Comment on ‘There wasn’t enough about the horror’: Hiroshima survivors react to Oppenheimer

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Sunforged@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

but it was always ever going to end the way it did, if not a lot worse.

This takeaway is mythologization of America’s most reprehensible act.

While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.”

The principal argument mounted to justify the use of atomic bombs — that they would quickly end the war and avoid an invasion that could result in as many as one million casualties — doesn’t hold much weight. Instead, historical evidence more strongly indicates America’s desire to circumvent the need for negotiations with the Soviet Union over the future of East Asia. The Potsdam Conference, held by Allied leadership in the summer of 1945, aimed to determine the postwar settlement in Europe. The United States did not want to be forced into similar negotiations — with the Soviets at the table — for the postwar settlement of the Pacific.

We murdered 210,000 civilians because of a perceived threat to capitalism.

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