Today, on August 6, it is exactly 63 years since the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. On August 9, it dropped yet another nuke on Nagasaki. The U.S. president Harry Truman went on the radio to claim: «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.»
A "military base"? Avoiding killing civilians? Hiroshima was a large, metropolitan area, and the largest city in the Chugoku region of western Honshu, the largest of Japan's islands. By the end of 1945, the nukes had killed 220.000 people, where half of them perished in the blasts and the rest by radiation and other reasons attributed to the bombs.
This is exactly what Truman wanted. The military "target commitee" led by Robert Oppenheimer «[...] agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance [...] obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan [...] making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized [...] Kyoto has the advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon. Hiroshima has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focussing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed.»
«Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history.»
Noam Chomsky - The Responsibility of Intellectuals, 1967
To this day, the bombings have often been accredited as a necessary evil in order to end the war, while mini-nukes are introduced as acceptable munitions for modern warfare. It's all for good; it's us or them. The lies are still there. Are we hiding behind what Richard Falk called «a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen with positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence»?
