On Aug. 9, 1945, as Japan’s high command met on surrender plans, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki killing 74,000 people instantly, a decision that’s never been adequately explained, writes John LaForge.
The bombing of Nagasaki as seen from the town of Koyagi, about 13 km south, taken 15 minutes after the bomb exploded. In the foreground, life seemingly went on unaffected. (Wikipedia)
By John LaForge
“The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, once said, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” — which he labeled a war crime.
In his 2011 book Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell says, “If Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki shows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.” Mitchell notes that the U.S. writer Dwight MacDonald cited in 1945 America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population.
The U.S. explosion of a plutonium nuclear bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945.
The New York Herald Tribune editorialized there was “no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind.”
Mitchell reports that the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in Slaughterhouse Five — said, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.”
On Aug. 17, 1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way:
“Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. We shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. We did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”
If shame is the natural response to Hiroshima, how is one to respond to Nagasaki, especially in view of all the declassified government papers on the subject? According to Dr. Joseph Gerson’s With Hiroshima Eye, some 74,000 were killed instantly at Nagasaki, another 75,000 were injured and 120,000 were poisoned.
If Hiroshima was unnecessary, how to justify Nagasaki?
The saving of thousands of U.S. lives is held up as the official justification for the two atomic bombings. Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering civilians to protect soldiers, what can be made of the Nagasaki bomb if Hiroshima’s incineration was not necessary?
The most amazingly under-reported statement in this context is that of Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes, quoted on the front page of the Aug. 29, 1945 New York Times with the headline, “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.” Byrnes cited what he called “proof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”
On Sept. 20, 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the famous bombing commander, told a press conference, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
According to Robert Lifton’s and Greg Mitchel’s Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial (1995), only weeks after Aug. 6 and 9, President Harry Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb “did not win the war.”
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted by Paul Nitze less than a year after the atom bombings, concluded that “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
Likewise, the Intelligence Group of the U.S. War Department’s Military Intelligence Division conducted a study from January to April 1946 and declared that the bombs had not been needed to end the war, reports Gar Alperovitz in his massive The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. The IG said it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.”
Russia did so, Aug. 8, 1945, and as Ward Wilson reports in his Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, six hours after news of Russia’s invasion of Sakhalin Island reached Tokyo — and before Nagasaki was bombed — the Supreme Council met to discuss unconditional surrender.
Experiments with Hell Fire?
Nagasaki was attacked with a bomb made of plutonium, named after Pluto, god of the underworld earlier known as Hades, in what some believe to have been a ghastly trial. The most toxic substance known to science, developed for mass destruction, plutonium is so lethal it contaminates everything nearby forever, every isotope a little bit of hell fire.
According to Atomic Cover-Up, Hitoshi Motoshima, mayor of Nagasaki from 1979 to 1995, said, “The reason for Nagasaki was to experiment with the plutonium bomb.” Mitchell notes that “hard evidence to support this ‘experiment’ as the major reason for the bombing remains sketchy.” But according to a wire service report in Newsweek, Aug. 20, 1945, by a journalist traveling with the president aboard the USS Augusta, Truman reportedly announced to his shipmates, “The experiment has been an overwhelming success.”
U.S. investigators visiting Hiroshima on Sept. 8, 1945 met with Japan’s leading radiation expert, Professor Masao Tsuzuki. One was given a 1926 paper on Tsuzuki’s famous radiation experiments on rabbits. “Ah, but the Americans, they are wonderful,” Tsuzuki told the group. “It has remained for them to conduct the human experiment!”
Originally published by Consortium News on Aug. 9, 2014.
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, edits its quarterly newsletter, and writes for PeaceVoice.
Good article, by Mr. Le Forge. I would like to add additional info on it, and if interested, go to the Aug.7, 2025 CN article by Professor Peter Kusnick, titled: “Atomic Bombing at 80! Truman’s “Human Sacrifice” to Subdue Moscow” and click on Comments and you’ll see what I wrote.
The Japanese were ready to surrender in 1944 but we (the US) wanted to keep it going for another year for $$$ reasons.
Brig. Gen. Carter Clarke:
“We brought them[the Japanese] down to an abject surrender through the accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone, and when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”
p359 “The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth” by Gar Alperovitz
Two prototypes to test for comparison in preparation for mass production. as in all tests of shock and awe-ability of military technology over the ages of mankind’s addiction to war..
No mystery, pandora’s box was opened, the MIC had a new toy. It was always going to be used, if it hadn’t been Japan, it would have been Korea or Vietnam.
That generation of the MIC has now passed, and now the new generation wants to use their toys.
Lessons learnt, never again ? No chance, idiots are still idiots and psychopaths are still psychopaths.
With our current governments it’s only a matter of time …
The Emperor issue is most important. Here’s one way to read the bombing of Nagasaki. The Potsdam Declaration issued in July 1945 gives no reason to believe that the US and allies had agreed to let the Emperor stay in place. Hiroshima was hit on August 6, and the Japanese did not agree to end the conflict. Same after the bombing of Nagasaki. In fact, on August 11, news was leaked or announced that the Emperor would stay in place–so no “unconditional surrender.” The war didn’t end until 4 days later, on August 15. So it might well have been the refusal of the US and allies to agree to let the Emperor stay on that prolonged the war.
The bombings were never about Japan; they were always about the USSR. Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were slaughtered to send a message to Stalin that the US had the weapons and was willing to use them against anyone.