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“You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.”

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 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.” US writer Dwight MacDonald noted of the bombs in 1945 what he called 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.”
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut -- who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand as a prisoner of war, 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…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? Between 74,000 and 100,000 were killed instantly, another 75,000 were injured and 120,000 more were poisoned.

If Hiroshima was unnecessary, how to justify Nagasaki?

The saving of thousands of US lives is held up as official justification for the two atomic bombings. Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering civilians to protect soldiers, what can be made of the Nagasaki bomb if the war was won before Hiroshima’s incineration?
The most under-reported news I’ve found in this context, is that of President Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes, who was quoted on the front page of the August 29, 1945 New York Times under the headline, “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.” Byrnes reported what he called “proof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”
On Sept. 20, 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the famous bombing commander, told a press conference, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
According to Robert Lifton’s and Mitchel’s Hiroshima in America, only weeks after August 6 and 9, Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb “did not win the war.”
The military’s official US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “[C]ertainly prior to 31 Dec. 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 Nov. 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and ever if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
Likewise, the Intelligence Group of the US War Department’s Military Intelligence Division did an official study from January to April 1946 and declared that the bombs had not been needed to end the war. The Intelligence Group said it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.”
Russia invaded Japan Aug. 8, 1945, and six hours after this news reached Tokyo -- before Nagasaki was bombed -- Japan’s Supreme War Council met to discuss unconditional surrender. Nagasaki was destroyed while they met.

Experiments with hell fire?

Nagasaki was shattered using plutonium -- named after Pluto, god of the underworld, earlier known as “Hades” -- in what some believe to have been a hellish experiment. The most toxic substance known to science, every isotope a little bit of hell fire developed solely for mass destruction, plutonium is so lethal it contaminates everything nearby forever.
According to Atomic Cover-Up, Hitoshi Motoshima, the mayor of Nagasaki from 1979 to 1995, said, “The reason for Nagasaki was to experiment with the plutonium bomb.” “[H]ard evidence to support this ‘experiment’ as the major reason for the bombing remains sketchy,” Mitchell says, but according to the wire service report in Newsweek Aug. 20, 1945 -- by a journalist traveling with Truman aboard the USS Augusta -- Truman announced to his shipmates, “The experiment has been an overwhelming success.”
US investigators visiting Hiroshima Sept. 8, 1945 met with Japan’s leading radiation expert, Professor Masao Tsuzuki. One was given Tsuzuki’s 1926 paper on his famous radiation experiments on rabbits. “Ah, but the Americans, they are wonderful,” Tsuzuki told the group. “It has remained for them to conduct the human experiment!”

- John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a peace and environmental action group in Wis., and edits its Quarterly.