80 Years of Lies: The US Finally Admits It Knew It Didn’t Need To Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the world is drifting as close to another nuclear confrontation as it has been in decades.
With Israeli and American attacks on Iranian nuclear energy sites, India and Pakistan going to war in May, and escalating violence between Russia and NATO-backed forces in Ukraine, the shadow of another nuclear war looms large over daily life.
Eighty Years Of Lies
The United States remains the only nation to have dropped an atomic bomb in anger. While the dates of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are seared into the popular conscience of all Japanese people, those days hold far less salience in American society.
When discussed at all in the U.S., this dark chapter in human history is usually presented as a necessary evil, or even a day of liberation—an event that saved hundreds of thousands of lives, prevented the need for an invasion of Japan, and ended the Second World War early. This, however, could not be further from the truth.
American generals and war planners agreed that Japan was on the point of collapse, and had, for weeks, been attempting to negotiate a surrender. The decision, then, to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians was one taken to project American power across the world, and to stymie the rise of the Soviet Union.
“It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” General Henry Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945, wrote in his 1949 memoirs.
Arnold was far from alone in this assessment. Indeed, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer during World War II, bitterly condemned the United States for its decision and compared his own country to the most savage regimes in world history.
As he wrote in 1950:
It is my opinion 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. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
By 1945, Japan had been militarily and economically exhausted. Losing key allies Italy in 1943 and Germany by May 1945, and facing the immediate prospect of an all-out Soviet invasion of Japan, the country’s leaders were frantically pursuing peace negotiations. Their only real condition appeared to be that they wished to keep as a figurehead the emperor—a position that, by some accounts, dates back more than 2,600 years.
“I am convinced,” former President Herbert Hoover wrote to his successor, Harry S. Truman, “if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan—tell them they can have their emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists—you’ll get a peace in Japan—you’ll have both wars over.”
Many of Truman’s closest advisors told him the same thing. “I am absolutely convinced that had we said they co
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
