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Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
The worst act of terrorism in history
BY ROSE ANA DUEÑAS AND RAISA PAGES—FOR GRANMA
INTERNATIONAL—
THE
sun was shining and the sky was blue on August 6,
1945, as 12-year-old Miyoko Matsubara began work
with more than 200 classmates from her girls’ junior
high school in Hiroshima, Japan, demolishing wooden
houses for firebreaks. They were laughing and
calling out to each other. It was 8:15 a.m.
 “Suddenly,
my best friend, Takiko, shouted, ‘I hear the sound
of a B-29!’ Thinking this was not possible because
the all-clear had sounded, I looked up and “ saw a
luminous body drop from the tail of the plane“I
heard an indescribable, deafening roar.
“When I regained consciousness, the bright sunny
morning had turned into night. I was in a dense
dusty mist. Takiko, who had been standing next me,
had simply disappeared“The only clothes left on me
were dirty white underwear. The white color
protected me from death“I realized that my face,
hands, and legs had been burned and were swollen
with the skin peeled off and hanging down in shreds.
I frantically started running.
“On
my way home, I saw a lot of people. All of them were
almost naked and looked like characters out of
horror movies with their skin and flesh horribly
burnt and blistered.” Thousands were trapped under
collapsed buildings. Dead and dying people lay
everywhere; crawling and shuffling, they tried to
get away from the burning fires that surrounded
them. Their eyes were hanging out of their sockets,
their hair stood on end; they walked with their arms
out in front of them, crying out for their mothers
and whispering desperately for “water, water!”
It
was the end of World War II. A U.S. Air Force plane
had just dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a city
of 350,000, mostly civilians. Shock waves from the
explosion leveled all houses within a mile and a
half of ground zero. Most of those indoors were
crushed under the destroyed buildings or burned
alive by the ensuing firestorm.
About 100,000 people died instantly, including 8,000
schoolchildren like Miyoko who had been mobilized to
build firebreaks. Three days later, on August 9 the
United States dropped another atomic bomb on the
city of Nagasaki, right over its most densely
populated area, instantly killing 74,000 and
injuring another 75,000.
Many
people lay agonizing with little or no medical care
for days or weeks with maggots infesting their
rotting flesh before they died from heavy doses of
radiation, burns and other injuries. More than
60,000 died within months, and another 70,000 died
by 1950; many were slow deaths, from cancer.
Sixty-five percent of those killed on the day of the
bombing in Hiroshima were elderly people, women, and
children. In Nagasaki, about 10,000 of the dead were
Koreans, among the 2 million living in Japan at the
time, many as slave laborers. Around 40 percent of
those who died in both cities were never found. They
evaporated into thin air, burned into ashes, or were
carried out to sea when they stumbled into the
rivers for water.
The
official defense for the attacks with the A-bomb –
which some still stand by today – was a lie: that
the bombings would accelerate Japan’s surrender, end
the war and save lives. Actually, Japan had already
expressed its desire to end the war and the United
States knew it and ignored it. The chief of staff of
the U.S. armed forces at the time, Admiral William
D. Leahy, admitted, “The Japanese were already
defeated and ready to surrender because of the
effective sea blockade and the successful bombing
with conventional weapons. It was my reaction that
the scientists and others wanted to make this test
because of the vast sums that had been spent on the
project. Truman knew that, and so did the people
involved.”
Ironically, government officials admitted as such
only a year later.
Previously, the United States had firebombed almost
every other city of Japan, including Tokyo. On March
9 of that same year, 300 U.S. bombers dropped oil
and then more than 1,600 tons of napalm-filled bombs
on that city. More than 100,000 residents of Tokyo
burned to death. A report filed at the time by the
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that
“probably more persons lost their lives by fire in
Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the
history of man.”
David Kruidenier was a navigator flying B-29 bombing
raids in Japan in 1945. He admitted: “We had been
firebombing the largest cities in order to kill the
maximum number of civilians, and Hiroshima was the
largest untouched available city remaining.” With
just one bomb, they did what had previously required
hundreds of planes and thousands of tons of
explosives.
THE
START OF THE COLD WAR
It
is apparent that the A-bomb was dropped to test it
on live targets and to prove the overwhelming
military superiority of the United States: it not
only had a plutonium bomb, it was willing to use it.
This
message of terror and intimidation was aimed at the
rest of the world, particularly the Soviet Union.
The allies had already agreed at Yalta that the USSR
would attack Japan three months after Germany
surrendered. Stalin had notified the United States
that the Russian armies would be ready for that
attack on schedule: August 8. But the United States
did not want the USSR to go to war with Japan. The
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6.
US
imperialism was not in the war simply to defeat the
German Nazis and Japanese imperialists. It had its
eyes on the war booty: Europe and possibly China.
The Soviet Union had done what the United States
needed: it had defeated Germany with the blood of
millions of Russian workers and peasants who were
defending their homeland and the conquests of their
Revolution. The United States didn’t need it as an
ally any longer.
Soon
after the Japanese government surrendered on August
14, President Truman halted all lend-lease
shipments, including food, to the Soviet Union, its
ally during the war. By October, Truman was
attempting to rally the people of the United States
for a confrontation with the USSR – the “communist
threat.”
“There can be no compromise with the forces of
evil....[The] atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki must be a signal,” Truman stated.
The
civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
murdered not to end World War II, but to begin the
Cold War. The so-called “American Century” had
begun.
Immediately after the bombing, the United States
began to lie about what it had done. On August 9,
the same day that Nagasaki was bombed, President
Harry Truman stated, “The world will note that the
first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a
military base. That was because we wished in this
first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the
killing of civilians.”
DISTORTING HISTORY
The
term “terrorism” has been mystified by the big
business media. If an Iraqi, tired of watching how
children die in his country, straps explosives to
his waist and blows them up as a U.S. military
convoy goes by, it is an act of terrorism. But if a
U.S. soldier fires missiles at that country’s
civilian population, it is not terrorism – it is a
defensive military action against an insurgency.
Until 1960, the U.S. government prohibited the
release of photographs documenting damage from the
bombings. Christian Herter, U.S. secretary of state
at the time, wrote to John McCone, director of the
Atomic Energy Commission, that his department had
"serious reservations about the release of these
photographs because we have been concerned over the
political impact in Japan particularly, and because
of our reluctance to present the Communists with a
propaganda weapon they would use against us in all
parts of the world.”
Within Japan, during the U.S. occupation that lasted
from the end of the war until 1952, U.S. officials
introduced a Press Code, censoring Japanese news
reports and scientific publications carrying
information on the A-bomb attacks. The occupation
authorities confiscated diaries, poems, photographs,
movie film, medical specimens, slides for
microscopes and doctors’ records on the treatment of
radiation: tens of thousands of objects.
All
types of terrorist acts are repugnant, but besides
condemning them it is necessary to understand why
such acts occur. The intellectual Atilio Borón
warned of the “trap” set by “well-meaning
intellectuals” to use that happy expression of
Alfonso Sastre’s: they invite us to condemn such
monstrosities out of hand, but without asking
ourselves about their causes, shutting down all
discussion about the other terrorism, that which
emerged and was consolidated as state policy
beginning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and
iImplemented by Washington with the ethical and
political backing of the governments of advanced
capitalism.
The
ideologues of the day take institutionalized
terrorism and naturalize it, make it invisible,
Borón affirms, noting that through this ideological
alchemy, such terrorism becomes the “war against
terrorism,” while the terrorism of their adversaries
rotates its dialectical relationship with the first
and becomes the sinister expression of a few evil
geniuses who are running wild through the world.
Recent statements by the U.S. president exemplify
how this ideological hocus-pocus is managed, when he
had the cynicism to say that “These kind of people
who blow up subways and buses are not people you can
negotiate with or reason with or appease,” repeating
that anyone who kills innocent people is a
terrorist.
So
what kind of people ordered the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs – weren’t
the children and other human beings who died in
those acts of terror innocent people? What were the
four million Vietnamese who were massacred fighting
for their country’s independence? What are the
Iraqis who are invaded, occupied, tortured and
murdered? What were the 73 Cubans who died in a
plane that was blown up in mid-flight, with the
bomber protected by the U.S. government?
Imperialism does not seek the reasons that generate
violence – it multiplies it with acts of terror.
What ethics were applied by Harry Truman when he
wanted to terrify the world by dropping the two
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? We are still
suffering the consequences of that horrific act.
The
official U.S. version of those terrible attacks
should be pulverized into dust. The world was never
the same after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth
about the worst act of terrorism in history must be
known. Only by transforming the economic and social
systems that generate violence – capitalism itself –
can we combat the roots of the violence that
predominates in today’s world. |
