The bombing of Hiroshima

The Bombing of Hiroshima

The Hiroshima A-bombing was undertaken by the United States in to save lives . As then President Truman himself said , We have used [the atomic bomb] in to shorten the agony of war , in to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans (Long , n .d Unfortunately for the Japanese , the 9 ,700 pounds of uranium bomb instantly killed around 70 ,000 people and more than 100 ,000 more after five years due to cancer and other after effects . Ironically christened Little Boy ' the atomic bomb which

had a yield equal to that of 15 ,000 tons of TNT , was meant to secure the unconditional surrender of Japan , one of the declarations of the Potsdam Conference (U .S Department of Energy , n .d

Some people , however , questioned the U . S . position . According to them if the objective was merely to end the war as early as possible and prevent further loss of lives , it could have been accomplished more easily by not demanding an unconditional surrender ' John J . McCloy then Assistant Secretary of War , argued that unconditional surrender would have result to the utter loss of face on the part of the Japanese He suggested that dropping the term could have been more acceptable thereby securing their surrender more easily . It was observed then that the issue of unconditional surrender was the biggest stumbling block to the Japanese surrender because , according to Joseph Grew , who was the Acting Secretary of State at the time , the Japanese feared that unconditional surrender would mean the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne (Nuclear Age Peace Foundation , n .d

On the other hand , there were also those who believed that Japan was already on the verge of giving up the war even without the atomic bomb It was claimed that even before June of 1945 , Japan was already a beaten country with its Imperial Navy reduced to almost zero and its air force completely destroyed . This enabled the Allied Forces to bomb Japan at will against only a nominal opposition . Tokyo , for instance , had been devastated by U .S . bombing attacks , first on March 9 , when 300 bombers killed around 100 ,000 people with about 1 ,700 tons of bombs . It was followed by another bombing raid on May 23 , 1945 , involving 520 B-29 Superfortress ' bombers which unloaded some 4 ,500 tons of incendiary bombs ' followed two days later by a second batch of 502 bombers with 4 ,000 tons of explosives ' That two-day bombing attack of May , 1945 alone leveled about 56 square miles of Tokyo . This prompted General Curtis LeMay of the U .S . Air force to boast that the Japanese were being driven back to the stone age ' General Henry H . Arnold , who was commanding the Army air forces , even declared that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb , the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse ' A confirmation was provided by Fumimaro Konoye , who was...