Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, has shattered multiple records, and still plays to sold out cinemas the world over weeks after its box office debut. A labyrinthine visual epic, it tells the tragic story of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s stratospheric rise to international renown as “father of the Atomic bomb”, and unceremonious undoing once his creation’s terrifying detonation over Hiroshima and Nagasaki transformed him into a committed anti-nuke activist.
Glad I know how to read books and paid attention to my father who served in the Pacific Theatre and didn't want to come back. I pay no attention to MSM or Hollywood and don't waste my money. We imported those Nazis in Operation Gladio and Operation Paperclip and have been paying the price ever since and now it's in full bloom for the World to see. Unfortunately, few bother to pay attention.
Hear hear on the reading of books......I read Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in my formative years and learned that if Hitler's Operation Sealion had succeeded all English males over 16 would have been sent to Germany....my dad amongst them no doubt.....but thanks to a few brave RAF pilots Operation Sealion was postponed and Hitler implemented Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The sacrifice of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians ensured the failure of Barbarossa and the utter defeat of Nazi Germany.
Operation Sealion was never again implemented, England was never invaded, my father was never arrested and sent to Germany. I owe my existence to the sacrifice of a few brave RAF pilots and the resistance of the Soviet Russian people.
The injection of former Nazis into our societies via Operation Paperclip has made the alleged quote by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels a nightmarish reality..." Even if we lose we will win, because we will have planted our ideas into the minds of the victors."
BTW, the British High Command knew full well in 1940 that Sea Lion had no chance of success. For that matter, so did the Wehrmacht, and they were relieved when Hitler called it off.
Wargaming conducted by the British after the war (when they had full access to German dispositions and real strengths) confirmed this.
The pilots who fought the Battle of Britain were no doubt extremely brave. I recall vividly an interview on British TV many years ago with one ace, who took down a Luftwaffe plane headed straight for Buckingham Palace by repeatedly ramming it, crashing his own plane and risking his life in the process. He dismissed the interviewer's suggestion he was a hero, rather he was just doing his job. At the time, I was overwhelmed by his sacrifice. Now I'm older, part of me slightly wishes he'd given that Luftwaffe fighter free passage.
Operation Sealion is a very interesting example of how opposing intelligence agency information operations can overlap, complement and accentuate one another, even if the objectives behind them are very different. German intelligence deliberately leaked the plans as part of a wider effort to compel the British to negotiate peace, and MI6 was happy for them to become public, in order to instill public vigilance, unity behind the government, and counter public and political support for settlement. It also justified extraordinary security measures, including ID cards and executive detention.
While Operation Sealion's plans were detailed there was never any chance of them being implemented, and what's more, Hitler had no desire to invade Britain. Mein Kampf is a billet doux to the British Empire, rife with fawning adulation for the English. As late as 1944, he still thought it plausible that the Western Allies would "see sense" and ally with him against the "real enemy" in Moscow, and throughout the conflict he lamented the Empire's disintegration. His peace proposals to Britain, about which virtually no one has ever heard, let alone knows in detail, were extraordinarily generous. But that's a discussion for another time!
I doubt "the BHC knew full well" ...remember this was the time of Dunkirk. Revered as a symbol of British resolve, Dunkirk was a defeat and evacuation leaving much materiel behind, a resounding defeat
In 1940 the "fog of war" was pretty thick.
Operation Sealion was probably an "unknown unknown" as Rumsfeld put it.
Like the Germans, the BHC knew what logistics and the English Channel were.
They also knew that, even if they lost the Battle of Britain, the RAF could pull out of Southern England and stay out of range of German bombers, with the Royal Navy still very much a threat to any invasion force. German Admiral Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine in 1940, wrote in his memoirs:
"[U]p until now the British had never thrown the full power of their fleet into action. However, a German invasion of England would be a matter of life and death for the British, and they would unhesitatingly commit their naval forces, to the last ship and the last man, into an all-out fight for survival. Our Air Force could not be counted on to guard our transports from the British Fleets, because their operations would depend on the weather, if for no other reason. It could not be expected that even for a brief period our Air Force could make up for our lack of naval supremacy."
In fact, some elements of the BHC were hoping that the Germans would launch Sea Lion. Churchill himself wrote "There were indeed some who on purely technical grounds, and for the sake of the effect the total defeat of his expedition would have on the general war, were quite content to see him try."
The fact remains that the USSR. provided most of the human sacrifice and the USA provided most of the materiel that defeated NAZI Germany.
Bexhill might well have been Stalingrad.
Those fighter pilots, the mechanics who kept them flying ,the capricious tides and weather of the English Channel made sure that Stalingrad and General Winter foiled Barbarossa and a renewed attemt at Sea Lion.
Thank you! I always knew that the USA was fully aware of Japan’s surrender plans. I was not aware of the position of Japan and their understanding of the role of the USSR. This was very informative article. I learned a lot!
Great article on a truly terrible topic. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sheer gratuitous nonsense, violating any codes of ethics left. If you can find it, check out Paul Boyer's "By the Bomb's Early Light" (1985), which provides plenty of evidence how Americans actually reacted to the Atomic Bomb drops, kind of like Berliners when the Wehrmacht rolled into Paris: Just look down and don't say anything...
Very good summary. I've been reading on this subject for decades but you brought up a few details I hadn't heard. I didn't know Dresden was also meant to be a demonstration for the Soviets. It's so important to counter the official narrative of the bomb's use in Japan. Thank you very much.
You can’t convince me that Oppenheimer (2023) is not DOD facilitated propaganda to glamorize military-sponsored mass murder. I heard enough stories from #Downwinders, many of whom continue to suffer the effects of state violence, to believe them.
Thanks for that. I also saw this documentary, and I came under the impression that Oppenheimer was a ruthless sociopath himself. How does it fit then with his post-war regrets?
I find it bitterly ironic that the Japanese Prime Minister, in his 2023 Hiroshima Day speech, neglected to mention just who dropped those bombs. I guess atomic bombs are a meteorological phenomenon?
Instead, the good little lackey focused on Russia.
Japan is America's bitch and is told what to do, say and how to act and when to do it. That's why the two bombs were dropped by the Evil Globalists even when it was entirely unnecessary.
The deep cynicism and cruelty of the U.S. elite in pursuit of world dominance after WWII shown here makes me worry about what it might be willing to do now as its grip on world dominance is inevitably slipping away. We are indeed in dangerous times.
We’re fast approaching the “desperate times calls for desperate measures” phase of the debacle in Ukraine. It seems to our leaders that only military victory over Russian will cement our place as the world’s superpower. It also seems quite evident that many countries once either neutral or in our corner are showing a growing distaste for America’s arrogance and cavalier attitude toward human life. Losing friends and support from allies is step one in the fall of an empire. While Blinken assures us Ukraine is making progress the opposite is in fact happening. They’ve lost territory they may never get back and hundreds of thousands of lives. Desperation is growing behind closed doors in the situation room in DC. They’ve backtracked on every promise made that American tanks, aircraft and such wouldn’t be used to the point where cluster munitions, widely forbidden in over 130 countries are now approved for use. It seems no one in the seats of power in America with Ivy League degrees studied history-especially military history. Heaven help us.
The only cement at this point will be the cement shoes of the dying U.S empire, carrying it to the bottom of the ocean, figuratively speaking. U.S. propaganda is working overtime to tell the opposite of the truth, but people are starting to realize that the U.S. is spewing BS.
So let me get this straight: the Japanese high command was terrified of a Russian invasion of Japan and not at all concerned about the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's the narrative here. Why would that be?
Were they also not concerned about an invasion of the US army?
The Japanese high command and emperor sound completely insane in this narrative -- why were they more worried about the Russians than the instant obliteration of two cities?
This narrative has the problem, like almost every narrative I've read surrounding the decisions to drop the bombs, of simplifying a complex and confusing set of circumstances and decisions assessed and taken within the fog of war to serve a particular narrative. The truth, which is impossible to fully know, is guaranteed to be far more chaotic and confused made by human beings in the middle of a terrifying war. I know we're supposed to demonize everything military in the west, being on the left and all (and ignoring that strange question of why Japan was more terrified of the Russians than the US -- you know the ones who had been kicking their asses all over the pacific for 3 years), but can we take a moment to ask whether the Russians perhaps weren't carrying flowers in their guns for just a second? That perhaps capitulation to the west was preferable for any number of reasons?
This particular narrative also irks me because, not only doesn't it hold up logically: even on its own terms it elides the clear implication that the Japanese military leadership was completely unconcerned about the civilian population of Japan; but any invasion, from either Russia the US or both, would've resulted in far more death, misery and destruction for Japan than the two atomic bombs. So which is it -- did the Japanese military care about civilian deaths or not? Were they or were they not willing to fight to the last Japanese?
Not to mention any invasion would've resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or millions of Allied soldiers: something which all these revisionist narratives don't ever seem to have the slightest concern for. Apparently the writers of these narratives didn't have or don't care about any ancestors who might've died in that invasion. The US military's goal was to win the war with as few US casualties as possible. That's what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now and demonizing the WWII military leadership for achieving that goal is dishonest and characterless.
So back to the narrative: the Japanese were on the verge of capitulation and it had nothing to do with the two bombs -- that's the story here. So even though they finally surrendered unconditionally only 6 days after the Nagasaki bomb we're supposed to believe the bombs had nothing to do with it. There's a lot missing from this narrative.
Oppenheimer had his reasons for opposing nukes after he had husbanded them into existence. But reasons are just logic we apply to emotions we don't really understand. I would take his, and any other, simple narrative justification for what it is: largely an exercise in futility that is doomed from inception to be only partial, simplistic and flawed. Demonization of US military command is easy and popular these days but nothing is ever as simple and clear cut as this piece wants it to be and it does a disservice to all those who died in that awful war to attempt it in such a simplistic and clearly political way. The currently fashionable narrative is the decision to drop the bombs was monstrous and wrong and anything that might contradict that narrative will simply not be discussed. I just can't get with this way of thinking.
Most of us on the left decry the simplification of the Ukraine war into an "unprovoked invasion". Are we not guilty of the same when we write simplistic narratives for decisions made in the middle of the deadliest war in human history almost 80 years ago?
You raise some interesting points, and I agree that things are always more complex than we think. However, I believe that the two atomic bombs were NOT the decisive factor in Japan's surrender. As to the question ' didn't the Japanese leadership care about their civilians?', the answer seems to be, probably not. After all, tens of thousands of them had been routinely killed by fire bombing attacks in the preceding months most nights. Ward Wilson is good to read on this, 'The Winning Weapon?' He suggests that in many ways, Japan did not actually see the atomic bomb as being significantly different.
You have to remember that people are not binary yes/no creatures. Even the Japanese high command had differing views represented within it. The way these things generally work is by some informal consensus that forces the leader to make a choice between opposing views as presented. The bombs focused the minds of these men -- many of whom were rather insane with imperial bloodlust and would have fought to the last Japanese. But there were other voices and after the bombs were dropped they became far stronger. Some of these men actually came forward after the war ended and said that some among the leadership were so crazed with imperial ambition and zeal that their reaction to the bombs was to declare with certainty that the US must not have any more and not to worry about them. Of course these were the minority since everyone really knew they couldn't be certain -- and that what was already done was bad enough. What these men said was that the bombs broke the wall of consensus and allowed for the discussion of surrender. Is this the correct narrative? It certainly is plausible.
It's one thing to have a city bombed over weeks and months and entirely another to be erased from the map in an instant. The end result is similar but the process -- the shock of the moment -- and the total lack of warning -- was something entirely new and should not be discounted.
Again, I'm not really judging one way or the other here. I think its a quixotic adventure we go on when we try to imagine what we think should've been done in such circumstances when we can't even really imagine what it was like.
We also color our views on the end to the Pacific war with what came after -- Eisenhower's inept administration that served to strengthen and promote the more unhinged members of the emerging security state -- from the Dulles brothers to Curtis LeMay -- and the ensuing cold war madness that overtook the power elite in the US. That is also a mistake. The one did not necessarily have to lead to the other and the Strangelovian fever that existed in the 1950's was by no means foreordained.
I would recommend reading the “Plutonium Files” and the after that, go and find the documents of the 1994 Senate hearing on the radiation experiments on human beings.
The database was taken down (and likely sanitized) shortly after 9/11. And when you read through some of documents, you find some interesting names… for instance Willard Libby (Nobel Price recipient and famous for his Nickname, which weirdly no one knows about, “Get me some dead baby bones“) and Tara O’Toole.. which you may know if you read anything form the Center for Health Security (SPARS-Pandemic)… the Victoria Nuland of the Biosecurity sector.
Don't turn the WWII Japanese into victims. They were the very definition of ravenous invaders. Butchers in China. Unspeakable, militarily unnecessary violence against millions of confused and defenceless civilians.
That generation is gone... Replaced by a peaceful and humane culture. But make no mistake about the crimes of that militaristic generation.
I haven’t seen the movie nor will I see it because it is a pointless exercise as we all know what happened next after it was deployed. The military nutcases will of course fawn over it - good for them.
Fine reporting on the movie and on the "real" J.R. Oppenheimer.
I hope every American who claims to be glad that the bomb was dropped on innocent civilans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (with its significant and historic Christian population) will have a chance too visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, to see photos and artifacts from the aftermath. It is a soul-shaking experrience.
He introduces some material not reported here (and some of the material here is not covered there), but the conclusion is the same---the bomb was not needed to induce the Japanese to end the war, they wanted the war to end much sooner than they did, but did not want to give up the right to continue the lineage of the Japanese imperial house and thus hesitated to "unconditionally surrrender".
Glad I know how to read books and paid attention to my father who served in the Pacific Theatre and didn't want to come back. I pay no attention to MSM or Hollywood and don't waste my money. We imported those Nazis in Operation Gladio and Operation Paperclip and have been paying the price ever since and now it's in full bloom for the World to see. Unfortunately, few bother to pay attention.
Hear hear on the reading of books......I read Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in my formative years and learned that if Hitler's Operation Sealion had succeeded all English males over 16 would have been sent to Germany....my dad amongst them no doubt.....but thanks to a few brave RAF pilots Operation Sealion was postponed and Hitler implemented Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The sacrifice of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians ensured the failure of Barbarossa and the utter defeat of Nazi Germany.
Operation Sealion was never again implemented, England was never invaded, my father was never arrested and sent to Germany. I owe my existence to the sacrifice of a few brave RAF pilots and the resistance of the Soviet Russian people.
The injection of former Nazis into our societies via Operation Paperclip has made the alleged quote by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels a nightmarish reality..." Even if we lose we will win, because we will have planted our ideas into the minds of the victors."
BTW, the British High Command knew full well in 1940 that Sea Lion had no chance of success. For that matter, so did the Wehrmacht, and they were relieved when Hitler called it off.
Wargaming conducted by the British after the war (when they had full access to German dispositions and real strengths) confirmed this.
The pilots who fought the Battle of Britain were no doubt extremely brave. I recall vividly an interview on British TV many years ago with one ace, who took down a Luftwaffe plane headed straight for Buckingham Palace by repeatedly ramming it, crashing his own plane and risking his life in the process. He dismissed the interviewer's suggestion he was a hero, rather he was just doing his job. At the time, I was overwhelmed by his sacrifice. Now I'm older, part of me slightly wishes he'd given that Luftwaffe fighter free passage.
Operation Sealion is a very interesting example of how opposing intelligence agency information operations can overlap, complement and accentuate one another, even if the objectives behind them are very different. German intelligence deliberately leaked the plans as part of a wider effort to compel the British to negotiate peace, and MI6 was happy for them to become public, in order to instill public vigilance, unity behind the government, and counter public and political support for settlement. It also justified extraordinary security measures, including ID cards and executive detention.
While Operation Sealion's plans were detailed there was never any chance of them being implemented, and what's more, Hitler had no desire to invade Britain. Mein Kampf is a billet doux to the British Empire, rife with fawning adulation for the English. As late as 1944, he still thought it plausible that the Western Allies would "see sense" and ally with him against the "real enemy" in Moscow, and throughout the conflict he lamented the Empire's disintegration. His peace proposals to Britain, about which virtually no one has ever heard, let alone knows in detail, were extraordinarily generous. But that's a discussion for another time!
I doubt "the BHC knew full well" ...remember this was the time of Dunkirk. Revered as a symbol of British resolve, Dunkirk was a defeat and evacuation leaving much materiel behind, a resounding defeat
In 1940 the "fog of war" was pretty thick.
Operation Sealion was probably an "unknown unknown" as Rumsfeld put it.
Like the Germans, the BHC knew what logistics and the English Channel were.
They also knew that, even if they lost the Battle of Britain, the RAF could pull out of Southern England and stay out of range of German bombers, with the Royal Navy still very much a threat to any invasion force. German Admiral Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine in 1940, wrote in his memoirs:
"[U]p until now the British had never thrown the full power of their fleet into action. However, a German invasion of England would be a matter of life and death for the British, and they would unhesitatingly commit their naval forces, to the last ship and the last man, into an all-out fight for survival. Our Air Force could not be counted on to guard our transports from the British Fleets, because their operations would depend on the weather, if for no other reason. It could not be expected that even for a brief period our Air Force could make up for our lack of naval supremacy."
In fact, some elements of the BHC were hoping that the Germans would launch Sea Lion. Churchill himself wrote "There were indeed some who on purely technical grounds, and for the sake of the effect the total defeat of his expedition would have on the general war, were quite content to see him try."
It is interesting to look back with 20/20 hindsight and speculation on Hitler's plans.
The Bexhill Museum has a great article on this.
(https://www.bexhillmuseum.org.uk/our-patron-eddie-izzard/operation-sealion-the-invasion-that-never-came/)
The fact remains that the USSR. provided most of the human sacrifice and the USA provided most of the materiel that defeated NAZI Germany.
Bexhill might well have been Stalingrad.
Those fighter pilots, the mechanics who kept them flying ,the capricious tides and weather of the English Channel made sure that Stalingrad and General Winter foiled Barbarossa and a renewed attemt at Sea Lion.
As I pointed out - even in 1940, the Germans and the British knew that Sea Lion was a non-starter.
Thank you. I really feel I learned something reading that publication.
Thank you! I always knew that the USA was fully aware of Japan’s surrender plans. I was not aware of the position of Japan and their understanding of the role of the USSR. This was very informative article. I learned a lot!
Great article on a truly terrible topic. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sheer gratuitous nonsense, violating any codes of ethics left. If you can find it, check out Paul Boyer's "By the Bomb's Early Light" (1985), which provides plenty of evidence how Americans actually reacted to the Atomic Bomb drops, kind of like Berliners when the Wehrmacht rolled into Paris: Just look down and don't say anything...
Very good summary. I've been reading on this subject for decades but you brought up a few details I hadn't heard. I didn't know Dresden was also meant to be a demonstration for the Soviets. It's so important to counter the official narrative of the bomb's use in Japan. Thank you very much.
You can’t convince me that Oppenheimer (2023) is not DOD facilitated propaganda to glamorize military-sponsored mass murder. I heard enough stories from #Downwinders, many of whom continue to suffer the effects of state violence, to believe them.
Thanks for that. I also saw this documentary, and I came under the impression that Oppenheimer was a ruthless sociopath himself. How does it fit then with his post-war regrets?
https://vitaldissent.com/oppenheimer
I find it bitterly ironic that the Japanese Prime Minister, in his 2023 Hiroshima Day speech, neglected to mention just who dropped those bombs. I guess atomic bombs are a meteorological phenomenon?
Instead, the good little lackey focused on Russia.
Was that the same event where Ursula v d Leyen talked about Russia "using nuclear weapons again"?
Japan is America's bitch and is told what to do, say and how to act and when to do it. That's why the two bombs were dropped by the Evil Globalists even when it was entirely unnecessary.
The deep cynicism and cruelty of the U.S. elite in pursuit of world dominance after WWII shown here makes me worry about what it might be willing to do now as its grip on world dominance is inevitably slipping away. We are indeed in dangerous times.
We’re fast approaching the “desperate times calls for desperate measures” phase of the debacle in Ukraine. It seems to our leaders that only military victory over Russian will cement our place as the world’s superpower. It also seems quite evident that many countries once either neutral or in our corner are showing a growing distaste for America’s arrogance and cavalier attitude toward human life. Losing friends and support from allies is step one in the fall of an empire. While Blinken assures us Ukraine is making progress the opposite is in fact happening. They’ve lost territory they may never get back and hundreds of thousands of lives. Desperation is growing behind closed doors in the situation room in DC. They’ve backtracked on every promise made that American tanks, aircraft and such wouldn’t be used to the point where cluster munitions, widely forbidden in over 130 countries are now approved for use. It seems no one in the seats of power in America with Ivy League degrees studied history-especially military history. Heaven help us.
The only cement at this point will be the cement shoes of the dying U.S empire, carrying it to the bottom of the ocean, figuratively speaking. U.S. propaganda is working overtime to tell the opposite of the truth, but people are starting to realize that the U.S. is spewing BS.
So let me get this straight: the Japanese high command was terrified of a Russian invasion of Japan and not at all concerned about the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's the narrative here. Why would that be?
Were they also not concerned about an invasion of the US army?
The Japanese high command and emperor sound completely insane in this narrative -- why were they more worried about the Russians than the instant obliteration of two cities?
This narrative has the problem, like almost every narrative I've read surrounding the decisions to drop the bombs, of simplifying a complex and confusing set of circumstances and decisions assessed and taken within the fog of war to serve a particular narrative. The truth, which is impossible to fully know, is guaranteed to be far more chaotic and confused made by human beings in the middle of a terrifying war. I know we're supposed to demonize everything military in the west, being on the left and all (and ignoring that strange question of why Japan was more terrified of the Russians than the US -- you know the ones who had been kicking their asses all over the pacific for 3 years), but can we take a moment to ask whether the Russians perhaps weren't carrying flowers in their guns for just a second? That perhaps capitulation to the west was preferable for any number of reasons?
This particular narrative also irks me because, not only doesn't it hold up logically: even on its own terms it elides the clear implication that the Japanese military leadership was completely unconcerned about the civilian population of Japan; but any invasion, from either Russia the US or both, would've resulted in far more death, misery and destruction for Japan than the two atomic bombs. So which is it -- did the Japanese military care about civilian deaths or not? Were they or were they not willing to fight to the last Japanese?
Not to mention any invasion would've resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or millions of Allied soldiers: something which all these revisionist narratives don't ever seem to have the slightest concern for. Apparently the writers of these narratives didn't have or don't care about any ancestors who might've died in that invasion. The US military's goal was to win the war with as few US casualties as possible. That's what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now and demonizing the WWII military leadership for achieving that goal is dishonest and characterless.
So back to the narrative: the Japanese were on the verge of capitulation and it had nothing to do with the two bombs -- that's the story here. So even though they finally surrendered unconditionally only 6 days after the Nagasaki bomb we're supposed to believe the bombs had nothing to do with it. There's a lot missing from this narrative.
Oppenheimer had his reasons for opposing nukes after he had husbanded them into existence. But reasons are just logic we apply to emotions we don't really understand. I would take his, and any other, simple narrative justification for what it is: largely an exercise in futility that is doomed from inception to be only partial, simplistic and flawed. Demonization of US military command is easy and popular these days but nothing is ever as simple and clear cut as this piece wants it to be and it does a disservice to all those who died in that awful war to attempt it in such a simplistic and clearly political way. The currently fashionable narrative is the decision to drop the bombs was monstrous and wrong and anything that might contradict that narrative will simply not be discussed. I just can't get with this way of thinking.
Most of us on the left decry the simplification of the Ukraine war into an "unprovoked invasion". Are we not guilty of the same when we write simplistic narratives for decisions made in the middle of the deadliest war in human history almost 80 years ago?
You raise some interesting points, and I agree that things are always more complex than we think. However, I believe that the two atomic bombs were NOT the decisive factor in Japan's surrender. As to the question ' didn't the Japanese leadership care about their civilians?', the answer seems to be, probably not. After all, tens of thousands of them had been routinely killed by fire bombing attacks in the preceding months most nights. Ward Wilson is good to read on this, 'The Winning Weapon?' He suggests that in many ways, Japan did not actually see the atomic bomb as being significantly different.
You have to remember that people are not binary yes/no creatures. Even the Japanese high command had differing views represented within it. The way these things generally work is by some informal consensus that forces the leader to make a choice between opposing views as presented. The bombs focused the minds of these men -- many of whom were rather insane with imperial bloodlust and would have fought to the last Japanese. But there were other voices and after the bombs were dropped they became far stronger. Some of these men actually came forward after the war ended and said that some among the leadership were so crazed with imperial ambition and zeal that their reaction to the bombs was to declare with certainty that the US must not have any more and not to worry about them. Of course these were the minority since everyone really knew they couldn't be certain -- and that what was already done was bad enough. What these men said was that the bombs broke the wall of consensus and allowed for the discussion of surrender. Is this the correct narrative? It certainly is plausible.
It's one thing to have a city bombed over weeks and months and entirely another to be erased from the map in an instant. The end result is similar but the process -- the shock of the moment -- and the total lack of warning -- was something entirely new and should not be discounted.
Again, I'm not really judging one way or the other here. I think its a quixotic adventure we go on when we try to imagine what we think should've been done in such circumstances when we can't even really imagine what it was like.
We also color our views on the end to the Pacific war with what came after -- Eisenhower's inept administration that served to strengthen and promote the more unhinged members of the emerging security state -- from the Dulles brothers to Curtis LeMay -- and the ensuing cold war madness that overtook the power elite in the US. That is also a mistake. The one did not necessarily have to lead to the other and the Strangelovian fever that existed in the 1950's was by no means foreordained.
Huh. Next you’ll find that Barbie distorted women in order to sell merchandise. Filing this one under “Well yeah, what else did you expect?”
there are bombings and there is Dresden bombing
I would recommend reading the “Plutonium Files” and the after that, go and find the documents of the 1994 Senate hearing on the radiation experiments on human beings.
Here is a link to the timeline: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/10111991.pdf
The database was taken down (and likely sanitized) shortly after 9/11. And when you read through some of documents, you find some interesting names… for instance Willard Libby (Nobel Price recipient and famous for his Nickname, which weirdly no one knows about, “Get me some dead baby bones“) and Tara O’Toole.. which you may know if you read anything form the Center for Health Security (SPARS-Pandemic)… the Victoria Nuland of the Biosecurity sector.
Don't turn the WWII Japanese into victims. They were the very definition of ravenous invaders. Butchers in China. Unspeakable, militarily unnecessary violence against millions of confused and defenceless civilians.
That generation is gone... Replaced by a peaceful and humane culture. But make no mistake about the crimes of that militaristic generation.
I haven’t seen the movie nor will I see it because it is a pointless exercise as we all know what happened next after it was deployed. The military nutcases will of course fawn over it - good for them.
Fine reporting on the movie and on the "real" J.R. Oppenheimer.
I hope every American who claims to be glad that the bomb was dropped on innocent civilans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (with its significant and historic Christian population) will have a chance too visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, to see photos and artifacts from the aftermath. It is a soul-shaking experrience.
Ryan Dawson published a compedium of facts regarding the US atomic bombing of Japan on his substack at https://ryandawson.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear
He introduces some material not reported here (and some of the material here is not covered there), but the conclusion is the same---the bomb was not needed to induce the Japanese to end the war, they wanted the war to end much sooner than they did, but did not want to give up the right to continue the lineage of the Japanese imperial house and thus hesitated to "unconditionally surrrender".