Sean: 空爆

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Posted by Sean:
空爆
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1186360462.shtml


   There are always, in the week before the anniversaries of the atom
   bombings, articles run about the decreasing numbers of survivors and
   the effort to keep their stories alive. One such piece was an [1]AP
   story picked up by the Yomiuri on-line (not sure whether it ran in the
   print edition:

     Monday's anniversary comes just a month after Fumio Kyuma was
     forced to quit as defense minister for seeming to implying that the
     bombing was inevitable, because otherwise Japan would have gone on
     fighting and would have lost territory to a Soviet invasion.
     Not so, says Steven Leeper, the first American to head the
     Hiroshima Peace and Culture Foundation. "Historically, that's not
     correct," he said in an interview, "And it's unbelievable that he
     said it."
     Leeper shares the view of most Japanese: that Japan had already
     lost the war and that the bombing of Hiroshima, and of Nagasaki
     three days later, was wrong and unnecessary.
     "Everybody knows on the left and the right that Japan was finished
     at the time the bomb was dropped," Leeper said.
     Historically, the American justification was that the bombing ended
     the war and limited the number of U.S. military and Japanese
     civilian lives that would have been lost in a land invasion.
     The Japanese perspective argues that Japan was already working on
     negotiating a peace treaty, as well as a surrender, and that the
     U.S. dropped the bomb to test its destructive power and to
     intimidate the Soviet Union.

   I love Japan and am glad that we're allies today. But sixty-odd years
   ago, our grandfathers were enemies. It was the responsiblity of ours
   to crush theirs. I'm glad they did it conclusively. One hopes that no
   civilized society has to resort to nuclear warfare again, but it's a
   mistake to prettify history for the sake of expedient would-be
   humanitarianism.
   I've never seen it disputed that Japan had already lost the war by
   August, in the sense that it clearly wasn't going to win. Whether it
   was "finished," however, is another matter. The government was hedging
   over the [2]Potsdam Declaration. There was vocal opposition to
   surrender from some military leaders--even after both bombings, they
   tried to prevent the emperor's surrender proclamation from being
   broadcast--who wanted to make good on previous promises to resist an
   invasion of the mainland by any means necessary. The Japanese people's
   meek acceptance of occupation and immediate dedication of energy to
   rebuiding a peacetime economy seems inevitable now, but only because
   we know that's how it happened.
   And as for sending a minatory message to the Soviets, that does indeed
   appear to have been a factor, but I can't see why it's evidence of
   moral turpitude. Japan had mindedly inserted itself into an
   international conflict, betting that the United States and British
   Commonwealth would not have the resources to fight effectively in both
   Pacific and European theaters. It turned out to be a bad bet of global
   dimensions. What would be done with Japan after its surrender would
   affect the post-war balance of power, and our military leaders would
   have been nuts not to factor that in when deciding how to attack it.

References

   1. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_FEA_JAPAN_HIROSHIMAS_LEGACY_ASOL-?SITE=YOMIURI&SECTION=HOSTED_ASIA&TEMPLATE=ap_national.html
   2. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration?match=ja