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Did the Atomic Bombs End World War II?

On September 2, it marked 80 years since Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender, formally ending hostilities with the Allied powers. In 1945, Emperor Shōwa decided to surrender on August 14. Why did Japan choose to accept defeat at that moment? The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. As a result, many claim that these bombings brought the war to an end. This past June, U.S. President Donald Trump compared American strikes on Iran to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stating, “That hit ended the war.” But did the atomic bombs truly end World War II?

To explore this question, we must consider two perspectives: how the Japanese government perceived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and whether the United States intended to use them specifically to force Japan’s surrender.

What was the Japanese government’s response to the atomic bombings?

To begin, let us examine this first question. Experts have pointed out that the role of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war is often underestimated. While many believe that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to an end, another perspective holds that the Soviet declaration of war was the decisive factor. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8 – two days after the bombing of Hiroshima – and launched an invasion of Manchuria on August 9.

On June 22, 1945, Japanese leaders convened a conference in which Emperor Shōwa urged peace negotiations through Soviet mediation. This was despite the fact that, back in April, the Soviet Union had formally notified Japan of its intention to terminate the Neutrality Pact. Yet Japan continued to pin its hopes on Soviet goodwill, reasoning that the pact remained legally valid until April 1946. The Soviets, for their part, offered no clear response, leaving Japan to wait in vain for a gesture that was never likely to come.

Japan had come to recognize that it could not defeat the United States and the United Kingdom on its own. The Imperial Japanese Army’s plan for a decisive mainland battle would be rendered impossible if the Soviets joined the conflict. Thus, Japan placed its hopes on Soviet mediation, aiming to secure favorable terms for peace – most importantly, the preservation of the Emperor’s position.

Yasuaki Chijiwa, Director of the Department of International Conflict History at the National Institute for Defense Studies, notes that Japanese leaders continued to await a response from the Soviets even after the bombing of Hiroshima. It took two days to assess the devastation in Hiroshima, but once the Soviets entered the war, Japan acted swiftly. Just six hours after the Soviet invasion began, Japanese leaders convened to discuss surrender terms.

Emperor Shōwa stated, “Now that we are at war with the Soviets, it is imperative to bring the conflict to a swift conclusion.” Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō echoed this urgency: “We must end the war immediately.” Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki declared, “I have decided to accept the Potsdam Declaration in order to end the war.”

Although the Army continued to insist that a mainland battle could inflict significant damage on the enemy and strengthen Japan’s negotiating position, Emperor Shōwa expressed growing distrust toward the military. He had been informed as early as June 1945 that Japan’s forces lacked the capacity to sustain such a campaign, and this realization is believed to have shifted his stance toward seeking an early peace. He resolved to accept the Potsdam Declaration, provided that the Emperor’s position would be maintained.

The Byrnes Note – a diplomatic reply issued by U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes on August 11 – did not explicitly guarantee the continuation of the Japanese monarchy. Nevertheless, despite resistance from factions within the military, Emperor Shōwa accepted the terms of the declaration on August 14.

In summary, the two atomic bombs were not the sole or decisive factor in Japan’s decision to surrender. Japanese leaders referred to so-called “new-type bombs,” yet they struggled to comprehend the full extent of their impact in such a short time. Moreover, by that point, roughly 60 Japanese cities had already suffered catastrophic damage from large-scale incendiary bombing campaigns targeting urban populations.

A 1946 report by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey – commissioned by the U.S. military to assess the impact of aerial bombardment during World War II – concluded:

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

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Trump to reinterpret 1987 missile treaty to sell heavy attack drones abroad

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to unilaterally reinterpret a 38-year-old arms control treaty to sell sophisticated “Reaper” style and other advanced military drones abroad, according to a U.S. official and four people familiar with the plan.

The new interpretation would unlock the sale of more than 100 MQ-9 drones to Saudi Arabia, which the kingdom requested in the spring of this year and could be part of a US$142 billion arms deal announced in May. U.S. allies in the Pacific and Europe have also expressed interest.

By designating drones as aircraft like the F-16 rather than missile systems, the United States will sidestep the 35-nation Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) agreement it signed in 1987, propelling drone sales to countries like UAE and in Eastern European nations that have struggled to get their hands on America’s best unmanned aerial vehicles.

The new policy will allow General Atomics, Kratos, and Anduril, which manufacture large drones, to have their products treated as “Foreign Military Sales” by the State Department, allowing them to be easily sold internationally, according to a U.S. official speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

This effort is the first part of a planned “major” review of the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program, the official said.

A U.S. Department of State spokesperson declined to comment.

Under the current interpretation of the MTCR, the sale of many military drones is subject to a “strong presumption of denial” unless a compelling security reason is given and the buyer agrees to use the weapons in strict accordance with international law.

The MTCR was originally meant to curb the sale of long-range missiles that can deliver weapons of mass destruction. Though drones were invented many years later they were considered within the scope of the MTCR due to their ability to fly long distances and carry weapons.

U.S. drone manufacturers are facing stiff competition overseas, especially from Israeli, Chinese and Turkish rivals who often sell under lighter restrictions.

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Company Owned by Ilhan Omar’s Multimillionaire Husband Owes IRS Over $200,000 in Unpaid Taxes

A company owned by Tim Mynett, the multimillionaire husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), failed to pay its fair share of taxes in 2021, according to a tax lien obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Mynett’s company, EStreetCo, accumulated nearly $206,000 in unpaid income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes in 2021, the IRS charged in a tax lien filed against the company in Sonoma County, Calif., in January 2023. Omar, who introduced legislation in February to “make corporations pay their fair share,” was married to Mynett when the IRS says the company failed to pay its taxes.

In her 2021 financial disclosure, the Minnesota Democrat described EStreetCo as a “creative agency” and said Mynett’s share of the company was worth no more than $1,000.

EStreetCo provided advertising, design, and public relations services, and boasted a staff of at least 17 people, according to an archived version of its website. Mynett’s business partner, former DNC adviser Will Hailer, formed EStreetCo in October 2020, and business records show the pair owned the firm until its dissolution in June 2022, about seven months before the IRS filed the lien.

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Blockbuster sea level study may turn climate change orthodoxy on its head

Global sea levels have not continued to rise at the rates predicted by many scientists — and there is no evidence that climate change has contributed to any such acceleration, a new first-of-its-kind study has claimed.

The research found that the average sea level rise in 2020 was only around 1.5mm per year, or 6 inches per century, according to the paper’s authors, Dutch engineering consultant Hessel Voortman and independent researcher Rob de Vos.

“This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media,” Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

Voortman was shocked that no researcher before had performed an analysis of real-world local data.

“It is crazy that it had not been done. I started doing this research in 2021 by doing the literature review. ‘Who has done the comparison of the projections with the observations?’ And there were none,” he told Shellenberger.

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RFK Jr. Says CDC Ordered Scientist to DESTROY Autism Data Linking Measles Vaccine to Black Children in 2002

During a stunning Senate hearing, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed that in the early 2000s, a senior CDC scientist was ordered to destroy data from an internal study that showed a staggering link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism risk in young Black boys.

In 2004, a CDC-backed case-control study in Atlanta compared 624 children with autism to 1,824 without, assessing whether timing of MMR vaccination (before vs. after 18 or 24 months) was linked to autism risk. It found no significant association.

While the 2004 study did not find a causal link, a later re-analysis of the same data received significant attention.

A 2014 study published in Translational Neurodegeneration re-examined the CDC’s dataset and claimed to find an increased autism risk among African American boys who received the MMR vaccine before 36 months of age.

According to the 2014 study, “The present study provides new epidemiologic evidence showing that African American males receiving the MMR vaccine prior to 24 months of age or 36 months of age are more likely to receive an autism diagnosis.”

According to RFK Jr., the findings were explosive:

“The data from that study showed that black boys who got the vaccine on time had a 260% greater chance of getting an autism diagnosis than children who waited,” Kennedy testified.

“The chief scientist on that, Dr. William Thompson, the Senior Vaccine Safety Scientist at CDC, was ordered to come into a room with four other co-authors by his boss, Frank DeStefano, who’s the head of the safety press, and ordered to destroy that data. Then they published it without that fact.”

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Trump and Biden Tried To Break Up Google. Now, They’ve Both Failed.

The federal government’s five-year-long antitrust case against Google has ended. Instead of forcing the tech giant to divest from Chrome, a federal judge on Tuesday opted “to allow market forces to do the work.”

The suit was first brought against Google in October 2020 by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department (DOJ) and 11 states, who complained that the company had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by monopolizing the general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising markets in the United States. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia—the same judge who issued Tuesday’s decision—ruled in favor of then-President Joseph Biden’s DOJ in August 2024.

In November 2024, the Justice Department proposed wide-reaching actions that the federal government said were necessary to address Google’s monopolization of the search market: divestiture from Chrome; conditional divestiture from Android; termination of its paid partnerships with Apple and Android; forced sharing of its search, user, and advertisement data with competitors; and prohibition on “query-based AI product” investments. In March, the Justice Department submitted its revised proposal, which largely maintained these remedies but eliminated the AI-investment prohibition.

On Tuesday, Mehta rejected the proposed Chrome divestiture, saying it “cannot reasonably be described as a remedy ‘tailored to fit the wrong'” and characterized the contingent Android divestiture as suffering “from similar legal infirmities.” Mehta declined to forbid Google from paying distributors like Apple for default placement of its search engine on its iPhones in light of the “GenAI products that pose a threat to the primacy of traditional internet.” Doing so would disadvantage “Google in this highly competitive space.”

Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics, says that Mehta’s refusal to enjoin Google from making payments for search access is “entirely borne out of adherence to a consumer-welfare-focused antitrust and rejection of the ‘big is bad’ vision underlying the [Justice Department’s] proposed remedies.” Likewise, Mehta’s rejection of the choice screen remedy, which would’ve required users to choose their device’s default search engine on first use and again every year thereafter, “recognized that judicial micromanagement of product design would not be beneficial for innovation or consumer welfare in the long run,” says Manne.

Mehta did prohibit Google from maintaining exclusive distribution agreements that condition access to the “Play Store or any other Google application on the distribution, preloading, or placement of Google Search.” He also sided with the plaintiffs on some search-index data-sharing provisions but opted for a narrow definition of search index, which excludes user-side data and only includes information about websites. Qualified competitors will only receive a one-time snapshot of this search index data, not the ongoing, periodic disclosure proposed by plaintiffs.

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Far-Left Judge SCREAMS at DOJ Lawyers From the Bench During Hearing on DC Man Who Threatened to Kill Trump After Grand Jury Declines Indictment – Pirro Responds

A far-left magistrate judge erupted during a hearing on Thursday after the DOJ dismissed a case against a DC man who threatened to kill President Trump.

Earlier this week, a DC grand jury declined to indict Edward Dana after he was arrested for damaging a light fixture at a DC restaurant.

Dana also allegedly threatened to kill President Trump and the DC Metro officer who arrested him.

“I’m not going to tolerate fascism. … And that means killing you, officer, killing the president, killing anyone who stands in the way of our Constitution,” Dana allegedly said, according to KTLA. “You want to stand in the way of our Constitution, I will f—ing kill you.”

Federal Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui on Thursday screamed from the bench and blasted DOJ lawyers during a hearing to dismiss the case.

The judge also apologized to the defendant who threatened kill Trump!

This thread…documenting a federal judge’s stark warnings, literally screaming from the bench about the Trump DOJ abusing rights in DC.

Judge Farriqui: “It’s September 4.. as of now we still have a Constitutional democracy” https://t.co/2rSn0U79Gm

— Todd Zwillich (@toddzwillich) September 4, 2025

CBS News reported:

A federal judge excoriated the Justice Department over its handling of criminal cases during the Trump administration’s ongoing federal takeover of Washington, D.C., saying at a hearing Thursday that the department has brought “embarrassment and shame” on the government during its “rush” to charge individuals.

U.S. District Judge Zia Faruqui apologized to Edward Dana, a man who was charged for what the Justice Department and U.S. Secret Service said was a threat to kill President Trump last month. Dana spent a week in jail, only to have the charges against him dropped Thursday.

Faruqui said the U.S. is “past the point of constitutional crisis,” as the Trump administration “is playing cops and robbers, like children” during the federal takeover of Washington’s police department.

The judge also criticized the Justice Department over the D.C. U.S. attorney’s multiple failed indictments in recent weeks, saying he had a “grave concern” that in a “rush to get stats on Twitter or Truth Social” touting the takeover, the Justice Department has not given time to those who have been “illegally detained.”

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Manufactured Famines in Gaza Began Almost Two Decades Ago, So Why Haven’t They Been Halted?

On Friday, August 22, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the global famine watchdog, declared widespread famine in Gaza. The IPC is regarded as the international gold standard in nutritional crises.

As international media was quick to point out, the declaration meant that a quarter of all Palestinians in Gaza are starving – more than 500,000 people – with that number expected to rise to more than 640,000 within six weeks.

What was most damning to most international media is that this outbreak of full famine as described by the IPC and UN agencies had been fully avoidable.

What should be far, far more damning is that several waves of famines have been widespread in Gaza for some 20 months and that precarious conditions of life and episodic famines have prevailed episodically in the Strip since 2007 – that is, for almost two decades.

The blockade since 2006   

In the 2006 Palestinian election, when Hamas won a clear majority in all occupied Palestinian territories, Israel and the Middle East Quartet—U.S., Russia, the UN and EU—launched economic sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’s parliamentarians and Palestinian territories. The sanctions were coupled with a blockade, Israel’s attempt to push the Gazan economy “to the brink of collapse,” according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks.

With the inception of its blockade in 2007, the Israeli government estimated how many daily calories were needed to prevent or to cause malnutrition in Gaza. The average daily calorie intake critical to survival is estimated at 2,100 kilocalories (kcal) per day. The Israeli “Red Line” document used a calculation of 2,279 calories per person.

During the 2008–2009 Gaza War, the Strip was subjected to a “Shoah” (Hebrew for Holocaust), as Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said. The idea was to “send Gaza decades into the past,” stated then commanding general Yoav Gallant.

Some 15 years later, Gallant was targeted by an International Criminal Court warrant “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare.” But in 2009, he and other Israeli leaders complicit in the starvation games were ignored by international community.

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The White House Says Trump’s Tariffs Have Raised $8 Trillion in Revenue. That’s Not Even Close.

The White House celebrated Labor Day by announcing that President Donald Trump’s “protectionist trade policies have helped drive more than $8 trillion in new U.S. investment.” The accompanying photo refers to “$8 trillion in tariff revenue.” There’s a difference between $8 trillion in U.S. investment and $8 trillion in tariff revenue, but Trump’s trade policies have achieved neither.

The second claim is easier to refute. The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) calculates the gross tariff and excise tax revenue generated from January 1 to August 28 to be $158.8 billion, according to the Treasury Department’s Daily Treasury Statements. The customs and excise taxes collected from January 20, when Trump took office, to August 28 amount to about $156 billion.

According to the Treasury Department’s own data, the president’s policies have clearly not raised anywhere near $8 trillion; they’ve raised 2 percent of this figure. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tariffs Trump has implemented since January will generate an estimated $3.3 trillion over 10 years—significantly less than the $8 trillion that the White House is claiming the tariffs have already raised.

Gross tariff revenue isn’t even the most relevant statistic; net tariff revenue is. The BPC explains that the latter “removes ‘certain other excise tax revenue’ and accounts for refunds of tariffs,” i.e., the tariff revenue that stays in federal coffers. Although net tariff revenue is not available in the Daily Treasury Statements, the BPC was able to determine that net tariff revenue was $135.7 billion from January through July 31 using the Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statements, which account for tariff refunds. Net tariff revenue as a percentage of total imports jumped from about 2.4 percent in March to 5.73 percent in April, reflecting the impact of Liberation Day’s “reciprocal tariffs,” and climbed to 10.31 percent in June.

Still, the net tariff revenue of $135.7 billion amounts to 1.7 percent of the White House’s claimed $8 trillion in tariff revenue. (That’s neglecting the fact that the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that “$1 of excise tax revenue will lead to a $0.25 decline in income and payroll tax revenue,” according to the BPC.)

The first claim is more slippery; it’s unclear what the White House means by saying Trump’s policies “helped drive” investment. One interpretation is that it is crediting Trump’s reciprocal tariffs and hostile negotiations for producing more foreign direct investment (FDI) in the U.S. than would have otherwise existed. Even assuming that all FDI since January is the direct result of Trump’s protectionist policies, it is completely inconceivable that $8 trillion has been raised as a result.

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RFK Jr Leaves Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren Redfaced When He Exposes Her Big Pharma Ties – Then RFK Jr Embarrasses Bernie Sanders When He Comes to Warren’s Defense 

After burying multiple Democratic Senators intent on trying to destroy his political career, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got his chance to dunk on arguably the most notorious Senators in America. As expected, he did not disappoint.

As NBC News reported, Kennedy appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to answer questions.

This comes one week after Kennedy pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, Susan Monarez, to resign. The White House fired her when she refused, and three top CDC officials then resigned in protest.

The hearing got testy in a hurry after far-left, Big Pharma hack Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), when he tried to question Kennedy’s integrity by bringing up the words of the disgraced Monarez. This failed to faze Kennedy as he left Wyden completely humiliated.

Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) then got into a screaming match with Kennedy over mRNA vaccines and embarrassed himself as well.

Senators Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (D-MA) and Comrade Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) later had their chance to interrogate Kennedy and fared no better.

Warren accused Kennedy of taking away COVID shots from those who wanted them when he changed COVID vaccine recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women back in June. They are no longer recommended to receive the shots.

Then, Kennedy exposed Warren for taking nearly $900,000 from Big Pharma. This should come as no surprise to TGP readers since Warren previously defended Big Pharma in a hearing with Kennedy earlier this year.

Having no answer, Warren doubled down on calling Kennedy a liar without evidence, which he rebutted again.

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