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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And we're joined by our friend Greg Mitchell, blogger at The Nation Magazine, TheNation.com, and author of probably about a third of the books that have ever been written, including Atomic Cover-Up, Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made, Hiroshima in America.
For so long, for so long, oh, wow, Who Owns Death, Capital Punishment, The American Conscience, and The End of Executions.
Now that's interesting, co-written with Robert J. Lifton, very interesting there.
And then, what am I missing here, Hollywood Bomb, The Unmaking of the Most Important Movie Ever Made, all at Amazon.com, under the name Greg Mitchell.
Welcome back to the show.
Greg, how are you?
All right, Scott, happy to be here.
Very good.
Happy to have you here.
So, who's this Harry Truman fellow, and why is he going around throwing nuclear bombs at people?
Well, we're marking the 68th anniversary tomorrow.
It actually happens tonight in Japan time.
And it's the 68th anniversary.
I've been writing about it for over 30 years, apparently not with a lot of effect, by some measures.
But I've been writing about it in articles and three books, and I used to be the editor of Nuclear Times, went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a month on a journalism grant.
So it's been something I return to every year, especially at this time, not only at this time, but especially at this time.
So I write dozens of articles and op-eds, and continue to write books about it, and so forth.
So I guess it's one of my life's works.
Yeah, right on.
I think that you're making a mistake in downplaying the effect that your work on this subject has had.
After all, there's just really not that many different writers working on revisionist history of the nukings, and I don't know what exactly the poll numbers are, but there are a lot of people who, their gut tells them that something ain't right about that, and it's very important that they have somewhere to go to find out that actually they're right.
It didn't have to be.
No, I agree.
I think it's worth doing.
We saw, in fact, I have a piece up at The Nation now, my interview with Oliver Stone about his recent Showtime series, which one of the, I guess, eight or ten episodes was about the dropping of the bomb, and a critical view of it.
And he said, I don't know how much my writing had to do with it, but he did say that until not too long ago, he was one of the, I guess, majority in the U.S., anyway, who always supported the use of the bomb, or felt Truman had no alternative, ended the war, and so on and so forth.
So certainly, let's say, revisionist writing of the past two decades had a big effect on him and on many others.
You know, polls continue to show that most Americans still back the dropping of the bomb.
It's come down maybe a little bit.
You know, it's sort of like, you mentioned capital punishment in my book on that.
It's much like that, in that you go to the rest of the world, and literally almost everywhere in the world, you know, people are opposed and governments are opposed to capital punishment, and they are critical of America's use of the bomb.
And of course, the precedent is set, and of course, the U.S. gets on its high horse now and says, you know, no one else should have the bomb or use the bomb or anything, but every president, every top political leader, vast majority of media, the pundits, all continue to support the use of the bomb then.
So it's sort of like, to do what I say, not what we do.
Right.
Well, and the thing of it, too, is, you know, as long as the theory goes more or less unchallenged about why it was necessary then, then that opens up the possibility that it could be necessary at some point in the future.
Yeah, it's like we've drawn a line in the sand, basically, and we've, you know, the only two examples of using the bomb were by us.
And you know, we've tried to say, and of course, we've seen the pundits and leaders say this all the time, they say, well, never again, or this was a unique set of circumstances in 1945.
Well, you know, what we what we claim to have done, even though there's a lot of doubt about that now, we we use the bomb to try to end a war and save American lives.
And of course, we've been in numerous wars since then, and other wars around the world involving other countries.
So it's far from a unique situation where someone has a super weapon, or, you know, thousands of them that they say, well, let's just use them on against cities as terror weapons.
And, you know, to produce an end to a war into a conflict to get rid of a problem.
So it really, you know, yes, of course, it was sort of unique World War Two is always be have a lot of uniqueness to it.
But it's certainly not unique that you get involved in a long, nasty war, and you're tempted to end up taking, you know, extreme measures.
Of course, I'm sitting here saying something smart with my mic off.
You can only speculate, but it sure looks like they would have used nukes in Korea if it hadn't been for the fact that the Russians had them too, and it would escalate it into a real war between us and them.
Yeah, it's possible.
There's a lot of, you know, a lot of history on near misses, threats, you know, Nixon, Kamui and Matsu, the madman theory, or Nixon wanted the one of everyone to think he might use them in Vietnam, and so on and so forth.
And of course, we have a situation today with various hotspots.
Pakistan has the bomb, Israel has the bomb, so forth.
So it's, you know, I keep writing about it every year, because, you know, I do feel that the we still have a first use policy.
It was very quietly.
America still has a first use policy, meaning we we reserve the right to use the bomb first, not just after we're nuked.
And, you know, there's a precedent for using them.
So in terms of, you know, my issue with it, as long as in America, we continue to defend the use of the bomb, then it sets the scene for using it again.
And, you know, there have been surveys in the past, like in terms of Iraq war, and the first Gulf War and things like that, when people have been asked, you know, if we need to, should we nuke Saddam?
And again, 50 percent or whatever the number was said, yeah, OK, if we, you know, if we have to, OK.
So it's certainly not embedded in the American conscience that it is really totally against the use of nuclear weapons against against people in cities.
And that's, you know, what I keep coming back to on Hiroshima is, you know, the direct targeting of of the city at the center of a city that was filled, the vast majority were women and children and old, old, old men and women targeting, you know, tens of thousands to die.
We didn't target the industrial corridor.
I mean, I've been to Hiroshima, the industrial corridors out towards the harbor.
We didn't target the one military base there, which is a little bit off center in the town.
We dropped it directly over the center of the city so that we could cause as much death and destruction as possible.
And, you know, it doesn't bother some people, I guess, but it sort of bothers me.
And I think that's a very bad, bad example for the future.
Well, now, I don't blame you, Greg.
You should stop saying we.
It wasn't we.
It was Harry Truman and his secretary of war, Stimson, and virtually no one else in the entire cabinet or his military advisors or anything.
It was those two who decided to do this.
Yeah, well, it was well, it was the whole group.
It was a large group.
You know, Secretary of State Jimmy Burns was was perhaps the most hawkish on it.
But, you know, as I brought as I bring out every year in articles and done again in the last last couple of weeks, you know, most people don't know that General Eisenhower, who is head of the war effort in Europe, told the Truman or his aides before we dropped the bomb that he was against it, that it wasn't necessary.
And he wrote about it later in his memoirs, Admiral Leahy, who was Truman's chief of staff and was the top ranking military officer in the entire war as a as Truman's combination chief of staff, joint chief head.
He was against the bomb, told Truman that beforehand.
General MacArthur, head of the war in the Pacific, said he was against the use of the bomb.
He didn't even know about it.
He wasn't even brought into the discussion.
But he said that if he had been, he would have been against the bomb.
So that's three pretty, pretty top people.
Of course, we could then get into the atomic scientists who were against it.
Great numbers of them who helped, you know, work on the bomb and so on and so forth.
But, you know, the morality, you know, Einstein's letter aside and all that, the military commanders are saying we don't need to do this.
What about Nimitz?
He was against it, too, wasn't he?
Yeah, there was a great.
I mean, I don't know if he took account.
Whether majority were against it, but the fact that, you know, that some of the top people and some of the few people who knew about it in advance, you know, it wasn't like Sunday morning quarterback and it wasn't like Eisenhower saying after the drop bomb was dropped, after so many died, after it helped spark an arms race.
And then, you know, Eisenhower, 10 years later, says, oh, maybe we shouldn't have done it.
That's not the way it happened.
That's not what happened with Leahy either.
So these are not Sunday morning, Monday morning quarterbacks, you know.
So, I mean, that but that, you know, that doesn't prove that it was wrong.
That doesn't prove to most people it was wrong.
But when people learn about that, it does it does change some minds.
And, you know, it's another reason that really the focus, I mean, you mentioned I've done three books on on the subject and actually each of them are about the cover up after the bomb.
I have I've not done a book that's strictly about the decision to use the bomb.
I've written, you know, I've written a lot about it, but my books are all about the what you might call the cover up in America.
And so it has to do with how images, film footage was censored, film footage shot by U.S. military was suppressed for decades that showed the true effects of the bomb.
You mentioned my latest book, Hollywood Bomb, which is about how MGM tried to make an epic drama, the first movie about the bomb, a real Hollywood spectacle, you might say.
But it started out as inspired by the scientists and was the first scripts and the whole motivation was to have a warning about the bomb and to be critical of the decision to drop the bomb and the warning of an arms race and the warning of so much that came about.
And this was in 1946.
And, you know, when the military and the White House found out about it, then they directly stepped in and censored the movie, had the script rewritten.
Truman even had his character character rewritten and scenes changed and so on and so forth.
I mean, it's a wild story.
I'd really recommend it to anyone who's interested in kind of a yarn, a Hollywood yarn, but with the very, very, very serious side of this cover up, which is part and parcel of the whole thing.
It wasn't just like a little episode from Hollywood.
It was part of an overwhelming and decades long suppression of the true facts about Hiroshima, the true effects of Hiroshima.
And, you know, in some ways continues to this day.
But in any case, it's sort of what motivated my, you know, my writing for for all this time.
The cover up, it was George Weller who was the first reporter in there and and the army censored all of his what, thousands of pages or or hundreds of pages worth of reporting out of Japan.
Right.
Well, he was the first reporter into Nagasaki.
Wilfred Burchette is famous for for getting into Hiroshima.
And he had to take incredible measures to get his story out.
And I'm sorry, what was his name?
The first person to Wilfred Burchette, Wilfred Burchette.
He was Australian and he got the story out from Hiroshima, you know, a few weeks later via London.
But George Weller was a Chicago Chicago newspaper reporter who managed to get the Nagasaki.
And he filed several lengthy stories via MacArthur's office in Tokyo, thinking, OK, they're going out, they're going to be published.
And they were suppressed and disappeared for decades.
It was really just the last five years, 10 years where, you know, his son sort of found them and published them.
But they were missing for, I don't know, 60 years, I guess.
So that's so that's what happened.
But even beyond those, those two, there were, you know, reporters routinely.
And again, we show show shown this in my books, reporters routinely got to those cities and filed stories that were were either not published or they they practiced self-censorship.
They went to the hospitals and they saw a Japanese dying of radiation disease, which was a new thing.
Then people wanted to believe that this was just a bigger bomb.
And that was what it was really about, right, was covering up the radiation sickness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that that and also the fact that, you know, 95 percent of the victims were civilians.
And, you know, in some ways it didn't matter how they died.
The fact they died horribly didn't help.
You know, some were incinerated, some were just, you know, ghastly burns, some were, you know, blown apart.
Some had lingering injuries.
Many died of radiation soon or over years.
And of course, the radiation thing was sort of the extra, the new dimension of horror.
And so it was important to cover that up.
So you had reporters who would witness this and then they either practice self-censorship or were actively censored.
And so that story, you know, it did come out to some extent, partly because of foreign reporters wasn't totally suppressed.
But, you know, that was another example.
I mentioned images, photos, film footage shot by U.S. military that showed showed the full effects that, you know, was was suppressed for decades.
So it was, you know, it really was a great or not not so great American cover up.
Yeah.
Well, now, Harry Truman was asked at one point, I guess years later, well, how come you didn't nuke him a third time?
Because I guess they were still delaying a little bit before the surrender.
And he said, you know, we thought about it and I think maybe they didn't even have enough nukes at the time.
But anyway, his answer was, we thought about it.
But then I thought, man, all those kids.
Yeah, well, that's yeah, I've got that in the book.
Basically, the bombs.
And again, it's it's when you read what actually happened, you know, you may feel on the one hand that, well, we wanted to end the war.
The war was horrible.
And, you know, and people died all over the globe and so many had died.
And this is just another terrible episode.
But when you read the third, the cold blooded, thoughtless drive to use this weapon almost without thinking, you know, the we'd produced basically three weapons.
The first two were ready by the end of July.
And Truman basically put it on autopilot or we call it the assembly line.
He basically said, you know, keep using them.
Gortheroni three, but keep using them until Japan surrenders.
So there was an order to use the bomb against Hiroshima, which was number one on the target list.
But there was no specific order to use a second bomb.
It just was OK if it's ready, use when ready.
There wasn't let's give Japan a week to surrender.
I mean, they did surrender after after eight days.
And, you know, and, you know, of course, Russia's entry into the war had as much or more to do with it than the bomb, which most Americans don't really know.
But we'll talk a bit about that.
There was actually a piece of policy that the early thought is just that we had it.
We had a base gun.
So there was no thought about pausing, stopping.
We just went right into Nagasaki.
And there are there are many Americans who are who are OK with Hiroshima, but just but think Nagasaki was it was a true war crime.
Oh, that's interesting.
I guess I never really saw the discrepancy between the two of them.
But can you talk a little bit more about the Stalin's entry into the war against Japan and what effect that had and how that changed the situation in D.C. at the time?
Well, I knew it for before I knew much about the subject going into my adulthood and certainly as a kid.
It was always said what I always thought was and was told was Russia wanted to get it on the kill.
You know, we we nuked Hiroshima and then the Soviets, you know, that they wanted to get on the kill.
So then they declared war on Japan and so forth.
But history tells us that this is not debated.
It's not that not revisionist history.
There's absolutely no question that the U.S. wanted and asked that demanded that the Soviets enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany.
And Stalin said, yeah, sure.
I mean, he wanted to, but they didn't need much convincing.
But they had to, you know, move their giant armies to the east and so forth.
And, you know, Truman even went to Potsdam to nail that down in mid-July, late July.
And Stalin confirmed, yes, we're going to enter around August 7th.
And and, of course, what was felt, Truman even wrote in his diary, any Jap when that occurs, he was well aware that the Japanese, because of their history, feared feared the Russians more than any other nation.
Japan was already sending out surrender feelers, peace feelers via Russia, who they thought was going to stay out of the war.
Japan already recognized it was defeated.
It was a matter of what terms they could surrender on.
And the entry of the hated, dreaded Soviets not only would guarantee full defeat, it would guarantee a full occupation of Japan by the pillaging, raping Russians, I guess, in their view.
And so, as Truman noted himself at Potsdam, any Japs when that occurs.
So he was well aware that the Soviet entry into the war would produce a surrender in fairly short order.
Now, we don't know exactly how short or on what terms, but there was no question that.
And that's why exactly why Eisenhower and Leahy and MacArthur and others felt the bomb was unnecessary, because with the Soviet entry, if there ever was any doubt about Japan surrendering before a U.S. invasion, that was taken care of with the Soviets entering.
So it's just a matter, would they surrender in days or weeks or whatever?
And so that's sort of the largely untold for most people story.
And of course, the Russians did invade, did attack Japan on August 7th as planned.
Nothing did nothing to do with our dropping the bomb.
And the Japanese surrendered a week later.
Now, you know, that's where you get in the interesting debate with the Soviet entry spark that surrender more than the bomb, just as much as the bomb, not as much as the bomb.
But in the view of most Americans and media figures and political leaders, the Soviet entry is meaningless.
You know, we dropped the bomb.
Japan surrendered.
So that's, you know, that's a great subject.
Well, to most Americans, the Russians weren't even in World War Two at all.
America won that war.
Well, they were our allies, believe it or not.
And that's that's why there's a great Eastern Front.
Everybody knows that the war was, you know, D-Day.
And then we won.
Well, the other thing is just in term.
And again, this is a very interesting debate.
It's not a black and white debate.
The whole question of, you know, the postwar arms race, if we had told the Russians about earlier, if we had Truman instead of rushing to use the bomb and then feeling, hey, we're going to bully the Russians.
Yeah, I mean, there are there are a lot of so-called revisionist historians who boil it down to and I've never been in this camp completely.
They boil it down to Truman knew we didn't have to use the bomb and he only used the bomb to bully the Russians to the first.
It wasn't the last shot of World War Two.
It was the first shot of the Cold War.
And that's that's true, of course.
But I've never believed that Truman simply sort of said, oh, I don't have to use the bomb.
I just want to, you know, frighten the Russians.
I think he felt a lot of reasons to use the bomb, including the two billion dollars the U.S. had spent for, you know, for one thing.
And just, hey, we can we use it to dictate the terms, you know, Russia.
Yes, Russia, but also in other ways.
So that's funny what we spent so much money making these nukes.
We got to use them.
Yeah, well, that was that was a feeling.
Again, you can't you can't boil down the use of the bomb to, you know, one thing.
And some people like to do that.
And I think there's like five different reasons.
And you can then debate, was this 50 percent of this or 30 percent of that or whatever?
And a lot of it was just thoughtlessness.
And, you know, why not?
I don't want to think too deeply about, you know, the fact, you know, I mean, I have a piece coming out tomorrow that is basically talks about how even in crafting the Truman's first message announcing the bomb, they went to great pains, this is on August 6th, of painting Hiroshima strictly as a military base.
They even used the word we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, a military base.
When we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, we claimed it was just a naval base.
We didn't even know they knew they were well aware of what we were doing.
That was the first virtually the first words of the nuclear age was a lie, which was we we we dropped it on military base, not on a city of three hundred and fifty thousand, a vast majority of people, women and children and old people.
So we wanted to make it think like this was a military operation against a base, maybe out in the suburbs or something.
So so it was a lie from the start.
And and the only the only other thing I'll mention is that the other factoid or fact that most Americans aren't aware of is that they know that we let Japan keep their emperor.
We know that MacArthur came in as kind of a sub emperor.
We know that the occupation went very smoothly and MacArthur was photographed with the emperor and so forth.
They also most Americans also oddly will say, yes, we want to drop the bomb and got unconditional surrender because that's how Truman pictured it.
But in fact, it was conditional surrender because they kept the emperor.
And there's a great deal of research which indicates and again, this is cited by many of these military figures, that if we had we refused to let them keep the emperor before when we we sent out our terms, we said unconditional surrender, don't even ask about the emperor.
Once we dropped the bomb, oddly, we said, hey, well, you can keep the emperor.
So there's a great deal of claim that if we had signaled in advance that they could keep their emperor and of course, knowing the Russians were coming in, then they would have surrendered in the same time frame.
So that's another, you know, bit of historical information, fact that's not not disputed that has to factor into if America had an honest debate about the use of the bomb rather than the same slogans and myths and, you know, we still hear the overwhelming voice still in this discussion are the what used to be the veterans.
Now, it's the veterans and their children and descendants who will just shut down any argument by saying, you know, Grandpa said if we hadn't dropped the bomb, you know, he would have had to invade Japan and might have died.
And, you know, I've always respected that view.
I think it's one view.
I think it's it's not irrelevant.
But the fact is, the soldiers in the trenches in the Pacific didn't have the faintest idea what was going on in the Pentagon.
They didn't have the faintest idea what was going on in the White House.
They didn't know about Japanese peace feelers.
They didn't know about unconditional surrender.
They didn't know about the Russians coming in.
So it's an emotional view, which is valid.
But it's it shouldn't be the overwhelming after, you know, 68 years, the main view, because, you know, people people in the foxholes don't know what's going on in, you know, in the war effort and then the peace feelers and options and and so on and so forth.
So, you know, that is still the overall I don't mind that being being an argument, but it shouldn't be the overwhelming argument when there's so much, you know, historical research that that that should be relied on.
Right.
And now we're real short on time here.
But I just want to mention that historian Ralph Rako points out in his book or in his article, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that George H.W.
Bush, I think this is the highest number I've ever heard.
George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush, claimed that a million American soldiers would have died, which that's the highest number ever.
But everybody loves to just throw around whatever made up number they want.
And, of course, as you say, always just accepting the premise of unconditional surrender without questioning it for even one moment.
And then they just make up whatever number of Americans would have had to die invading, you know, as a number high enough that it sounds good to them, justified to them.
And then they just leave it at that.
Yeah, well, those those figures, starting about 20 years ago, were completely debunked, totally exaggerated, even for an all out invasion.
And the point we make and I make in my books is particularly atomic cover up was that, yes, we had an invasion plan for, you know, the end of November.
It might not have even happened till early 46.
There's no question of that.
And there's no question it would have involved a lot of forces.
There's no question that no question that many would have died.
But the fact is, would we have gotten to the end of 45 needing to invade?
That's the question.
Right.
Probably not.
All right.
Thank you very much, Greg.
I appreciate it.
Sure, sure.
That's a great Greg Mitchell.
Everybody's at the nation.com.
He's the author of Atomic Cover Up.
And a bunch of other ones, too, and I just had in front of me Hollywood bomb.
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