Quite a story-think it will get much mainstream attention?

I never could understand how the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were viewed as being "horrendous, immoral attacks" but the Tokyo and Dresden firebombing were viewed as business as usual.

Kristof is the mainstream. Thanks, AL. I almost had him pegged as the sort of person who you could predict what he was going ot say before he said it ...

Hell, the war faction in the Japanese government even attempted a coup to prevent Emperor's surrender announcement. It failed.

Maybe we could get Billo Moyers to do a documentary based on Kristoff's findings. THAT is when I'll consider the story mainstream.

Ray- right on- I was already framing my reply (with a blunderbuss!)before I got to his findings. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks.

The firebombing of Dresden is considered an abomination. Hell, Kurt Vonnegut is like Hamlet's ghost on the subject.

I really wish that American writers would refer to that emperor as "Showa". Japanese emperors are properly called by their era names after their death. The current emperor will be "Akihito" only until his passing, upon which he'll be "Heisei". It makes a contemporary writer sound like a hick to say "Hirohito", at least to my ears...

I agree with the article, but does this fall into the category of everything the US did in WW2 is good, and everything since is bad? Some people seem to have this outlook. Could it be more of the same?

Comment please:
As horrifiic as these events were, didn't they serve as a potent talisman, preventing use of the 'bomb' during the entire Cold War? How much more likely would a 'Hot' War have been, if the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't there to provide examples of where it could lead?

Lurker -

I think you're absolutely right, and that the spectre of Hiroshima did a lot to keep the post WWII war 'Cold'.

A.L.

I think there's another point being missed: even if what the US did was bad, does that mean that we want to give everyone, including unstable regimes like Iran and Iraq and North Korea, the ability to go back to WW2 style total war? Despite what all the usual suspects say, we have fought the current war in a very limited fashion; If Hussein, or Kim Jong Il, wants to go back to the old days when nations committed warfare by firebombing cities, should we let them? Doesn't that chain of reasoning end with us forced to do all the things over again, in retaliation, that the usual suspects say robbed us of legitimacy?

Kristof here sounds like one of those rare Democrats who recognizes that foreigners are not mere backdrops for domestic politics. Many people, not just Americans, tend to think that foreigners are not real, and that everything foreigners do, say or think is due to some domestic cause/event/disliked faction, as opposed to foreigners acting the way they do for foreign reasons.

A good line about this tendency was expressed by a Southern gentlemen named Pickett who, when asked why the South lost at Gettysburg, replied that he always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.

Those who consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki only in terms of the American side are perfect examples of this attitude.

Kristof, like most people, seems to think there were not alternative WMD to the A-Bomb.

The same June 18, 1945 meeting where Truman decided to use the A-Bomb also presented the case for the mass use of chemical weapons against the civilian population of Japan.

Using gas, not a ground invasion, was the real American "Plan B" for ending WW2.

Don't forget the Japanese nuclear program. Can't dig up the link at the moment though.

You know, I would've thought that when Hirohito's (I guess I'm a hick) papers were released a few years back and they showed that the bomb was central in his decision to support surrender, that would have ended the American left's myth about the bomb.

Yeah, I kno, call me naive...

I thing it's time people got off bashing the US for those first two bombs. What was so horrible about them? Oh, they killed a rather large number of people. Well, in
the history of the world, the toll of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs has been vastly exceeded many times over, most recently in Rwanda where the deaths
were all exclusively the result of old-fashioned hand craftsmanship. But the oh-so-caring US-bashers have wasted no time railing and recoiling against the perpetrators, apparently because good machetes are morally superior to bad nuclear weapons and the victims must have all died happy.

Likewise for the Pol Pot regime's 'intellecticide', and for Stalin's six million starved Ukrainians - it doesn't matter that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dwarfed by those body counts. The USA didn't do the deeds, so no energy is wasted in thunderous accusations.

If ideology were properly recognized as a WMD, the lefties would be the grand slam perp kings.

I'm reminded of an anti-war demonstrator at a reunion of the bomb makers.

The sign said One Bomb - Too Many.

Teller (I think) replied "One bomb? Not enough."

"The chief cause is US nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research into mini-nukes and other so-called 'useable nuclear weapons,' appears to worship nuclear weapons as God," he said.

Where do people get their hyperbole?

In the eve of Hiroshima, there was an Allied declaration adressing Japan, which is worth reading until today:

"The time has come for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason."

Japan didn't listen, and a few days later the U.S. dropped the bomb. The fallout of this event still shapes todays Korea and Germany.