Did We Need to Nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

In The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, Gar Alperovitz, a former research fellow at Harvard and King's College and a research scientist at the University of Maryland, makes a powerful case that the U.S. did not need to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that Truman and other senior officials knew that the Japanese were prepared to surrender weeks before Hiroshima.

Come to find out that many, many U.S. military leaders, including Eisenhower, felt that we should not have nuked the Japanese and that there was no valid military reason for doing so.

We knew from intelligence intercepts of Japanese communications that the Japanese would surrender and meet all of our demands if we would merely assure them that the emperor would not be molested.

It's hard to feel sorry for the Japanese, given the vicious way their army conducted itself in so many cases. But one set of war crimes does not justify another.

Defenders of Truman's action have long claimed that if we had not nuked Japan, hundreds of thousands of casualties would have been suffered in a land invasion. But this is a false choice. As many military experts pointed out at the time, no invasion would have been necessary if the naval and air blockade had simply been allowed to continue to strangle Japan for a few more months, even assuming the Japanese were not ready surrender by June 1945 (which they were).

Here are some online articles on this tragic episode in American history:

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via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2mnDofL