Reply #186: The A Bomb [View All]

[LeahMira]

Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared a lot of bombing during the war just so the effect of the bomb could be evaluated clearly without clouding up the results with the effects of the smaller bombs. Read anything Robert Jay Lifton has written about the bombs that were dropped on Japan... his writing is great. I think I read about the "isolation" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki somewhere else, though... maybe in John Hersey's Hiroshima. Anyhow, despite all the propaganda about how lives were saved because the Japanese would have kept on going until the last man died, there are lots of contradictory reports. Don't know how responsible Truman was personally, but like any president I imagine he was pressured by the military types and a lot of relevant information that he should have been given was "accidentally" forgotten.