Recalling 3 World-Shaking Events of the Last 9 Days of WWII
Recalling 3 World-Shaking Events of the Last 9 Days of WWII
The US still has never apologized for the unnecessary nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has deep-sixed information on a teenage atomic spy who gave the Soviets plans for the plutonium bomb.
This year’s somber remembrance of the Aug. 9, 1945 nuclear bombing of Nagasaki held yesterday was notable for two reasons. It marks the 79 years that have elapsed since that seemingly pointless devastation of a non-military target city of 263,000 that killed 74,000 people instantly or from injuries, burns or radiation sickness over the next four months. It also highlights the fact that Nagasaki was both the second and the last city to be struck by an atomic bomb since nuclear weapons were invented.
But the annual event was also notable for another reason. The memorial, attended by Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa, was boycotted by the US because the city’s Mayor Shiro Suzuki had disinvited Israel, along with Belarus and Russia. While Suzuki didn’t explain the snub of Israel, he did state that it was because Belarus and Russia were attacking Ukraine, and Japan has been critical of Israel’s war on Gaza’x population and has been accused of genocidal behavior. Britain, France, Canada, Germany, and the European Union all followed the US lead and boycotted the memorial in Nagasaki’s Peace Park too because of the Israeli snub.
Frankly, the very idea of the US’s attending peace memorials in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki — both destroyed by US atomic bombs on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945—is appalling, given that the US government has never apologized for those precedent-setting new war crimes, and indeed contrinues to officially promote the obscene lie that they were necessary to “save lives,” US and Japanese by making a US invasion of Japan unnecessary.. Obscene too is the reflexive support for Israel, in this instance by the US and its sycophantic European allies, in pulling out of the event. It is a shameful attempt to portray Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Palestinians in the captive territory of Gaza as somehow different from other wars. It is not. Indeed it is arguably worse because Israel has the Palestinians trapped in what amounts to a 141 square mile prison camp over which it has total control over energy, water, food, medicine and travel, including access by journalists (whho are being killed by the IDF at a prodigious rate.
What the incident exposes is the still festering sore that remains from the US’s use of two atomic bombs, In the waning days of World War II, when neither weapon’s use was actually justified and when the target was a non-nuclear nation and two militarily insignificant cities.
As I and many other journalists and historians have written over the years, the two atom bombs — the “Little Boy” uranium-based one used against Hiroshima and the ‘Fat Man” plutonium-based on used on Nagasaki — were dropped against a non-nuclear nation that moreover had already been so destroyed by unrelenting US incendiary bombings of Japanese cities that some cities had to be spared simply so they could serve as a choice of targets to demonstrate the awesome destructiveness of America’s new super-weapon.
Obviously, with Japan’s air force and its domestic anti-aircraft defenses almost totally destroyed by early August, if the US had really wanted to destroy two cities to demonstrate the two bombs’ power, this country could have warned those target cities in time for everyone to leave them and then dropped the bombs (The US will argue that warning thr Japanese of such bombings could have allowed them to attempt to fly some remaining undamaged fighters to attack the B-29s, but as is was. they were dispatched on their runs with no fighter escorts, many of which could have been joined them had they announced their plans. In fact though, the goal was clear: it was not just to destroy buildings but to instantly kill an unprecedented number of people. That’s why both bombs were dropped during the day — a Friday at 8:15 am on Hiroshima and Monday at 11:02 on Nagasaki — times that were calculated to kill a maximum number of people—workers and children going to school, women out shopping for food in open air markets. (The “Fat Man” bomb’s target was originally Kokura, which would have been hit earlier more like Hiroshima, but when that city was found to be too shrouded in clouds and smoke from other cities already torched by US bombings, an “on-the-fly” decision was made to continue on to the alternate target of Nagasaki.)
Japan as early as mid-July had been desperately trying to surrender to the US, with the country’s only major concern being protecting the emperor (a virtual god in Japan) from punishment or death. It was a condition the US was resisting (ironically after Japan’s surrender, when there was political pressure in the US and from Japanese leftists to have the emperor arrested and charged with war crimes, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was put in charge of the occupation of Japan, opposed that and succeeded in having him left in his ceremonial role as emperor) . The US, as I have written in my book (Spy for No Country, Prometheus Books, 2024), in fact actually worked to delay a Japanese surrender being negotiated in Moscow between Chinese and Japanese officials, so the war wouldn’t end before the two bombs could be “tested in a wartime setting.”
The goal of two nuclear bombings then, clearly was not to end the war in the Pacific (Germany had already surrendered in early May, and Japan, it’s navy destroyed, its military forces in Manchuria, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands cut off from supplies). Rather it was to “send a message” to the Soviet Union that the US now had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and would henceforth be calling the shots in the post-war world.
To accomplish that, nearly half a million Japanese civilians, counting those who were casualties later of the effects from the bombs’ radiation, had to die.
Meanwhile, there was a third still little unknown event that occurred some time between the first bomb on Hiroshima, and Aug. 15 when Japan’s Emperor Hirohito officially surrendered to the US in a radio broadcast. Sometime during that eventful nine-day period, Theodore Hall, a 19-year-old American Los Alamos scientist, the youngest physicist on the Manhattan project and a Soviet spy, handed over to an American spy courier working for the Soviet Union the complete plans for constructing the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb. Hall, who had been assigned at 18 in January 1944 to work on refining the complex implosion system needed to detonate the plutonium bomb. Because of that job, he knew all about that weapon and was able to provide the Soviets the schematics and all needed details for constructing their own copy of the bomb.
Never working for compensation, Hall made his decision to spy after presciently realizing that a US emerging from WWII with a monopoly on the atomic bomb would pose a menace to the world. He felt that with two countries in possession of the bomb it would end up being banned much as chemical and germ weapons were banned after WWI.
Records made available from Soviet archives during a brief period of openness during the Glasnost era after the collapse of the USSR, as well as a memoire by Pavel Sudoplatov, a top Soviet intelligence leader, make it clear that it was Hall’s information about the plutonium bomb that allowed Soviet scientists to rapidly build and successfully test their own atomic bomb by Aug. 29, 1949. It was a virtual carbon copy of the Nagasaki “Fat Man” bomb.
Hall was, to be sure, not the only Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project. There were several. The most important, Klaus Fuchs, a German Communist refugee and physics grad student who had fled from the Nazi Gestapo to Britain in 1936, had by 1940 been brought into Britain’s top-secret program code named “Tube Alloys” to develop an atomic bomb. Once there he had immediately begun providing information to the Soviets. Through the war and beyond, until caught, he provided much more information about the plutonium bomb than Hall, as well as information about the uranium bomb. But research into KGB files and spy cables revealed that Soviet authorities were increasingly suspicious about the reliability of Fuchs’ information. They worried about he quickness of his acceptance into the top-secret British “Tube Alloys” project, and later to the Manhattan Project, despite the British knowledge of his Communist past in Germany. Then there was his unexplained disappearance from contact with his NKVD spy handlers from July through December 1944.
Understandably, Soviet intelligence leaders and even some Soviet atomic scientists worried that his information about the Rube Goldberg-like construction of the plutonium bomb might be disinformation designed to run them down a dead-end path. It was only after Hall, who had volunteered as a spy just after the NKVD had lost contact with Fuchs, and who was known to have had no contact with Fuchs, literally walked in the door offering similar information about that bomb. — information that made them comfortable that they could trust what they were getting from Fuchs since it was similar.
At that point Igor Kurchatov, the head of the struggling Soviet atomic bomb development project, felt confident enough to tell Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the country needed to defer work on a uranium bomb and to focus all available resources on copying the US-Designed Plutonium bomb. This was critical because while the uranium bomb uses a much simpler design, obtaining sufficient quantity of the extremely rare U-235 fissionable isotope of uranium to reach critical mass was extremely difficult, particular in the USSR’s war-devastated condition with most resources going to defeating the still powerful German Wehrmacht, and with no known uranium reserves within the countries borders. Plutonium, pn the other hand, while difficult to to work with, was a relatively easy-to-extract waste product of nuclear reactors, and only a small amount was needed to make a bomb of it.
Ted Hall’s spying and the many-paged notes and drawings he supplied during the last few days of the war made it possible for the USSR to shock US experts by exploding their own weapon in just four years. This denied Washington the monopoly on nuclear weapons that national security strategists and President Harry Truman been anticipating. It also forced an indefinite suspension of plans developed by Truman and Pentagon strategists for a preemptive strike by 400 atomic bombs on the Soviet Union and allied countries which was being set for the early 1950s. At the time of the surprise test of a Soviet atomic bomb on Aug. 29, 1949, the US, which had begun working to industrially produce atomic bombs after the war, still had fewer than 200 of them, far less than the 400 that Pentagon experts had advised Truman would be needed to “destroy as an industrial society.”
Given all this information that we now know, it boggles the mind that Japan would even want the US at any peace memorial to commemorate the horrors of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Good piece as always about US warmongering. One "correction", and one suggestion.
Your lead-in that dropping the bombs was "pointless" is not correct, as you later explain: Soviet Union-Russia bullying. Another reason for Japan's preparation to surrender even before dropping the bombs was that Stalin was fulfilling his promise to FDR to help defeat Japan once Europe was captured from the fascists. One million Russian troops were near where most of Japan's remaining military forces were and they would have been overwhelmed by the Russians.
Truman knowing this would have made the Russians even more important war heroes would not allow such as he already, along with Churchill, was planing and preparing to invade the Soviet Union, as you point out.
And this history is significant to today's proxy war in Ukraine. US presidents, Republicans and Democrats, doing the Wall Street's bidding, along side the Pentagon and CIA, want to eliminate Russia's sovereignty, and take over much of the vast resources in the world's largest land. That is why the Russian people are once again fighting to preserve their independence from US world domination, their very sovereignty--something European lackies do not appreciate having willing turning over their sovereignty to the Ugly Americans.