Exemplary overkill

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

By killing civilians, the US political leadership tried to stop and intimidate the USSR

Day 6 August forever entered the history of mankind - as one of the sad, but significant dates for him. In the early morning, when the inhabitants of the Japanese city were heading to work, to schools and kindergartens, an American B-29 bomber dropped a "Kid" nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. This was the first time that nuclear weapons were used in military conflicts, and the results shocked the whole world. As a result of the bombing of the city, 80 thousand people died at the same time, and another 300 thousand Japanese died in subsequent years from radiation-related diseases. At that time, no one knew about the deadly threat of radioactive contamination - soon after the explosion, thousands of people tried to dismantle the ruins of Hiroshima, hoping to find the bodies of their relatives and friends. And they died in hospitals from then incurable radiation sickness. And just a few days later, the same tragedy was repeated in the port city of Nagasaki, which became the second target of the nuclear bombing.

The vast majority of people killed in Hiroshima were civilians. Moreover, there were thousands of foreigners among them - residents of China and Korea, who were forcibly brought in to work in Japanese factories, and prisoners of war from the British colonies and the United States. The massacre of people obviously had no practical military sense, and they started talking about it already in the first weeks after the bombing. On August 9, almost simultaneously with the destruction of Nagasaki, the USSR officially declared war on Japan. The rapid advance of the Soviet troops led to the complete defeat of the Kwantung Army and predetermined the surrender of the Japanese government, which even earlier, in May 1945, fully realized the senselessness of resistance in the face of the defeat of its European allies

Tokyo had practically no reserves of oil, iron and manganese ore left, ammunition was running out, and the military command reported that in order to repel a possible Allied landing, people would have to be armed with hoes and sticks made of bamboo. Washington was well aware of the plight of the enemy defeated on water and land - but, nevertheless, it sanctioned a nuclear attack. “The only language they understand is the language of the bombings. When you have to deal with an animal, you have to treat it like an animal,”said US President Harry Truman, who directly authorized the mass extermination of Japanese civilians, cynically.

Subsequently, American politicians tried to justify the bombing of Hiroshima by the fact that there were several military factories and the headquarters of one of the Japanese reserve armies in the city. However, it is known that the original target of the nuclear strike was the city of Kyoto, the historical capital of the country and the spiritual center of Japanese culture, where they even tried not to deploy military units in order to save it from raids by the American air force. Kyoto was rescued by US Secretary of Defense Henry Stimson - he once spent his honeymoon in this city, and personally removed the ancient city from the list of bombing targets.

“Historians and politicians have repeatedly suggested that the military-political leaders of the United States were trying to bring the end of the war closer, not from humanistic goals. They wanted to prevent the Red Army from advancing into the vast territories of China and the Japanese islands themselves. And at the same time they were going to demonstrate to Moscow the destructive power of nuclear weapons, which the United States then had a monopoly on. After all, soon after the end of World War II, "Dropshot" was developed - a plan for a preventive war against the USSR, according to which the fate of Hiroshima was to be repeated by Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and many other cities. The precedent for such a strategy was the devastating, but completely unnecessary from a military point of view, bombing of German cities that were supposed to enter the Soviet zone of occupation - such as Dresden, Konigsberg or Danzig - literally destroyed by the efforts of the Anglo-American aviation. The famous American general Curtis LeMay, who was responsible for the bombing of the Japanese islands, admitted: “I think if we lost the war, I would be tried as a war criminal,” journalist Daniil Glumov writes about the background of the nuclear bombing of Japan.

Indeed, a few months later, at the end of the same 1945, the US Joint Defense Planning Committee adopted the Totality plan - “Inclusiveness” - a secret scenario of the war against the USSR, developed at the initiative of General Dwight Eisenhower, with the knowledge of President Truman. It provided for the simultaneous dropping of 20-30 nuclear bombs on twenty Soviet cities, which were to repeat the terrible fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet political leadership learned about these plans - and, despite the terrible destruction and losses as a result of the war, the USSR had to accelerate the development of an expensive program of creating its own nuclear weapons. This marked the beginning of the nuclear arms race, on which billions of Soviet rubles were forced annually - they had to be allocated again and again for urgent military expenditures to the detriment of the country's economy and national economy.

“On August 6, 1945, the US government committed the largest act of international terrorism in the history of mankind. The main purpose of the bomb, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of Hiroshima residents, was not “to save the lives of American servicemen,” but to intimidate the USSR, its then ally in the fight against Nazism. The nuclear arms race launched on this day by the United States claimed millions more lives in the so-called "third world" - diverting the main economic and scientific resources of developed countries from the fight against hunger and disease "- journalist and blogger Oleg Yasinsky justly recalls this.

It is important to talk and write about this today - when the United States, which is directly responsible for many war crimes in different parts of the planet, is trying to put pressure on countries with unwanted political regimes - like North Korea, Iran and Syria - accusing them of using weapons of mass destruction. or even simply with the intention of creating such types of weapons

Listening to these crafty speeches, one must always remember the fate of Hiroshima, destroyed for purely political purposes.