80 Years Later

August 6 comes, August 6 goes. And peace-loving people across the world routinely commemorate the Hiroshima Day. This year Japanese observed the 80th anniversary of atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hibakusha–the Japanese term for atomic bomb survivors–will not be on the planet for much longer. Their testimony should continue to be diligently and accurately recorded while it is still available.

When on August 6 and 9, 1945 the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally. It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki–led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay–were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.

In Tokyo alone more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death by cluster bombs of napalm. All this killing was deliberate. Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing. Sixty-seven cities were fire-bombed. There was no Picasso to create another Guernica. On April 26, 1937, during the Spanish civil war, the Nazis tested their new air force on the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain. One-third of Guernica’s 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded. Pablo Picasso exposed the horror of the bombing in his famous anti-war painting called Guernica.

In truth this bombing was a dress rehearsal. The August 1945 atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that Americans could do to them what they did to the people of Japan. President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary-of-State James Byrnes had a plan to wipe the Soviet Union off the map as per revelation of a secret Pentagon document. Then Japan, not Germany, was chosen as a testing ground, because Japanese were not white. Had it not been the American project to destroy the Soviet Union, neither Russia nor China would have developed nuclear weapons. There wouldn’t have been a nuclear arms race. Today with 9 declared nuclear states, many in military confrontation with one another, the world is at a dangerous crossroads.

The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under American bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945 didn’t get to grow up. They couldn’t hide. They just went under. Americans put them under. Or they were left to smoulder for decades in pain and then die. But that it was necessary to save American lives is the biggest lie.

There is a straight line from the nuclear bombing of Japan to the arrant US support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 10, Aug 31 - Sep 6, 2025