering a clear, objective analysis of why the media works the way it does, who pulls the strings, how journalists are manipulated, knowingly or otherwise, you appear to have decided instead to use your platform merely to attack those who do not accept your narrow and particular doctrine."

I find your position dishonest but I was prepared for it. I am beyond incredulity, however, at your citing once more in your defence a hapless figure whom I had assumed you'd discreetly retired from this discussion:"In our January 6, 2004 Media Alert on the terrible atomic bomb attacks on Japan, we cited a highly respected historian - Howard Zinn."

We have been through this. Howard Zinn is not"a highly respected historian", and your resort to obsequious honorific is a nice indicator of your insecurity. Zinn's magnum opus is a largely worthless popular book neatly summarised by the left-wing historian Michael Kazin as"polemic disguised as history", whose author is"an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities". Zinn has no record of scholarly attainment in the study of the Pacific War. His one essay on the subject that I'm aware of accepts the USSBS conclusion on the"early surrender" counterfactual without a trace of scepticism or critical inquiry. When you consider that Zinn's idea of "admirable and painstaking research" is a book claiming that 9/11 was an"inside job", his unquestioning approach to the USSBS conclusion doesn't seem so surprising. He will, after all, believe literally anything that accords with what he is ideologically predisposed to wish were true.

It was, in the circumstances, unfeeling of you to appeal to Zinn for help after I had first pointed out your ahistorical assertions on the A-bomb. You will doubtless remember what happened next. Zinn hadn't read the very source he claimed to be citing; had no awareness of death rates in the Pacific War; completely misunderstood the significance of messages sent from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow; evinced no familiarity with recent historical research on the Japanese surrender; and cited a paper (about Iwo Jima) whose import he had misunderstood and whose author he misidentified. Your disasters in this debate stem in the first place from having read nothing on the subject bar Professor Zinn, so it was hardly likely that he would be of material assistance to you in your distress. It would be churlish of me, however, to refrain from granting that, while Zinn may be a clueless crank, he is far from the most absurd of the purported" credible sources" for your work. (If you're not familiar with the mishaps of "Neil Clark, a Balkans specialist" in his encounters with source material, let alone with his unavailing efforts to prevent public exposure of them, then a rich and diverting source of recreation awaits you.)

So far as I can work out from your evasiveness, you now accept the unreliability of USSBS - which will be bad news for Zinn - but insist that it doesn't matter because it is only"one part of the evidence for the key argument", viz. that the bomb was unnecessary for securing Japanese surrender. Extraordinarily, you still haven't grasped that your new deus ex machina Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is no support to you. Hasegawa does not agree, as your initial cited source Gar Alperovitz has spent 40 years maintaining, that Japan was trying to surrender before the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I take particular exception, in explaining this point to you by means of direct quotation from Hasegawa, that you accuse me of misrepresenting Hasegawa's wider thesis. I was in fact starting from the impossibly low base of your own knowledge of this subject, and pointing out that Hasegawa directly contradicts your (and Zinn's, and Alperovitz's) previous assertions. There is a great deal wrong with Hasegawa's wider thesis of a"race" to the bomb, and I'm happy to explain it to you; but in your misnamed"Cogitation", you weren't even at the stage of understanding what that thesis was or how it related to the historiographical debate.

As you were not aware when you first wrote to the luckless David Thomson, the debate has moved on from the old revisionist arguments about"atomic diplomacy" and the"early surrender" counterfactual. Hasegawa's argument is about the importance of Soviet entry into the war relative to the shock of the bomb. He maintains that without Soviet entry into the war, Japan would have continued fighting until rendered incapable of doing so by several A-bombs, by a conventional invasion, or by a naval blockade. It is - believe me - not possible for you to accept both Hasegawa's argument and Zinn's claim to you that:"In Japan, the Emperor was supreme, and he clearly wanted to arrange surrender terms, hence the dispatch of an envoy to Moscow."

If you are going to evacuate yourselves from the wreckage of your earlier position, as taken from Zinn, you need to know first what you're giving up, and secondly what the problem is with your new position. The problem with Hasegawa is that his supporting material has been shredded by critical reviewers. I have already told you that I have no interest in your"Buddhist philosophy of compassion", but I note that this path to enlightenment is evidently compatible with a highly advanced personal vanity. You expostulate that I"have outrageously accused Hasegawa of 'manipulation of source material'". Gentlemen, you are not competent to judge Hasegawa's use of source material: you haven't even understood what Hasegawa's argument is, let alone what evidence supports it. But if you wish to argue this point, then I'm game.

I refer you again to the case of Hasegawa's misrepresentation of the eyewitness accounts of President Truman's press conference announcing Soviet entry into the Pacific War. Wishing to present that decision as a blow to Truman, Hasegawa maintains that these contemporary press reports, from the Washington Post and the New York Times, depict a man suffering"profound disappointment". Hasegawa leaves out of his account the following sentences from the NYT report (emphasis added):"[Truman's] concluding words, 'That is all,' were all but drowned out by the scramble of news and radio reporters for the nearest exit to rush to their telephones. Mr. Truman and White House officials present rocked with laughter at the sensation his 'simple announcement' had precipitated."

When my correspondent Michael Kort observed, in a review here, that Hasegawa had left out this relevant material - which casts doubt on the notion that Truman was a severely disappointed man - the point appears to have been well taken. In his edited volume The End of the Pacific War, 2007, p. 224, Hasegawa repeats his assertion about Truman's press conference but removes the footnoted references to the contemporary press reports, thereby making it impossible for the reader to check the accuracy of his account. There may well be a compassionate Buddhist explanation for this, but as those ancient mysteries are closed to me I shall boringly repeat my observation about Hasegawa's manipulation of source material to fit a prespecified conclusion.

I have dealt at some length and in several posts with your misconceptions on this issue, for various reasons. The subject is of immense intrinsic importance even if your opinions are not. Dispelling some of the hoarier myths about Truman's A-bomb decision is a worthwhile aim of historical argument. On a parochial level, I was taken aback by your insulting manner towards a working journalist who had written a perfectly defensible comment on a subject he understood better than you. I also wanted to see if Media Lens would have the grace to acknowledge error and draw back when made to confront the limits of its understanding.

Taking these factors together, I find it easier to draw a definitive conclusion about Media Lens than I do about the debates over the Pacific War. The co-founder and editor of Media Lens David Edwards is, in one important respect, of a character with David Cromwell. It is this. As a matter of demonstrable fact and not speculative hypothesis, David Cromwell, founder and editor of Media Lens, is an ignoramus.

Yours fraternally,
Oliver Kamm

Arnold Shcherban - 2/21/2008

Mr. Kamm,

My response to your last comments will be multi-pronged.

Firstly, it looks like you either completely lost the main logical thread of our contention or deliberately tried to deviate from it. At least, I cannot imagine the other explanation to the fact that instead of trying to counteract my leading argument, which addressed the core of this debate, you alluded to the following: <Reagan's position at Reykjavik was (whether through accident or design) fundamentally ambiguous owing to his blurring the difference between ballistic missiles and strategic weapons.> And because I’m absolutely aloof (showing “obvious” incompetence) with the inner workings of the Reagan’s perceptual brain channels (are you hinting on his Alzheimer condition?), I cannot see the reasons behind his respective decisions and behavior???!
But even if this is true, how does it support your contention that Reagan, and American team, not Gorbachev offered the full elimination of nuclear weapons?
And how does it negate the quoted by me Soviet, of 15 January 1986 Program of Liquidation of Nuclear Weapons by the Year 2000, well known to American side months before meeting in Reykjavik along with the decision by Gorbachev, not by Reagan, to put it on the negotiating table there as the main course?

Secondly, you surely want to be holier than Roman Pope, as they say.
President Reagan himself stated unambiguously that he could not say “yes” to Gorbachev in response to the comprehensive, sweeping offers of the latter, since he (Reagan) already promised the SDI to American people.
But you know his motivations better…
That is what you call “critical analysis” and firm "grasp of the material"?

Thus, your last response was about anything else but the main content of this debate, the conclusion which leads to my "cordial advice" to you, Mr. Kamm: when debating somebody who does not have any "blurring" in their perception of your position, stick to the major points of the contention and don’t try to change a subject in question.

And finally, I never doubted your superior competence in all matters concerning personality of President Reagan, his perceptive abilities on the issues of nuclear armaments, and his presidency, in overall. On the other hand, I never claimed (during this debate), as you well know, my full (or even close to such) competence on the subject in question. Which, in view of your claims of my "obvious" incompetence raises a question:
1) Does one need full academic competence in a subject to make a valid pronouncement on any of the subject's conclusions and theories, or does a basic initial understanding accompanied with careful analysis of the issues involved suffice?
I can offer quite a number of historical precedents from the wide specter of subjects and issues, which clearly demonstrate that not fully competent (and even "obviously" incompetent - from the academic/formal point of view) folks sometimes “performed” much better than the prominent specialists in the respective areas of knowledge.
It is especially true in the area of US-Soviet relations and negotiations, in general. If you are an expert, or just an acute observer in the latter area, you should be familiar with what I'm talking about here. The number of egregious mistakes, miscalculations, and misjudgments made by so-called Sovietologists, US intelligence agencies, and presidential advisers is impressive, indeed.
Although I may present myself as a megalomaniac, let me tell you the following.
Over the last 25 years, being just an observer of events of international politics, I made quite a number of predictions and evaluations in different spheres of economic and political life, based on my certainly limited access
to facts and figures and modest analytical skills.
Those are some things that I predicted, on which the majority of the experts failed: the decay of the USSR with one year accuracy,
the rise of Islamic extremism, more dangerous world as the result of unipolar formation, created by the lack of sufficient deterrence to a single superpower, the absence of Iraq’s WMDs (in 2002), fast and easy US-UK military
victory in Iraq, the Iraq’s civil religious war between Sunnis and Shiites, caused by the foreign invasion, overthrowing of the secular regime and de-Baathization of Iraqi political and social life and other less important ones.
I also maintained for years, in spite of the majority expert opinion, that the US deliberately provoked the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in 1979.
Only relatively recently Mr. Bzezinsky, acknowledged that it was exactly the case.
So, although lacking your professional qualifications, I’m not particularly a slouch in the area of analytical skills and political insight and able to successfully debate those… who can follow the debate’s logical thread and stay within the debate’s contents, ‘cause otherwise the concrete analysis is
replaced with an eclectic mess.

Oliver Kamm - 2/21/2008

Mr Shcherban, my cordial advice to you is not to make ringing declaratory assertions on matters about which you are painfully obviously incompetent to comment. Before you handle primary documents you need to gain an overview of the political background to these discussions. You haven't, e.g., grasped that Reagan's position at Reykjavik was (whether through accident or design) fundamentally ambiguous owing to his blurring the difference between ballistic missiles and strategic weapons. It was because Reagan either didn't understand or didn't care about that difference that he went way beyond anything his administration or his European allies(rightly, in my view) would have countenanced. And it's because you demonstrably don't understand the material you're dealing with that you can conclude with so fatuous a conclusion.

Arnold Shcherban - 2/21/2008

Mr. Kamm,
I welcome your decision to respond
to one of my secondary value points, made in my communication with Messr. Proyect and having no immediate relation with the article inquestion, though what I would really appreciate
was your opinion on the "strategic" argument I introduced in my first comment on your article.

As far as my unprofessional comprehension grasps your response, it is concerned with a lack/absense of the evidential basis and "critical inquiry" for my comment about
who rejected what during Reagan-Gorbachev talks at Reykjavik, 11-12 October 1986.
With that you provided a very short exchange between Reagan, Gorbachev, and Shultz consisting basically of a couple of phrases that allegedly rebuffs my "unsubstantiated" statement that it is the USSR and Gorbachev who suggested full elimination of nuclear weapons, only
to be rejected by the USA and Reagan.

Perhaps, you and me differ in our interpretation of the term "critical inquiry", so I would like to clarify my side of it.
Critical inquiry concerning such global strategic issue as elimination of nuclear arsenals of two military superpowers (at the time) is a very ( I would say - deadly) serious, complex, delicate, and long endeavor.
It certainly involves tons of documentary evidence and theoretical interpretation of the latter, and therefore a couple of conversational
sentences exchanged by the people involved in the discussion on that issue, shows almost nothing, and proves even less.
On the other side, you're right in stating that I provided no documentary justification at all for the conclusion you consider to be opposed by the available documentary evidence.
So, in the spirit of "critical inquiry" I found several (previously secret) documents from Soviet and US archives, called "The Reykjavik File: Previously Secret U.S. and Soviet Documents on the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Summit". Of course, for the purpose of our narrower defined debate
we don't need all of them, or even
one document in its entirety.
Therefore, I'm offering you the excerpts taken from the brief reviews of those documents. You can find a match between what was printed here and the content of the documents, by checking them in the US National Security Archive.

<Gorbachev's instructions for the group preparing for Reykjavik, 4 October 1986, 5 pp.
...Gorbachev's ultimate goal for Reykjavik-he reiterates it several times during the meeting-is total liquidation of nuclear weapons based on the Soviet 15 January 1986 Program of Liquidation of Nuclear Weapons by the Year 2000.>
<"The President's Trip to Reykjavik, Iceland, October 9-12, 1986 - Issues Checklist for the Secretary," U.S. Department of State, 7 October 1986, 23 pp. (first 2 sections only, Checklist and Walk-through)
...Notable is the very first item on the latter, which presupposes that the best they will achieve is some agreement on a number of ballistic missile warheads between the U.S. proposal of 5500 and the Soviet proposal of 6400, rather than the radical cuts that wound up on the table at Reykjavik.>

All these documentary pieces clearly
show that the US had no intentions to
agree on even much less comprehensive
offers, not already mentioning such a huge one as total elimination of the nuclear weapons.

Moreover, President Reagan himself
acknowledged after Reykjavik that for him the straight offer to wipe out nuclear arsenals of the US and USSR made by Gorbachev came as a big surprise, but he could not agree to that, since he had already "promised
SDI to American people".

All unbiased observers that time pointed out an extreme "awkwardness" of that excuse given by Reagan, even measured by quite low standards of the White House rhetorical justifications.
Careful analysis of mentioned events and their chronology, related facts, concepts, and the negotiations' documents taken together with their logic forbids me to conclude that it was US and Reagan who proposed full elimination of the nuclear weapons and that Reagan did not essentially reject Gorbachev's proposal of the same content.

On the other token that analysis makes me to suspect that either the one who was taken the notes you presented (provided they are genuine quotes) did not do a fair job, or those notes have been doctored (I hope you won't assert that something like this never happened in the history of White House and US government)

Respectfully yours, A.S.

Oliver Kamm - 2/20/2008

I'm pleased that Messrs Proyect and Shcherban believe in the value of documentary evidence, but perplexed that they didn't think it worth embarking on a search for same before posting their comments. Shcherban's purported account whereby "Reagan rejected Gorbachev's straightforward offer of complete elimination of the two superpowers' nuclear arsenals under full inspection" is directly contradicted by the Memcon of the Reagan-Gorbachev talks at Reykjavik, 11-12 October 1986, contained in the Executive Secretariat of NSC Records, File Folder 8690725. Reagan declared that he would be happy "if we eliminated all nuclear weapons". Gorbachev responded: "We can do that. We can eliminate them." George Shultz interjected: "Let's do it." Gorbachev then declared that if the Strategic Defence Initiative was not confined to the laboratory, they could "forget everything they had discussed".

You may take issue with Reagan's stand on SDI (though it made sense in the context of his belief in total nuclear disarmament), but the chronology of who proposed what and who rejected what is part of the primary sources. I'm pleased that Messrs Proyect and Shcherban should interest themselves in a site devoted to the study of history, but I'd be obliged if they embarked on any future interventions on this site in the spirit that historians would adopt. I am not, of course, "speaking in the name of the left" in extending this request: I'm just pointing out the difference between critical inquiry and what Proyect/Shcherban may be used to.

Arnold Shcherban - 2/18/2008

You're right Louis.
I've already reminded to some Reaganite authors on other occasions how their hero, alleged peacemaker and nuclear disarmament extraordinaire Reagan rejected Gorbachev's straightforward
offer of complete elimination of the two superpowers' nuclear arsenals under full inspection, just to receive a resounding "NOooooooo" from the former.
But you know those ideological types: they never acknowledge no evidence, no matter how overwhelming it is, if
it contradicts their obsolete dogmas, while trying to pass off any piece of informational garbage that they hope
fly in order to support those dogmas.

Louis Nelson Proyect - 2/18/2008

Kamm is a real character. Speaking in the name of the left, he attacks Reagan for having illusions in a nuke-free world. When somebody who holds such a view can describe Reagan as a kind of utopian peacenik, Orwell's ghost must feel compelled to cry out, "See, I told you so!"

Arnold Shcherban - 2/17/2008

There are some more or less strong arguments and evidence on both sides of this argument, regardless of the comparable professionalism of the respective authors.
Therefore, the issue of military necessity of the use of the A-bombs
against Japan may seem to remain controvercial forever.
There is however one argument of a broad strategic kind that makes the anti-nuclear stance, at the least, more sustainable than the opposite one.
The US military invariably used overwhelming air bombing campaign against civilian installations and targets over all the
wars it has been involved in: agressive or defensive wars.
To give just a few examples, take Germany, Korea, and Vietnam, and for
the fresher ones - Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where validity of the excuse of military necessity had much lesser merit than in the case of "supersuicidal" Japan.
Moreover, only two out of many those wars could be qualified as defensive; the rest were either openly or overtly aggressive.
On the other hand, the US is the country that threatened foreign states
(big and small ones) with the use of nuclear weaponry more than any other country in the world.
Thus, the history of the US political and military strategy puts much more weight on the anti-nuclear side of the scale in the A-bomb-against-Japan
debate.