The 60th anniversary from the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was marked last Saturday. It was exactly August 6, 1945 when 250,000 innocent civilians, men, women and children were instantly exterminated for no other reason than that of showing the world how powerful the United States of America, the newly emerging superpower, was. Twice as many innocent people have died ever since that fatal day as a direct result of that horrendous and unnecessary crime against humanity, which inaugurated the advent of the nuclear age.
Though no tribunal was ever set up to put the culprits of this genocide on trial and though every effort is being made to bury the memory of that monstrous act from our future generations, one ought to remind readers what true Americans, who were first-hand witnesses of this atrocity, said:
Dwight Eisenhower (later to become US President): "... the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing" - Ike On Ike, Newsweek, November 11, 1963.
Gar Alperovitz - The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb, pg. 635: "... the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945... up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ... if such leads had been followed up there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs" - quoted by Barton Bernstein in Philip Nobile, ed, Judgment At The Smithsonian, pg. 142.
General Douglas Macarthur: "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb... he replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor" Norman Cousins, The Pathology Of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
John Mccloy (Assistant Secretary of War): "I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs" - quoted in James Reston, Deadline, pg. 500.
"The Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb. Thus, it wouldn't have been necessary for us to disclose our nuclear position and stimulate the Russians to develop the same thing much more rapidly than they would have if we had not dropped the bomb" - War Was Really Won Before We Used A-Bomb", US News and World Report, August 15, 1960, pages 73-75.
Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables - the Magic summaries - for Harry Truman and his advisors): "... we didn't need to do it. And we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it. We used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs" - quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, page 359.
Herbert Hoover: "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul" - Herbert Hoover: Army And Navy Journal, publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, August 8, 1945.
Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman): "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children" - William Leahy, I Was There, page 441.