By Dave Lindorff
Cambridge, UK, Aug. 6 — Seventy-four years ago today, the US dropped the first ever atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, a non-military target of several hundred thousand, instantly vaporizing some 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and causing the painful, slower death of another 70,000 who died of burns and radioactive damage to their bodies over the next four months. Another 60,000 died later over the years of cancers caused by the bomb’s radioactive pulse and subsequent fallout.
It was, of course, only the first of two such bombs. The first, nicknamed “Little Boy” was made with Uranium 235. The second, nicknamed “Fat Man,” was based on the man-made element Plutonium. Both were developed by the Manhattan Project based at Los Alamos, NM, along with the world’s first atom bomb, a Plutonium device exploded in the desert near Alamogordo and called “Trinity.”
It was the start of the nuclear age. Both bombs dropped on Japan were war crimes of the first order, particularly because we now know that the Japanese government, which at that time was having all its major cities destroyed by incendiary bombs that turned their mostly wooden structures into towering firestorms, was even before Aug. 6, desperately trying to surrender via entreaties through the Swiss government.
The Big Lie is that the bomb was dropped to save US troops from having to invade Japan. In fact, there was no need to invade. Japan was finished, surrounded, the Russians attacking finally from the north, its air force and navy destroyed, and its cities being systematically torched.
Actally, the US didn’t want Japan to surrender yet though. Washington and President Harry Truman wanted to test their two new super weapons on real urban targets, and even more importantly, wanted to send a stark message to the Soviet Union, the supposed World War II ally which US war strategists and national security staff actually viewed all through the conflict as America’s next existential enemy.
As authors Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, two theoretical physicists, wrote in their frightening, disturbing and well researched book To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans (South End Press, 1987), the US began treacherously planning to use its newly developed super weapon, the atom bomb, against the war-ravaged Soviet Union, even before the war had ended in Europe. Indeed a first plan, to drop 20-30 Hiroshima-sized bombs on 20 Russian Cities, code named JIC 329/1, was intended to be launched in December 1945. Fortunately that never happened because at that point the US only had two atomic bombs in its “stockpile.”
The describe how as the production of new bombs sped up, with 9 nuclear devices by June 1946, 35 by March 1948 and 150 by January 1949, new plans with such creepy names as Operations Pincher, Broiler, Bushwacker, Sizzle and Dropshot were developed, and the number of Soviet cities to be vaporized grew from 20 to 200.
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, seven-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/hiroshima-nagasaki-and-the-spies-who-prevented-a-criminal-us-from-obtaining-a-nuclear-monopoly/