Tag: japan

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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US To Deploy Controversial Typhon Missile System To Japan For First Time

Russia and China strongly condemned the deployment of the Typhon, which would have been banned by the now-defunct INF Treaty…

The US Army announced on Friday that it will be deploying the controversial Typhon missile system to Japan for drills in September, a move strongly condemned by Russia and China.

The Typhon, also known as Mid-Range Capability, is a land-based missile launcher that can fire nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, which have a range exceeding 1,000 miles, and SM-6 missiles, which can hit targets up to 290 miles away. The missile system would have been banned under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a treaty with Russia that the US withdrew from in 2019.

According to Stars and Stripes, the Typhon is being deployed to a US Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, about 25 miles southeast of Hiroshima, which puts mainland China and parts of eastern Russia in range if the system is armed with Typhons.

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The ‘Miss Atom Bomb’ Beauty Pageant in Nagasaki, After the A-Bomb Fell

As you probably know by now, my current PBS film (see links above) revolves around the January 1, 1946 all-star U.S. military football game played in, of all places, Nagasaki less than five months after one of our new weapons destroyed half the city and killed at least 75,000, overwhelmingly civilians.

Beyond the Atomic Bowl, there was a second highly revealing (of American occupation attitudes) episode a few months after that.

By the summer of 1946, most of the Marine occupiers of Nagasaki had been sent home. Before departing, some helped promote and/or served as judges for a Miss Nagasaki beauty pageant, which they took to calling the “Miss Atom Bomb” contest. The contestants, whose ages ranged from 17 to 25, were young Japanese women, surely some of them widows or daughters of men killed in the Pacific war or in the atomic bombing. They had entered by responding to ads in the three leading local newspapers calling for young women who symbolized “Nagasaki rising from the ruins.”

Three U.S. Marines were among the ten judges in a competition that somehow took three days to complete (April 29-May 1). It was staged in a dance hall in the southern part of the city, well outside the zone of worst destruction. (Remember, the bomb exploded more than a mile off target, so “only” half the city was wiped out.) The hall had become slightly notorious as it was a prime site for occupying troops to pay money to dance with and maybe woo local women.

Presenting roses to the winner (above) was Marine Sgt. Robert McMenimen, who had earlier served as one of the referees at the Atomic Bowl.

Here is a clipping from Pacific Stars & Stripes, covering it at the time, and more photos that my research team found in U.S. archives.

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Disinformation & The Dropping Of The Atomic Bombs

Legitimate disagreement about the wisdom of dropping two bombs on Japan to end World War II in 1945 persists even 80 years later, as reflected in discussions this past week.

But recently, there has often been no real effort even to present the facts, much less to consider the lose-lose choices involved in using such destructive weapons. In an age of revisionist history—when Churchill is deemed a “terrorist,” Germany did not really mean to starve millions of Jews and Ukrainians in summer and fall 1941, the British forced Hitler to continue the war, and World War II was not worth the cost—so too are Hiroshima and Nagasaki judged as either war crimes or colossal and unnecessary follies.

For today’s generation, it seems so easy to declare one’s 21st-century moral superiority over our ancestors. So we damn them as war criminals, given that they supposedly dropped the bombs without legitimate cause or reason.

What follows are some of the most common critiques of President Truman’s decision to use two nuclear weapons against wartime Japan, with an explanation of why his decision to use the bombs proved, at the time and in hindsight, the correct one.

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ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 80: The Mystery of the Nagasaki Bomb

“The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, once said, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” — which he labeled a war crime.

In his 2011 book Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell says, “If Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki shows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.” Mitchell notes that the U.S. writer Dwight MacDonald cited in 1945 America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population.

The New York Herald Tribune editorialized there was “no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind.”

Mitchell reports that the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in Slaughterhouse Five — said, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.”

On Aug. 17, 1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way:

“Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. We shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. We did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”

If shame is the natural response to Hiroshima, how is one to respond to Nagasaki, especially in view of all the declassified government papers on the subject? According to Dr. Joseph Gerson’s With Hiroshima Eye, some 74,000 were killed instantly at Nagasaki, another 75,000 were injured and 120,000 were poisoned.

If Hiroshima was unnecessary, how to justify Nagasaki?

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ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 80: The Very Un-Christian Nagasaki Bomb

Eighty years ago today, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, Japan, instantly annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of them Japanese Christians, and wounding uncountable numbers of others.

For targeting purposes, the bombing crew used St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral, the largest Christian church in East Asia. At 11:02 a.m., on Aug. 9, 1945, when the bomb was dropped over the cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan.

At the time, the United States was arguably the most Christian nation in the world (that is, if you can label as Christian a nation whose churches overwhelmingly have failed to sincerely teach or adhere to the peaceful ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount).

The baptized and confirmed Christian airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently, and they accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with a number of near-fatal glitches.

Most Americans in 1945 would have done exactly the same if they had been in the shoes of the Bock’s Car crew, and there would have been very little mental anguish later if they had also been treated as heroes.

Nevertheless, the use of that monstrous weapon of mass destruction to destroy a mainly civilian city like Nagasaki was an international war crime and a crime against humanity as defined later by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Of course, there was no way that the crew members could have known that at the time. Some of the crew did admit that they had had some doubts about what they had participated in when the bomb actually detonated. Of course, none of them actually saw the horrific suffering of the victims up close and personal.

“Orders are orders” and, in wartime, disobedience can be, and has been, legally punishable by summary execution of the soldier who might have had a conscience strong enough to convince him that killing another human, especially an unarmed one, was morally wrong.

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This Shot Was So Dangerous, They Had to Invent a New Cause of Death

Did you know the DPT shot injured so many children that Big Pharma threatened to stop making vaccines?

That’s how you lost the right to sue them.

Japan had the same problem.

But instead of protecting Pharma, they delayed the DPT shot until age 2, and what happened next was so profound, it was impossible to ignore.

This information comes from the work of medical researcher 

A Midwestern Doctor. For all the sources and details, read the full report below.

First up: The dark history of vaccines.

Vaccines were tested covertly on over 2,000 vulnerable children in Irish care homes in the 1930s, leaving many in unmarked graves.

Many others suffered illness and other side effects.

This practice was completely hidden from the public.

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Japan Continues Drifting From Post-WW2 Pacifist Constitution, Inking Landmark Navy Deal With Australia

Japan continues getting further away from its pacifist constitution adopted after World War 2, as US regional allies continue strengthen defense alliances in face of the ‘China threat’.

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles announced Tuesday a major deal with his country’s Indo-Pacific trade partner Japan, hailed as “the largest defense industry deal ever made between Japan and Australia.”

Australia plans acquire a total of eleven frigates from Japan in a major boost to its navy, valued at 10 billion Australian dollars (approximately $6.5 billion or €5.6 billion).

The major contract was awarded to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which will provide Mogami-class warships, which are highly advanced and with an array of weapons, with the bid succeeding over that of Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems.

“This decision was made based on what was the best capability for Australia,” Marles said. “We do have a very close strategic alignment with Japan.”

“The Mogami-class frigate is the best frigate for Australia,” Marles described. “It is a next-generation vessel. It is stealthy. It has 32 vertical launch cells capable of launching long-range missiles.”

This agreement marks Japan’s first export of warships since before the Second World War, and only its second significant defense sale abroad, which is why some Australian analysts consider the landmark deal to be high risk.

Many details of the deal still remain shrouded in mystery, but one maritime sources says: “Under the agreement, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will supply the Royal Australian Navy with three upgraded Mogami-class multi-role frigates built in Japan from 2029. Eight more frigates will be built in Western Australia.”

Additionally, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has never built warships outside of Japan. Rabobank in a note has commented further of this factor as follows:

Japan continues to increase its defense exports after decades of controls to stay out of global conflicts after World War II. Mitsubishi is going to build a fleet of frigates for the Royal Australian Navy in the coming years. The first three will be built in Japan, the remainder in Australia, bolstering the defense ties between the two countries. Both are US allies and face a threat from China. Australia aims to increase its surface fleet to its largest size since WWII.

It was only just over a decade ago, in 2014, that then-prime minister Shinzo Abe partially lifted the post-WW decades-long self-imposed ban on foreign arms sales.

The high tech multi-mission stealth frigate for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, now to be supplied to Australia’s military…

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ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 80: Truman’s ‘Human Sacrifice’ to Subdue Moscow

Sumiteru Taniguchi was one of the “lucky” ones. He lived a long and productive life. He married and fathered two healthy children who gave him four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He had a long career in Japan’s postal and telegraph services. As a leader in Japan’s anti-nuclear movement, he addressed thousands of audiences and hundreds of thousands of people. He traveled to at least 23 countries. The organizations in which he played a prominent role were nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Many of the more than 250,000 who lived in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, were not so lucky. Tens of thousands were killed instantly by the plutonium core atomic bomb the U.S. dropped that day from the B29 Bockscar, captained by Major Charles Sweeney.

The bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” exploded with a force equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT and wiped out an area that covered three square miles, shattering windows eleven miles away. Some 74,000 were dead by the end of the year. The death toll reached 140,000 by 1950. Included among the victims were thousands of Korean slave laborers, who toiled in Japanese mines, fields, and factories. Since then, atomic bomb-related injuries and illnesses have claimed thousands more victims and caused immense suffering to many of the survivors.

The scene of death and destruction defied description. Corpses, many of which had been charred by the blast, lay everywhere. Susan Southard, in her groundbreaking book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, describes the scene that U.S. occupation troops encountered when they landed on September 23, 1945: “The Urakami Valley had vanished from existence, corpses were burning on cremation pyres, skulls and bones were piled on the ground, and people were walking through the ruins with beleaguered and empty expressions.”

Among the troops was Keith Lynch, a sailor from Nebraska. Lynch wrote to his parents that he had just seen

“a sight I hope my children, if I am so fortunate, will never have to see, hear of, or ever think of. It was horrible and when you get to thinking, unbelieveable….Such a thing as I saw yesterday cannot be described in words. You have to see it and I hope no one ever has to see such a thing again.”

The death toll was even higher and the destruction greater in Hiroshima, which the U.S. had obliterated three days earlier with a uranium core atomic bomb. There, some 200,000 were dead by 1950. The Nagasaki bomb was more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, but damage was limited by the fact that the bomb missed its target and that the mountains surrounding Nagasaki, which is located in a valley, contained the blast. However, in Urakami Valley, where the bomb landed, nearly 70 percent of the population perished.

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Japan Creates Frankenstein Bird Flu Virus With New Immunological Traits

According to a new study published last week in NPJ Vaccines, Japanese researchers engineered an entirely new strain of bird flu, combining the genetic material of two separate wild viruses to create what they call Vac-3: a pathogen that is “a reassortant virus between A/duck/Hokkaido/101/2004 (H5N3) and A/duck/Hokkaido/262/2004 (H6N1).”

This lab-built virus—A/duck/Hokkaido/Vac-3/2007 (H5N1)—was never observed in nature.

It was artificially assembled, grown in eggs, concentrated, and inactivated with formalin to become the whole-particle vaccine used in long-term testing on nonhuman primates.

The new study comes after NIH-funded researchers at the University of Georgia, Mount Sinai, and Texas Biomed were caught engineering lab-made H5N1 bird flu viruses—one of which killed 100% of exposed mammals—using synthetic DNA constructs and then deliberately infecting live dairy cows, all under the same $59 million federal contract that has also been tied to mammal-adapted, drug-resistant strain development.

Japan is also working with U.S. scientists on other projects to build lab-made horse-human influenza hybrids that replicate 100 times faster than natural strains using aborted fetal cells engineered with the cancer-linked SV40 virus, also under the banner of vaccine development.

All of these developments raise fears that another man-made pandemic is on the horizon, as Congress, the White House, the Department of Energy, the FBI, and the CIA have acknowledged that a lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is most likely the origin of COVID-19.

An Engineered Virus with New Properties

The new Japanese paper highlights that this bird flu Frankenvirus triggered significantly stronger immune responses than existing flu vaccines.

It did so by retaining its full genetic structure, including viral RNA, which stimulated toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7) and a cascade of innate immune activation.

“WPVs contain single-stranded viral RNAs that stimulate innate immune receptors such as toll-like receptor 7,” the authors write.

This means the lab-built virus was left fully intact so it could shock the immune system into overdrive, triggering a much stronger reaction than normal flu shots.

Unlike conventional “split” vaccines, which separate viral proteins from RNA, Japan’s whole-particle vaccine (WPV) preserved the virus’s full anatomy.

This allowed it to activate dendritic cells, induce interferon-producing T cells, and stimulate somatic hypermutation—a powerful, but risky, rewiring of the immune system.

In short, the new virus didn’t just train the immune system—it reprogrammed it.

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