Japan remembers

Today was a hard day for us to get through here in Japan. At 8:15am on August 3rd, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on the city of Hiroshima and its 60kg core of uranium 235 was detonated. On that day, the aggressor turned into the victim. Its explosion with a force of 13 kilotons of TNT flattened a radius of 1.5 miles and killed 70,000 to 80,000 people outright with many more later dying of radiation sickness that the U.S. claimed was "Japanese propaganda." (As of August 2004, the City of Hiroshima claimed 237,062 dead as a result of the bombing.

Inside the Truman administration there was a debate on whether to drop the bomb in an unpopulated area to demonstrate its power or to see what it could do on a city. The arguments of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes won out with Hiroshima being the first target.

Claims, most notably from Byrnes, say that the bombs saved lives in the war. However, Japan was looking to end the war anyway. Take for example the words of then President Truman on July 18, 1945, President Truman: "telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace…. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [atomic bomb] appears over their homeland." Another among many examples is Walter Brown, aide to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who on Aug. 3, 1945 wrote "agreed Japs looking for peace…. "

I could go on about how the bomb was really for the Russians to let them see what the U.S. could do, but this is familiar to the point of cliche. Thus is will end by saying that every year in the peak of summer we here mourn as we will again on August 9th.