Dick Cheney's spring reading

[laststeamtrain]

Dick Cheney's spring reading

Our McClatchy colleague who covers the White House, William Douglas, contributed the following report today to Nukes and Spooks. The vice president's choice of reading material comes as he reportedly presses for a tougher line against Iran, while Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been speaking publicly about avoiding conflict with the Islamic Republic.

Vice President Dick Cheney, arriving in Philadelphia today to watch economic stimulus rebate checks processed at a government financial center, had a thick hardcover book tucked under his arm as he got off Air Force Two at Willow Grove Naval Air Station.

Aides said the book was "Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45," by the British historian Max Hastings.

Reviews on Amazon.com describe the book as a brutally honest recounting of some of World War II's bloodiest clashes in the Pacific from the perspectives of the troops - American, Japanese, Australian, Russian and Chinese - more than the views of the generals and world leaders who sent them into battle.

The book's main premise, according to reviews, is that the United States was justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway has been so completely discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence," Hastings writes....http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/nationalsecurity/2008/05/dick-cheneys-sp.html

[Thor_MN]

1. According to Freeman Dyson in June's Discover

It was the Russian invasion of Manchuria that got the Japanese Supreme Council to act. The conventional bombing of Tokyo killed more people than Hiroshima. Killing civilians was just part of normal business, the army was the only thing that mattered. The Council met within hours after of the Russians invading Manchuria, the army being affected. A two front war was untenable.

He did say that we could not have known it at the time, but (I think what he was saying is) had we not dropped atomic bombs, Japan would have likely surrendered anyway.

He said that Ward Wilson was the person who studied this and educated him.