Cyprus-Forum.com

[Novus]

On the eve of the detonation of the second bomb, on Nagasaki, I still wonder why these acts should not go down in the annals of History as amongst the greatest of War Crimes.

Whatever justification may exist (tenuous at best) for the bombing of Hiroshima ...... the mass murder by EXPERIMENT ..... of civilians at an unprecedented scale, in a matter of seconds .... and conducted surely in an experimental capacity .... the same cannot be said for the issuing of a second bomb.

Repeating a falsehood over and over will not make it true.
The US did not drop the bomb as an experiment, and to suggest it is ridiculous.
The bombs were dropped on a military target. If it was dropped to kill civillians they would have dropped it five miles further up and killed over twice as many people and not hit the military target.
The second bomb was dropped because Japan still did not surrender. They had days to respond. Truman even warned them days in advance more of the bombs were comming if they did not accept the terms they were given long before the first bomb was dropped.

[Oracle]

On the eve of the detonation of the second bomb, on Nagasaki, I still wonder why these acts should not go down in the annals of History as amongst the greatest of War Crimes.

Whatever justification may exist (tenuous at best) for the bombing of Hiroshima ...... the mass murder by EXPERIMENT ..... of civilians at an unprecedented scale, in a matter of seconds .... and conducted surely in an experimental capacity .... the same cannot be said for the issuing of a second bomb.

Repeating a falsehood over and over will not make it true.
The US did not drop the bomb as an experiment, and to suggest it is ridiculous.
The bombs were dropped on a military target. If it was dropped to kill civillians they would have dropped it five miles further up and killed over twice as many people and not hit the military target.
The second bomb was dropped because Japan still did not surrender. They had days to respond. Truman even warned them days in advance more of the bombs were comming if they did not accept the terms they were given long before the first bomb was dropped.

Novus I would appreciate your views on John Pilger's article pasted on page 5.

It is the predominant view amongst my liberal friends here in the UK. Guiltily it is what I would err towards too, not being American, or having been there or knowing much WWII history. So hands up, biased.

However, I accept as a fact both detonations were EXPERIMENTS.

[Novus]

On the eve of the detonation of the second bomb, on Nagasaki, I still wonder why these acts should not go down in the annals of History as amongst the greatest of War Crimes.

Whatever justification may exist (tenuous at best) for the bombing of Hiroshima ...... the mass murder by EXPERIMENT ..... of civilians at an unprecedented scale, in a matter of seconds .... and conducted surely in an experimental capacity .... the same cannot be said for the issuing of a second bomb.

agreed that this should go down as one of the worst war crimes, but don't you think the way the nazi treated the minoraties was far worse? i would think the cruel treatment of the prisoners in the camps far worse a fate than getting nuked. IMHO

The Japanese committed many war
attrocities much worse than what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki could ever be considered to be.
The Rape of Nanking was just one the Japanese did and more people (mostly civillians) were brutally murdered in that one area that died in both bombs dropped. What made it an attrocity above all others is they enjoyed committing the rapes and mass murders in a sick sadistic way, and the people of Japan generally approved of the stories of mass murder they read about.

The bombs were dropped on those two cities to end the war and the targets were military in nature. It was not an "experiment".
You want an example of actual experiments on civillians during war? Look here:

Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits", "criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.

Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit.

But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them. Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.

Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.

Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a scalpel.

"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."

Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms.

Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.

Those which did have a genuine medical value, such as finding the best treatment for frostbite - a valuable discovery for troops in the bitter Manchurian winters - were achieved by gratuitously cruel means.

On the frozen fields at Pingfan, prisoners were led out with bare arms and drenched with cold water to accelerate the freezing process.

Their arms were then hit with a stick. If they gave off a hard, hollow ring, the freezing process was complete. Separately, naked men and women were subjected to freezing temperatures and then defrosted to study the effects of rotting and gangrene on the flesh.

People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death like a cat in a washing machine. To study the effects of untreated venereal disease, male and female "logs" were deliberately infected with syphilis.

Ishii demanded a constant intake of prisoners, like a modern-day Count Dracula scouring the countryside for blood. His victims were tied to stakes to find the best range for flame-throwers, or used to test grenades and explosives positioned at different angles and distances. They were used as targets to test chemical weapons; they were bombarded with anthrax....


....Vast quantities of anthrax and bubonic plague bacteria were stored at Unit 731. Ishii manufactured plague bombs which could spread fatal diseases far and wide. Thousands of white rats were bred as plague carriers, and fleas introduced to feed on them.

Plague fleas were then encased in bombs, with which Japanese troops launched biological attacks on reservoirs, wells and agricultural areas.

Infected clothing and food supplies were also dropped. Villages and whole towns were afflicted with cholera, anthrax and the plague, which between them killed over the years an estimated 400,000 Chinese.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... avity.html


In WWII bombing military targets located in or near cities was not a war crime at that point. The use of nuclear weapons wasn't either. The US action was legal and even justified to a certain degree. Compared to what Japan did during the war makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki start to look like a humanitarian act. Imagine if they made the invasion of Japan so horrific and costly they were able to beat the US back. The US would have to accept their terms of peace and that might be to let Japan keep Korea and parts of China. Just how many hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans would have died horribly in the following years at Japanese hands just like they did for a decade before.

[Novus]

On the eve of the detonation of the second bomb, on Nagasaki, I still wonder why these acts should not go down in the annals of History as amongst the greatest of War Crimes.

Whatever justification may exist (tenuous at best) for the bombing of Hiroshima ...... the mass murder by EXPERIMENT ..... of civilians at an unprecedented scale, in a matter of seconds .... and conducted surely in an experimental capacity .... the same cannot be said for the issuing of a second bomb.

Repeating a falsehood over and over will not make it true.
The US did not drop the bomb as an experiment, and to suggest it is ridiculous.
The bombs were dropped on a military target. If it was dropped to kill civillians they would have dropped it five miles further up and killed over twice as many people and not hit the military target.
The second bomb was dropped because Japan still did not surrender. They had days to respond. Truman even warned them days in advance more of the bombs were comming if they did not accept the terms they were given long before the first bomb was dropped.

Novus I would appreciate your views on John Pilger's article pasted on page 5.

It is the predominant view amongst my liberal friends here in the UK. Guiltily it is what I would err towards too, not being American, or having been there or knowing much WWII history. So hands up, biased.

However, I accept as a fact both detonations were EXPERIMENTS.

His article is rife with lies, half truths and selective reading of history.

One, the peace overtures he claims "Japan" tried in 1943 were by a minority of the government basically acting on their own without the emporer or the military powers running the government, so his failure to mention it was a half hearted attempt in the first place and that it was conducted without Japanese authority reveals the author's extreme bias.
The reason it was not pursued was because the terms were laughably unnaceptable and the emmisaries did not even have the full Japanese authority in the first place.

Two, his claim about superior air power forcing a surrender within a year is ignoring a lot. It would have been costly, might not have worked and in that year famines in Japan would have taken millions of lives. Also there was a possibility Russia might have lent Japan support at that point. Untill August 9th we did not know which way Russia was going to go. Were they going to declare war on Japan and invade? Or were they going to help Japan because they wanted to makes us expend our military resources?
We could not waste a year and massive amounts of our resources on waiting for Japan to surrender a year or three later. We still had to rebuild Germany and deal with the Communist threats.
For the author to suggest Japan would have surrendered in a year and it was feasible for the US to fight that long is childish on his part.

As far as the lasting radiation part and how that was part of the experiment, the author fails to mention one importatnt thing. While we knew about some radiation, we thought the levels of radiation were so low we sent unprotected American troops into the city. Some troops even discoverd a glowing ball of unspent Uranium. Some of those troops suffered radiation poisoning too. Most parts of the military had absolutely no idea what to expect and to pick and choose what some parts say about something no one really knew the full extent of anyway is supremely prejudicial on the author's part.

Oracle, looking at how much propaganda and slanted writings there has been on the issue of Cyprus, especially the crap that comes from Turkey about what happened in Cyprus before or during the invasion, can't you see how propaganda, mischaracterizations and misrepresentations work yet? NEVER trust just one source when looking at a controversial aspect of history.
This author is so good at twisting the facts and misrepresenting events portraying them as menaing something totally different by stating them out of context, I bet he would have done great working for George Bush in the past seven years or writing for Pravda under Stalin.

[Oracle]

On the eve of the detonation of the second bomb, on Nagasaki, I still wonder why these acts should not go down in the annals of History as amongst the greatest of War Crimes.

Whatever justification may exist (tenuous at best) for the bombing of Hiroshima ...... the mass murder by EXPERIMENT ..... of civilians at an unprecedented scale, in a matter of seconds .... and conducted surely in an experimental capacity .... the same cannot be said for the issuing of a second bomb.

agreed that this should go down as one of the worst war crimes, but don't you think the way the nazi treated the minoraties was far worse? i would think the cruel treatment of the prisoners in the camps far worse a fate than getting nuked. IMHO

The Japanese committed many war
attrocities much worse than what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki could ever be considered to be.
The Rape of Nanking was just one the Japanese did and more people (mostly civillians) were brutally murdered in that one area that died in both bombs dropped. What made it an attrocity above all others is they enjoyed committing the rapes and mass murders in a sick sadistic way, and the people of Japan generally approved of the stories of mass murder they read about.

The bombs were dropped on those two cities to end the war and the targets were military in nature. It was not an "experiment".
You want an example of actual experiments on civillians during war? Look here:

Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits", "criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.

Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit.

But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them. Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.

Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.

Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a scalpel.

"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."

Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms.

Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.

Those which did have a genuine medical value, such as finding the best treatment for frostbite - a valuable discovery for troops in the bitter Manchurian winters - were achieved by gratuitously cruel means.

On the frozen fields at Pingfan, prisoners were led out with bare arms and drenched with cold water to accelerate the freezing process.

Their arms were then hit with a stick. If they gave off a hard, hollow ring, the freezing process was complete. Separately, naked men and women were subjected to freezing temperatures and then defrosted to study the effects of rotting and gangrene on the flesh.

People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death like a cat in a washing machine. To study the effects of untreated venereal disease, male and female "logs" were deliberately infected with syphilis.

Ishii demanded a constant intake of prisoners, like a modern-day Count Dracula scouring the countryside for blood. His victims were tied to stakes to find the best range for flame-throwers, or used to test grenades and explosives positioned at different angles and distances. They were used as targets to test chemical weapons; they were bombarded with anthrax....


....Vast quantities of anthrax and bubonic plague bacteria were stored at Unit 731. Ishii manufactured plague bombs which could spread fatal diseases far and wide. Thousands of white rats were bred as plague carriers, and fleas introduced to feed on them.

Plague fleas were then encased in bombs, with which Japanese troops launched biological attacks on reservoirs, wells and agricultural areas.

Infected clothing and food supplies were also dropped. Villages and whole towns were afflicted with cholera, anthrax and the plague, which between them killed over the years an estimated 400,000 Chinese.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... avity.html


In WWII bombing military targets located in or near cities was not a war crime at that point. The use of nuclear weapons wasn't either. The US action was legal and even justified to a certain degree. Compared to what Japan did during the war makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki start to look like a humanitarian act. Imagine if they made the invasion of Japan so horrific and costly they were able to beat the US back. The US would have to accept their terms of peace and that might be to let Japan keep Korea and parts of China. Just how many hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans would have died horribly in the following years at Japanese hands just like they did for a decade before.

You claim the use of Nuclear weapons was not considered a war crime then, as a justification for their use ... yet that was the first time they were used against people so a precedent had not been set.

All the atrocities the Japanese carried out are being used now to mitigate the reasons for using the bombs, but those atrocities were not under consideration by the US at the time the bombs were used. It's equivalent to us saying well Turkey is well known for its genocidal and extremely cruel acts of the past, so let's drop a nuclear bomb on them now.

It sounds like extermination tactics to me Novus.

[Oracle]

On the eve of the detonation of the second bomb, on Nagasaki, I still wonder why these acts should not go down in the annals of History as amongst the greatest of War Crimes.

Whatever justification may exist (tenuous at best) for the bombing of Hiroshima ...... the mass murder by EXPERIMENT ..... of civilians at an unprecedented scale, in a matter of seconds .... and conducted surely in an experimental capacity .... the same cannot be said for the issuing of a second bomb.

Repeating a falsehood over and over will not make it true.
The US did not drop the bomb as an experiment, and to suggest it is ridiculous.
The bombs were dropped on a military target. If it was dropped to kill civillians they would have dropped it five miles further up and killed over twice as many people and not hit the military target.
The second bomb was dropped because Japan still did not surrender. They had days to respond. Truman even warned them days in advance more of the bombs were comming if they did not accept the terms they were given long before the first bomb was dropped.

Novus I would appreciate your views on John Pilger's article pasted on page 5.

It is the predominant view amongst my liberal friends here in the UK. Guiltily it is what I would err towards too, not being American, or having been there or knowing much WWII history. So hands up, biased.

However, I accept as a fact both detonations were EXPERIMENTS.

His article is rife with lies, half truths and selective reading of history.

One, the peace overtures he claims "Japan" tried in 1943 were by a minority of the government basically acting on their own without the emporer or the military powers running the government, so his failure to mention it was a half hearted attempt in the first place and that it was conducted without Japanese authority reveals the author's extreme bias.
The reason it was not pursued was because the terms were laughably unnaceptable and the emmisaries did not even have the full Japanese authority in the first place.

Two, his claim about superior air power forcing a surrender within a year is ignoring a lot. It would have been costly, might not have worked and in that year famines in Japan would have taken millions of lives. Also there was a possibility Russia might have lent Japan support at that point. Untill August 9th we did not know which way Russia was going to go. Were they going to declare war on Japan and invade? Or were they going to help Japan because they wanted to makes us expend our military resources?
We could not waste a year and massive amounts of our resources on waiting for Japan to surrender a year or three later. We still had to rebuild Germany and deal with the Communist threats.
For the author to suggest Japan would have surrendered in a year and it was feasible for the US to fight that long is childish on his part.

As far as the lasting radiation part and how that was part of the experiment, the author fails to mention one importatnt thing. While we knew about some radiation, we thought the levels of radiation were so low we sent unprotected American troops into the city. Some troops even discoverd a glowing ball of unspent Uranium. Some of those troops suffered radiation poisoning too. Most parts of the military had absolutely no idea what to expect and to pick and choose what some parts say about something no one really knew the full extent of anyway is supremely prejudicial on the author's part.

Oracle, looking at how much propaganda and slanted writings there has been on the issue of Cyprus, especially the crap that comes from Turkey about what happened in Cyprus before or during the invasion, can't you see how propaganda, mischaracterizations and misrepresentations work yet? NEVER trust just one source when looking at a controversial aspect of history.
This author is so good at twisting the facts and misrepresenting events portraying them as menaing something totally different by stating them out of context, I bet he would have done great working for George Bush in the past seven years or writing for Pravda under Stalin.

I am familiar with the propaganda tactics of the bullies to suppress the smaller sovereignties which is why I asked for your version to Pilger's, as you are extremely knowledgeable, so thank you for taking the time to write all that, which I will have to re-read a few times.

The British are amongst the most anti-American nationalities I have met so far, so I can understand why the vast majority side with Japan on this issue. Plus the emotive forces at play with the idea of Nuclear weapons.

My worry is that the American propaganda machine is trying to portray these weapons as preventative or War-Stopping tools because of their use in Japan.

To me they are just such an overwhelming, threatening, menacing presence in the hands of men of doubt-able integrity and morals (Bush, Israel etc), that the lesson we should take home from these two bombings is that nuclear weapons are a sad mistake.

But I guess we have the mini-black hole experiments to worry about next when the Large Hadron Collider is fired up

[Novus]

You claim the use of Nuclear weapons was not considered a war crime then, as a justification for their use ... yet that was the first time they were used against people so a precedent had not been set.

YES!! There was no precedent on using nuclear weapons. However there was the Hague Convention which the US signed which says you cannot specifically target civillians if they are not part of the war effort and we didn't. We targeted military installations and military industry next to or at the edge of the city.

All the atrocities the Japanese carried out are being used now to mitigate the reasons for using the bombs, but those atrocities were not under consideration by the US at the time the bombs were used. It's equivalent to us saying well Turkey is well known for its genocidal and extremely cruel acts of the past, so let's drop a nuclear bomb on them now.

It sounds like extermination tactics to me Novus.

How do you know the Japanese war attrocities were not under consideration? You have only looked at a few extremely biased sources that only tell one side of the story that left out any details that might explain the justifications for dropping the bombs.

We heard about the attrocities in China, but we KNEW about the attrocities in the Phillipines committed by the Japanese against captured American soldiers and the civillian population there. The Phillipines was a commonwealth of the United States or a territory and so the people there were U.S. Nationals. The Japanese attrocities took the lives of up to a MILLION American Nationals and American citizens (and American POWs). In Manilla alone there were nearly 100,000 civillian lives lost under Japanese occupation.

Now this was not the reason for dropping the bomb and the reason for dropping the bomb was to end the war quicker, but if there was much dissent on the decision to drop the bomb, it was quelled by the recollection of the brutality of the Japanese and their mass attrocities on American people.
The brutality of the Japanese and our realization by that point in the war their willingness to die to the last man showed us an invasion or continued conventional warfare would be too costly in even more American lives and THAT is why we decided to drop the bomb.
The Soviets and the Japanese attrocities were factors in the decision, but they were side notes.

Did you know when we invaded the island of Okinawa which was a major Japanese island but not the mainland we lost 12,000 American soldiers but out of the 130,000 Japanese soldiers only about 10,00 survived? Many of them died in a suicide charge and others just plain refused to surrender and fought untill killed.
Did you know that as many as 150,000 Japanese civillians lost their lives on Okinawa during the invasion? Many of them committed suicide....ever hear of their mass suicides jumping off the cliffs into the sea with their babies in their ars? No? Then see for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwLSHAd4CdM
This is what they were going to let their own people suffer if we invaded or blockaded them for a year or two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-O0bC2q ... re=related
We KNEW what we were facing and it is an insult to the Japanese, the Phillipinos and the American soldiers that suffered through this or died to suggest it was "just an experiment".

[Novus]

I am familiar with the propaganda tactics of the bullies to suppress the smaller sovereignties which is why I asked for your version to Pilger's, as you are extremely knowledgeable, so thank you for taking the time to write all that, which I will have to re-read a few times.

The British are amongst the most anti-American nationalities I have met so far, so I can understand why the vast majority side with Japan on this issue. Plus the emotive forces at play with the idea of Nuclear weapons.

My worry is that the American propaganda machine is trying to portray these weapons as preventative or War-Stopping tools because of their use in Japan.

To me they are just such an overwhelming, threatening, menacing presence in the hands of men of doubt-able integrity and morals (Bush, Israel etc), that the lesson we should take home from these two bombings is that nuclear weapons are a sad mistake.

But I guess we have the mini-black hole experiments to worry about next when the Large Hadron Collider is fired up

You might find this interesting. http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/educat ... p-bomb.htm

It was written by an organization to end the existence of nuclear weapons.

[Oracle]

Japan remembers Nagasaki atomic bomb victims
Sat Aug 9, 2008

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan marked the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki with a solemn ceremony on Saturday and a call for world powers to abandon their nuclear weapons.

Thousands of children, elderly survivors and dignitaries in the city's Peace Park bowed their heads in a minute of silence at 11:02 a.m. (10:02 p.m. EDT), the time the bomb was dropped, to remember the tens of thousands who ultimately died from the blast.

"The United States and Russia must take the lead in striving to abolish nuclear weapons," Nagasaki mayor Tomihisa Taue said at the gathering, which included Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

"These two countries ... should begin implementing broad reductions of nuclear weapons instead of deepening their conflict over, among others, the introduction of a missile-defence system in Europe."

Britain, France and China should also reduce their nuclear arms, he added.

About 27,000 of the southwestern city's estimated 200,000 population died instantly from the bomb, and about 70,000 had died by the end of 1945.
Nagasaki was bombed by the United States on August 9, 1945, three days after the western city of Hiroshima, where the blast also killed tens of thousands immediately and many more later from radiation sickness.

On August 15, Japan surrendered, bringing World War Two to an end.

Fukuda said Japan had to fulfill its responsible role as a nation of peace Continued...

"I vow to lead the international community for permanent peace," Fukuda said in a speech.

Nagasaki's toll from the bomb, nicknamed "Fat Man", is updated every year by the Japanese government which keeps a record of victims it says die of radiation illness. It added 3,058 names to the list this year, bringing the official death toll to 145,984.

Earlier in the week, the mayor of Hiroshima had criticized countries that refuse to abandon their bombs and vowed to do more to help survivors still suffering the city's 1945 attack.

Japan has stood by its self-imposed "three non-nuclear principles" banning the possession, production and import of nuclear arms.

I received radiation burns (mild) on my legs years ago, and the searing constant (but low) burning sensation really made me feel sick and shaky with weakness such that I couldn't concentrate on anything else.

I was fine after a few days. But I can't help thinking how much pain those people who weren't immediately scorched to death, would have felt over months and even years, as they succumbed, slowly, to the effects of exposure to such vast amounts of radiation.

[Novus]

The decision to use the A-Bomb was not taken lightly by Truman or his advisors. The final move to
defeat Japan had to result in unconditional surrender with the fewest number of American casualties possible,
prevent Soviet occupation of territory, and inflict the minimum number of Japanese civilian casualties. The
atomic bomb met the first three conditions, and possibly the fourth, but alternatives were considered.
Using the bomb in a demonstration on an evacuated city or uninhabited area was seriously considered
but rejected on two grounds. The U.S. only had two A-Bombs at this point, and using one in a manner that may
be less than decisive was deemed too risky. Second, if the demo bomb were to be a dud, such a grand failure
would likely fuel Japanese resistance making a full-scale invasion the only alternative.
A second option was an economic war. In 1945 massive bombing raids laid waste to entire cities and
decimated Japan’s war industry and a naval blockade was preventing most imports into the country causing
shortages of food and raw materials. But this was not provoking serious calls for surrender from Japanese
leaders even though it resulted in horrendous collateral damage killing at least 300,000 civilians and leaving 8.5
million others homeless. However, strategic air offensives had not been decisive for the Germans against
Britain or for the Western Allies against Germany. At best this option would require many months, possibly
more than a year, to produce a surrender, and in the process result in several hundred thousand civilian deaths,
the total destruction of Japan’s cities and infrastructure and Soviet occupation of large portions of Asia.
Invasion was the last resort. An assault of the heavily populated, mountainous, island of Kyushu, the
southern most island of Japan, was scheduled for November 1, 1945. 800,000 assault troops would be involved
in this initial stage, five times the number involved in the D-Day landings. In April an invasion seemed
plausible, but by July, Japanese forces on Kyushu had tripled to over 650,000. If the recent battle of Okinawa
was any indicator, the expected number of American casualties would be over 300,000 and combined Japanese
military and civilian casualties would exceed two million in the first months alone. By the second stage, Japan
was expected to have 6,000,000 troops on their home islands and up to 28,000,000 additional “volunteers” of
the Civilian Militia, which consisted of poorly trained and equipped boys, old men and women. Truman and
most of his advisors believed an invasion would be the worst scenario for both America and Japan.

http://www.libraries.psu.edu/maps/text/HIROSHIMA.pdf

Also remember that since the military complexes were the target they were mostly ground zero. Many of the dead were military troops, and a number were military industry workers.