Reply #3: U.S. History of Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki More Fiction Than Fact

[Clara T]

Official U.S. history of atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is more fiction than fact

"The experiment has been an overwhelming success," President Harry S. Truman reportedly told his shipmates upon learning that the U.S. military had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. When considering the bomb's immediate and generational aftereffects on human life, President Truman's statements evoke horrific images of Dr. Frankenstein standing over his own distortion of humanity. Like Frankenstein's monster, the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrate what science can do if it is in the wrong hands, but we're not supposed to think that way. We're supposed to believe that the U.S. military's use of the atomic bomb was a justified response to Pearl Harbor and the only way to end the war with Japan.

President Truman's first official announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima reflects all that we are supposed to believe about our nation's actions. Since the president was still at sea, his assistant press secretary Eben Ayers read the following statement to the Washington press corps: "Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT ... The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe." Yes, the atomic bomb harnessed the "basic power of the universe" and yes, the bomb was more powerful than 20,000 tons of TNT; however, was the bombing a fair repayment for Pearl Harbor?

Based on the information that the government told the American people at the time, many Americans believed that it was fair. The U.S. government wasn't stupid; government officials knew exactly what to tell (and what not to tell) the public in order to keep popular opinion high. By classifying Hiroshima as an "important Japanese Army base," President Truman isolated the bombing as a military-to-military feat, as nothing more than an act of war. Additionally, as Greg Mitchell writes in his Editor and Publisher article "The Press and Hiroshima," the president stressed the size of the bomb (which was sure to impress most Americans), rather than the horrific effects of radiation, an aftereffect of an atomic bomb that most Americans were at the time probably ignorant of. Later on, in the days following Hiroshima, the Air Force provided American newspapers with an aerial photograph of the city and stressed that they had targeted an area with major industrial targets.

When a later U.S. survey of the damage to Hiroshima discovered that the bomb had mostly destroyed residential areas, the government did not release the information to the press. Any revealed information was part of a calculated public relations campaign that the contemporary press ate up with a spoon. As the military director of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie Groves, later proudly remarked, "Most newspapers published our releases in their entirety. This is one of the few times since government releases have become common that this has been done." The press's almost exclusively positive coverage of the bombing then carried over to the American public, resulting in the misinformed perspective of the atomic bomb that has prevailed in the American consciousness for the past 60 years.

http://www.counterthink.org/019176.html