Workers protests U.S. President  Obama’s recent visit at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. Hypocrite-in-chief Barack Obama concluded his visit to Japan with no apology for the most deadly terrorist slaughter in the history of the world, the 1945 U.S. atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, he called for a “moral awakening” and “a world free of nuclear weapons.” He laid a wreath. He embraced survivors of the racist atrocities that murdered more than 200,000 women, men and children, the vast majority of them civilians burned to death. Whenever the imperialists fight, it’s always the working class that suffers the bloody horrors.
But actions speak louder than words. In response to the sharpening inter-imperialist competition between the U.S. bosses and their capitalist counterparts in Russia and China, Obama has engineered “a $1 trillion program to rebuild the American nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years. A new Pentagon report shows that he has eliminated fewer nuclear weapons than any president since the end of the Cold War” (New York Times, 5/28). In particular, the recent development of smaller—and therefore more usable—nuclear weapons by “an economically declining Russia, a rising China and an uncertain United States…threaten[s] to revive a Cold War-era arms race…” (NYT, 4/16).
Joining Obama at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was Shinzo Abe, Japan’s hard-right prime minister, who led a successful 2015 campaign—backed by the U.S.—to “re-interpret” the country’s pacifist postwar constitution and free its “Self-Defense Forces” to engage in overseas combat. Obama’s pivot to Asia is heavily tilting toward a remilitarized Japan as a once-and-future regional counterweight to China. As a former Japanese Foreign Ministry official observed, “Abe’s approach is a kind of ‘military pacifism’ that takes war as a given” (NYT, 5/27).
When the rulers talk of peace, as Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht once noted, the workers know that war has already begun. The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the U.S. ruling class will stop at nothing to preserve its state power and profit. Which means the next world war is only a matter of time.
Bombing Japan to Save It—for U.S. Imperialism
For seven decades, U.S rulers have tried to justify the A-bomb attacks by maintaining they were needed to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion and a million U.S. casualties. In reality, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before Hiroshima:
   • According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a board of military and civilian experts established by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Hiroshima Lies
   • A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, later the U.S. National Security Adviser, “confessed that he had pulled it out of the air to justify the bombings” (8/5/2005).
   • By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”
   • The arch-racist Truman’s diary referred to a decoded Japanese cable indicating Japan was about to surrender unconditionally, as “the Jap[anese] Emperor [was] asking for peace.”
   • General (and future president) Dwight Eisenhower believed that Japan “was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…and no longer mandatory to save American lives” (Eisenhower: Mandate for Change, 1963).
   • General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, considered the A-bombs “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (James Clayton, “The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945,” Vol. II).
A Genocide Aimed at USSR
If overwhelming evidence shows that the genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary, and that Japan was on the verge of unconditional surrender, why did President Harry Truman order the A-bombs dropped? The true purpose was to warn the then-socialist Soviet Union that the U.S. had a new and devastating weapon, and was ready to use it against any threat to the U.S. imperialists’ world dominance. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginning of the Cold War between capitalists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Some supporting evidence:
      • On June 6, 1945, Stimson told Truman he was “fearful” that the U.S. Air Force would have Japan “so bombed out” that the A-Bomb “would not have a fair background to show its strength.”
   • With the Soviet Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier, to play what Stimson referred to as a “master card”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson diary).
   • James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state, told Stimson, “The atomic bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war” (Truman: Year of Decisions).
As A-bomb scientist Leo Szilard, in a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes, recalled:
Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb…in order to win the war….Mr. Byrnes’s….view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.
—A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb, Leo Szilard, 1949.
In an implicit indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, Szilard said, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremburg and hanged them.”
In this era of a U.S. “war on terror” and Obama’s bald-faced lies about eliminating nuclear weapons, it’s important to remember that he represents the capitalist class that stands guilty of the genocide in Japan. To this day, only the U. S. rulers have used nuclear weapons in war. It remains for the international working class to mete out justice to the most murderous criminals the world has ever known.