hiroshima umbrellas
There have been a bunch of posts this weekend in the blogosphere about the use of atomic weapons at the end of the war. Whether it was justified in order to save lives in the invasion, intended to piss off the Russians, a horrible mistake, an act of war, what have you.
Some links off of BoingBoing...
The documentary. Some photographic evidence from the Lewis and Clarke University collection.
There are no good answers. Truman had an eye towards the post-war world after the Yalta conference. The Soviet Union was going to enter the war against Japan two days after the second bombing, having taken a month after V-E day to retool and move forces to the Pacific theater. Patton wanted to re-arm the Germans to go after the Soviets right after the war. And the Soviets, having lost 20 million people during the war, were understandably paranoid about the shape of things to come. So I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that Truman wasn't thinking of a larger picture.
There's a book by H. Bruce Franklin called War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination which goes into some of the history of weapons, war, and foreign policy. There are whole chapters on genocidal wars against Asians in literature (hell, Jack London wrote a novel about the Yellow Peril). Looking at propaganda during the war, it's clear that the caricatures of the Germans and the Japanese are very, very different animals. There's also that Life photo of the woman whose boyfriend sent her a skull captured in battle. Not to mention the thousands of Japanese-Americans put into internment camps here in the US, something not done for the Italian and German citizens. (Racist apologist Michelle Malkin would have you believe this was a wise decision, but she is so very, very wrong in this, as in most things. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese-American volunteers, was one of the most-decorated units of the war. Defending a shitty policy years ago to bolster arguments for Gitmo is just bad.)
The world changed a lot that week. Two bombs destroyed two cities, ushering in the framework for the Cold War and marking the US as the only nation to use atomic weapons in war. (Though private Canadian companies currently have enough nuclear material to accomplish the same thing. Good thing the NHL decided to have another season, eh?)
