TW: war
I'm so upset. I feel like I'll implode with anger and hopelessness and it only comes out in shaking and tears. I'm at Las Alamos -- the Manhattan Project -- the place that created and deployed the first nuclear bombs. My whole life I've been told how the bombs were worth it, they were our savior, a justified evil. But no. Japan was already set to surrender. What pushed their surrender, in the end, was not the bombs, but the Soviet invasion of Japan on August 8th.
So now the whole of the American public believes a horrendous lie! I know the government is a machine of deceit, but even this? Even something that has been a simple fact. Untrue.
The war is over, of course, but this idea of a false reality can have so many consequences. Everyone thinks that the mass murderer of civilians -- CIVILIANS! -- is what ended the war. And so in the future, as humans do, we will look to history and say, "this worked, why not make it work again?"
Hundreds of thousands dead, a city destroyed, generations glorifying carnage, for a lie.
"... the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender..." - William Leahy, most senior US officer on active duty during WWll.
"... it was found convenient to construct the policy of nuclear deterrence on the myth that the fear of such unthinkable carnage would discourage any future aggression." - Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
"[President] Truman himself described an intercepted cable from July 18, 1945, as the 'telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.'" - LA Times.
"From 1946 to 1958, the United States detonated on the Marshall Islands some 67 nuclear bombs, the equivalent of over 1.5 Hiroshima-sized explosions every single day for 12 years, causing much suffering from forced relocation, burns, birth defects, and cancers." - Geneva Centre for Security Policy.