The war in the Pacific had ended by January of 1945

Never forget Nagasaki January 17, 2018 Rory Fanning, author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America, recounts his trip with another antiwar veteran to Japan to discuss the horrors the U.S. atomic bombings during the Second World War and the urgent need for nuclear disarmament today, in an article first published at Jacobin.

Mike and I did not give the order to drop the bombs. We did not fight as soldiers in the war that dropped those bombs. However, we were pawns of the U.S. war machine in its latest, longest war. We both partook in wars that have killed over a million people, the majority of them civilians. We signed up to fight terrorism but soon realized we were the ones doing the terrorizing. We believe our role in the war on terror connects us in some way the 140,000 civilians who were killed within days of the atomic blasts. We believe that the deaths of so many civilians in both of these wars should never have happened. THE CONSENSUS argument holds that the United States dropped those bombs on so many civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war and save millions of lives. This claim cannot be justified. The war in the Pacific had ended by January of 1945. The Japanese were starving and the country could no longer manufacture what it needed to continue the fight. The United States had the ultra-secret purple and red Japanese cyphers transmitting this information. High-level government officials offered surrender terms to Douglas MacArthur a full seven months prior to the bombing, terms nearly identical to those accepted in Japan Bay on September 2, 1945. This history remains largely untaught, just as the fact that the Taliban surrendered within months of the initial American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 remains untaught--to say nothing of the lies that led us into the Iraq War. Seventy years separates the Second World War and the global war on terror, but the cliched line nevertheless applies to both: "Truth is the first casualty of war." This sense of being lied to, of being manipulated into participating in so much death and destruction, drove us to Japan. As we uncovered the lies of the war we fought, we soon wanted to uncover the lies of other wars, especially the "Good War," the one that is so often used to justify others. Learning the truth can only provide so much closure; stopping the lies that lead to war became our priority.

https://megalodon.jp/2018-0119-1900-04/https://socialistworker.org:443/2018/01/17/never-forget-nagasaki?utm_content=bufferdcaa7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer The Firebombing of Tokyo BY RORY FANNING Was Hiroshima Necessary? Why the Atomic Bombings Could Have Been Avoided By Mark Weber