All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Greg Mitchell.
He is the author of the new book, The Beginning or the End, How Hollywood and America Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Welcome back to the show.
Greg, how are you doing?
Ah, thanks.
Very happy to be here.
Good, man.
Good to talk to you again.
And what a great book.
I learned so much about the atomic bombing itself and then, of course, the making of the sort of docudrama, The Beginning or the End.
And I had actually never heard of that before, but I've watched the first 20 minutes now on the very end of it.
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to watch the whole thing.
And I admit to you, because anything less than the whole truth is a damn lie, that I only read about four fifths of the book last night and this morning and wasn't able to quite finish it.
But I love it.
It's great.
And I know everybody's going to love it.
Thank you.
And so tell us, assume that the audience doesn't know anything more than me about it, which is nothing.
What is this movie and who's got anything to do with it?
And give us the introduction here.
OK, well, a little history is we are marking the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings.
August of 1945 over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed, by most estimates, at least two hundred thousand people, 90 percent of them civilians.
So we'll just start with that.
About two months later, the Donna Reed, the actress who many of us remember out in Hollywood, was contacted by her former high school chemistry teacher back in Iowa who had disappeared into the Manhattan Project two or three years earlier in Tennessee.
And he urged her urgently to get Hollywood to make a big budget movie warning the world about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the coming bigger, more powerful weapons such as the H-bomb and nuclear arms race with the Soviets, which also came to pass.
She had a husband who was an agent, went to Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, famous legendary figure.
He loved the idea, said it would be the most important movie he would ever make.
And so they started down that path to write a script and so forth.
So, I mean, the thing to remember is that the movie was inspired by the urgent warnings of the atomic scientists raising questions about the use of the bomb and more of them.
And the book basically tells the story of what happened in the next year, where the movie was revised and revised and cuts were made, falsifications were added, basically because MGM gave General Leslie Groves, who was the head of the Manhattan Project and President Truman himself, a script approval.
And so the script, as I chart in the book over the course of those 12 months, went from raising severe issues about the bomb to being basically pro-bomb propaganda.
And the movie was released and it did not do that well.
So it's not surprising that you hadn't heard of it or seen it.
But it did find an audience.
It did get sort of mixed reviews and it lives on today on DVD and sort of regular showings on Turner Classics.
So people may stumble upon it or they may even look for it.
And so it's really the book is really a story about this turning point of that whole first year or two after Hiroshima, when the U.S. had a chance to turn away from nuclear weapons or at least to keep them in check.
And thanks to official intervention and censorship and suppression and propaganda, we did not do that.
Yeah.
Well, and ain't that always the way with this story, too?
There's a long line of suppressed stories there.
George Weller, I'm sorry, George Weller's the son.
What was the father's name again?
It was George, actually.
Yeah.
I've interviewed the son a couple of times.
They've got that great book about, you know, that he was a reporter who went into Nagasaki and his first Nagasaki.
That's the book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
His his stories were suppressed by the MacArthur censorship office in Tokyo and actually did not surface for, what, 60 years.
So, you know, I could go on.
There are many other serious examples of of suppression in that period of which this movie was one, but it was a very, very prominent one.
Well, and yet it's really sad the way you say, too, that this really started out.
One of the scientists who was in on it.
Was having real doubts after, especially I don't know if he was one of the ones who really had the extra doubts after Nagasaki and said, man, we've got to make a movie so that people can understand how horrible this is.
And then by the time it came out, it was just a bunch of hoorah and what a great job we did protecting ourselves from a bunch of myths.
Yeah, it's it was really the development of what I call the Hiroshima narrative, which still holds sway to this day.
That's why, you know, some people would say, well, why?
Why write about or care about a movie of 75 years old?
Why even care about you write about what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki can't bring back the dead.
You can't change what what happened then.
But you know, the key thing is, is that this narrative about the use of the bomb or allegedly why we had to use it and didn't have other options and saved American lives and so forth is still the main narrative today.
We saw it this year.
I mean, the main the main book, the main publicity to this date for this year, this is the seventy fifth anniversary now is Chris Wallace's book, the Fox host who wrote a book that became a big, big bestseller with basically endorsing the official narrative.
So it's those of us who have questioned the official narrative for decades are always up against it.
And so trying in my own way with books and numerous articles, interviews to try to put a dent in it and, you know, maybe partly succeeding.
But we'll see how this ends up when August is over.
If your listeners have seen kind of a flood of contrary articles and articles that raise questions, then I guess maybe we'll we're making progress.
But if it's the usual almost blanket endorsement in the media, then I don't know what you can do.
This is 75th anniversary.
You'd think it would be a time for reconsideration.
Well, you know, I was taught the story for the first time in fifth grade in social studies class.
And you know, the teacher actually did say, like, hey, there are people who disagree about this.
It's not an open and shut case kind of a thing.
Yet still, he pretty much let us know that the narrative here is that President Truman did what he had to do.
And of course he had to or he wouldn't have done it.
And of course, he was the right guy to make that decision or he wouldn't have been there.
He was put there by the democracy and the democracy knows what to do.
And so this is a thing that happened.
It's like you're saying that Moses shouldn't have come down from the mount with the tablet or something.
This is how it goes.
That's it.
As you know, Truman became president only because FDR died.
And of course, there's speculation, including in my book, whether FDR would have gone ahead with the bombing.
But you know, Truman became totally wrapped up in in in this movie and in the sense that he and his aides, you know, monitored the scripts and maybe the key chapters, the two chapters of the book come fairly near the end.
I'm not sure whether you got to them last night or not.
But finally, they have a screening of the near final movie in Washington and top White House aide sees it and then waves a red flag to MGM saying they must reshoot the key scene really in the entire movie where Truman explains why he had to use the bomb.
And so they they reshot the entire scene.
They fired the actor playing Truman again at the White House request and reshot a scene in which they were able to patiently lay out, again, what I call the Hiroshima narrative, that it was the only option that Truman had.
It saved a million American lives.
And basically, you know, the bomb going forward is something we, you know, we're going to have to embrace.
And so and that that's how the movie ended up.
That is the final the key scene in the movie and whether the movie was a big smash hit or not.
I mean, that certainly was the narrative and and the movie certainly helped to establish the narrative from that time.
And I was going to say there that, you know, and I probably was going on too long and not get to my point.
But the point was that that's the way it is.
That's the way it happened, because it had to happen.
And then the implication of that, then, is that the only people who would object and who would say that, OK, it's 75 years later and now we should rethink it and look at it seriously and this and that, that essentially, no, that's just for hippies or that's just for somebody who is, you know, taking the contrary position to what everybody knows kind of a thing.
So you can do that all day, but it doesn't change the narrative of the majority.
It would have to be something huge.
And in fact, I think one of the most important points that you make in the book, it's one of the things that I know absolutely blows the minds, especially of right leaning people, but really regular anybody's, was when you start naming admirals who opposed the attacks.
And then once you start naming them, then you get to the generals.
You get to Leahy, the chief of staff.
You get to McNamara and Eisenhower and Nimitz.
They all opposed it.
And you quote one of these admirals in here saying, oh, well, the Americans, the Americans, they have their new toy and they want to play with it.
Oh, my God.
They didn't teach me that in fifth grade.
Well, there is, you know, I guess you call it the contrary narrative makes use of what a lot of these military people did say.
General Eisenhower was probably most vociferous and actually told Truman and his secretary of war Stimson in advance, you know, it wasn't wasn't what they call Monday morning quarterbacking.
It was actually in advance.
And I'm sorry, because I think I mistakenly gave McNamara credit there.
I meant to say MacArthur, which is even more to the point that MacArthur is the guy who wanted to nuke North Korea over and over again.
He didn't care about using nukes.
But in this case, he thought, why bother?
Well, it's it's it's funny you mention McNamara because Robert McNamara, of course, famously later admitted that the regular even the regular carpet bombing of Japanese cities was a war crime.
Right.
And so he's kind of was admitting he was a war criminal.
That's in the documentary, The Fog of War.
Everybody, if you've never seen that, you absolutely have to see it.
It's just remarkable.
One of the many important revelations in there.
Yeah.
But, you know, just to complete one thought I had, which is why this matters today, succinctly, it's simply because many people don't even know the U.S. still has a first use policy as it's officially known.
And what that means is that any president and especially have to worry about the current one, has absolute control and ability and permission to initiate a nuclear war, to launch nuclear missiles, not in retaliation, but in a preemptive attack.
And it could be in any conventional war.
It could have been, for example, in Iraq after we invaded or when we invaded Iraq, if Saddam had threatened to use chemical weapons, we could have nuked Baghdad.
It can happen even with threats.
If Iran or North Korea, Pakistan, whoever started raising threats in a crisis, it's absolutely U.S. policy to be able to launch a first strike.
And so this goes back to 1945 and the fact that, you know, while people in the media and officials kind of wring their hands and they say, well, we must never use nuclear weapons again.
I mean, how many times have you heard that?
But in fact, they endorse the two times we have used them.
And the same arguments about, you know, saving American lives and, you know, we had to use them first to end a war and a crisis, all very much in play.
So and polls show that at least 30, 40 percent of the public, if not more, explicitly endorse scenarios for us using the bomb first, you know, against North Korea or Iran, for example.
So this is not just a story of the past.
I know this movie may seem, if people watch it, seem kind of hokey and, you know, why are we even care about this?
Even any writing about the 75 years ago, certainly the movie, which is, you know, a Hollywood thing.
So who cares?
But in fact, it's part of the whole scenario where America came to embrace and embrace the bomb.
And it's although we don't think about it much today, still accepts and endorses the bomb today.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Ray McGovern was on the show earlier and was very much putting the media in the military industrial complex with the rest of them.
And so it is a hugely important story because it just goes to show how easy it is really for the media to just defer to the government.
Well, think you have the quote.
We owe it to our government to defer to its opinion or something like that.
We do.
Says who?
Why?
And when?
And especially when they're wrong, justifying a monstrous war crime.
Think of the story.
You know, the whole their whole argument is, what if the Nazis had got it first?
OK, let's run with that.
What if the Nazis had got it first and the Nazis had used a bombs with a story, be that, hey, they had to do what they had to do to get on dish, unconditional surrender.
Or it would be.
Part and parcel of the entire narrative about, yeah, Nazis do what Nazis do, because that's who they are.
And dropping bombs is a Nazi kind of a deal.
Right.
I don't know.
Right.
Well, the you know, the the specific revisions in the movie, which I document in the book for the first time anywhere, is that are revealing of what what the U.S. was, I guess you might say defensive about, you know, in this story at this turning point.
So if so, for example, I mean, it's almost dark humor as the revisions went on.
They injected specific references, totally false, totally based on where that the president or General Groves warn that the Japanese might have atomic weapons.
And if we don't use our first, any invasion will be met by the Japanese with atomic weapons.
They even had a scene, a full scene where you may find this amusing.
They have a German submarine surfaces off the coast of Tokyo.
The German scientist is brought to shore.
He meets with the top Japanese scientist and gives him I don't know what form it was, gives him the secret of the atomic bomb that Germany had.
And the Japanese scientist then is heading off to their big laboratory to create this atomic bomb.
Just shameless.
And where is that?
Where is this?
I'll give you five seconds to guess where this laboratory is located.
Well, it's located in Hiroshima.
So you can't you can't make this stuff up, but they did.
Now that scene was cut from the final film.
Rather surprisingly, I guess.
But there are so many other changes that reflect.
I'll just mention one more, which was, you know, there are many people who feel that while they're they're not sure where Hiroshima ranks, but they are pretty sure that Nagasaki was a war crime.
And so this movie kind of recognizing that over the course of those months, they cut every mention of Nagasaki.
So when you get to the if you watch them finish watching the entire movie, you'll say you'll never know that we even used a second bomb.
And of course, this was one of the more sensitive, vulnerable parts of the official narrative.
You know, people accept one bomb, but the second bomb seems seems like a torture.
So so they had to cut that.
There are numerous other things.
But you know, like I said, the these revisions in the script really reveal the American defensiveness or thinking or and, you know, it worked.
You know, they did.
I have a major article at Mother Jones last week on how the people think that John Hersey's Hiroshima article in The New Yorker, which has been called one of the great journalistic feats of the last century.
You know, it really had a tremendous impact and change minds and so forth.
It's still read today in book form.
But in reality, it did have a big impact for a couple of months.
But then Truman and his allies rallied to have the secretary of war, Stimson, write a cover story for Harper's defending the use of the bomb.
And the press, which had started to raise questions after the Hersey article, then did a 180.
You know, which you've seen yourself numerous times.
They do a 180.
And then it's like, well, OK, this settles the question forever.
We don't have to think about this bombing again, maybe forever.
And the Harper's cover story, you know, settles it for history.
And so the Hersey article, which was in the same period as this movie, you have this summer and fall of 1946, the bomb is coming under scrutiny, possible turning point.
Albert Einstein totally against it.
All sorts of questions about the Hiroshima bombing.
And and it was laid to rest by early 1947.
That kind of thing.
Check that out there.
And thanks.
A couple of things there just to go back real quick on the first use policy.
I wanted to point out that Obama at one point had put out his nuclear posture review, which said that we no longer threaten first strikes against non nuclear weapon states except Iran.
We still might use a first strike against them.
But North Korea has nukes now, so that counts.
But then Trump rescinded that.
And so now the we reserve the right to first strike against Australia or anybody is still on the table, is back on the table.
So it's worse than you could even describe it.
It's just it's saying that they I mean, I realize there are a lot of other serious issues today, including the pandemic, of course, and climate change, which is climate change in some ways has usurped a lot of the interest, especially among younger people in the dangers of nuclear weapons, which is understandable, but in some ways unfortunate.
Yeah.
What a coincidence that instead of war, there's anyway, go ahead.
But in the Republican or the Democratic debates, the primaries, all the many debates in the last year and earlier this year, there was only one.
The nuclear policy came up almost never.
And one somehow some question out of the blue came for Elizabeth Warren in one of the debates.
She was the only one asked, said, Do you support the first use policy?
And of course, I rubbed my hands.
Wow, she's being someone's actually being specifically asked about the US first use policy.
And she bravely said, no, she was for no first use.
I was hoping they would then go down the line or ask people to raise your hand.
You know, how many raise their hand?
But they didn't do that.
So this was like.
Gabbard did bring up nuclear issues a couple of times herself, but they certainly never gave her the opportunity deliberately to.
Yeah.
So she she said this.
And sure enough, the next day, Republicans and conservatives in the media just exploded at Elizabeth Warren.
Liz Cheney blasted her.
And so, you know, this is one person who dared to to question this first use policy.
Yeah.
And she was, you know, smashed by by Democrats, even Democrats and, of course, the Republicans.
You know, in a way, Obama during the campaign was saying, yeah, I'm going to start bombing Pakistan.
That's where Al Qaeda is.
I'm going to Pakistan.
And then one of the reporters asked him, would you use nukes in Pakistan?
And he goes, no, I wouldn't use nukes in Pakistan.
And then Hillary Clinton attacked him.
Don't ever say who you won't use nukes against.
Barack Obama is so naive and unprepared to be the president.
Did you hear that?
He just promised not to nuke Pakistan.
Well, I'll give Obama credit.
I mean, you know, I know he was disappointing in many ways.
And he did raid, as you mentioned, he did raise questions about at least questions about first use.
He raised questions about cutting back.
I gave him a trillion dollars for a whole new arsenal, too.
Yeah.
But he did talk to a good game.
As I chronicled at the time, he became the first president to ever visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki while they were in office.
In fact, he was the first to send the U.S. ambassador to their memorial ceremonies.
And eventually that was Carolyn Kennedy, of all people.
Obama then did visit it, did visit.
And, of course, the right wing had a storm of this in advance.
He was going to go and apologize.
He was going to go say, you know, we did something wrong.
And, of course, he did not.
But he did go there briefly.
He hugged one of the survivors.
So I'll give him at least credit for that.
But you see how that after after, you know, 70 years it took for a U.S. president to even step foot while in office in one of those two cities.
Right.
All right.
And now so I want to clown on Ayn Rand, but let's get back to that in a second, because it's much more important.
We got time.
I'm keeping you for an hour here.
So let's talk about the premises of the nuking here.
And you go through this real well in a book about a movie.
You really tell the story of the bombing and the decision making here so well in how it all came out.
And you have this ever inflated number of the expected American invasion force casualties.
And you have ever changing dates of when it was going to happen.
And you have ever changing claims about how certain it was that the invasion would be necessary.
And you have always the begged question that, of course, the condition must be unconditional.
And all of these kinds of things that almost always just go without saying without discussion when this subject comes up.
And so but you really break this down real well and give people the opportunity to see this a different way.
Well, I appreciate that, because in a way, I like to think of the book as a kind of one of the better breakdowns of the decision to use the bomb sort of disguised within a book about a Hollywood movie.
So, you know, rope them in with a Hollywood story and then convince them with this quite serious works.
I think you did it.
But but, you know, it's important to to break it down a bit, because I suspect even people in your enlightened audience and certainly there are many liberals and even lefties who, you know, still cling to this official narrative.
I get it all the time in interviews.
People you think are or in comments where, you know, the audience is sort of more towards the left and they're still raising the same issues.
So it's probably important to briefly break it down just in the in this way and to say that when we got to July 1945, we had taken all these islands in the Pacific.
We had already leveled most of the Japanese cities, at least in part with the carpet bombing.
And so the question was, Japan was surrounded.
So the question was, OK, how can this war end now?
How do we get this war to end?
And of course, there was absolutely a plan, as there had to be detailed plan for an invasion of Japan and with, you know, the millions or millions of American soldiers.
And but it was not set in August of 1945.
It was set for November, December, January in that period, many months off, actually.
There was no pending invasion, but there were certainly pending.
Serious plans for it.
And if an invasion, full scale invasion, that they were going to do a partial invasion, and if that didn't work, then there would be a landing near Tokyo.
That didn't work.
There'd be more.
And of course, you game out if that happens, if Japan still is capable of fighting, how many Americans would be killed.
So but even at the time, there were no estimates of a million American deaths, let alone casualties, let alone even deaths.
So the number was, you know, 200,000 or 400,000 or 100,000, which is.
And that's when you're talking total casualties, not just killed.
That's right.
And that's bad enough.
OK, let's let's admit that is bad enough.
However, the invasion was many months off and Japan was an incredibly, you know, precarious state, both their economy, the ability to fight surrounded no oil.
And so there were already were peace feelers from Japan.
And there already were people even within Truman's orbit and the aides and advisors who were saying, look, Japan is ready to throw in the towel.
You just have to, you know, have the right terms here.
And so it was floated.
I mean, the most serious thing probably was the U.S. after Germany was defeated, demanded of Joseph Stalin that Russia now declare war on Japan.
When Truman was at Potsdam in July in July, he confirmed that Stalin confirmed he would be in the war around around August 9th.
And Truman even wrote in his diary, Phinney Japs, when that occurs and and that he was referring strictly to the Russian invasion, not the use of the bomb.
He has a second reference in his diary along the same lines.
So Truman and others recognize the importance of the Russians coming into the war and already Japan on the verge of collapse.
And many did think that that that alone would cause a quick surrender.
The other second issue was the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender, which the Japanese rejected.
However, there were many people close to Truman again, including Stimson, including John J.
McCoy.
These are not does by any means saying that if we tell them that if we add one condition, which is that the emperor could remain on the throne, even symbolically would not be executed, for example, and the Japanese who cared would still have their royalty, so to speak.
That, again, alone could prompt a quick surrender.
And of course, we rejected that.
We demanded unconditional surrender.
And then after dropping the two bombs, we suddenly accepted the emperor remaining.
So the argument.
I like the anecdote, by the way, and I have to say so loud just to help me remember it later, because I got what Biden's got and I can't remember a thing anymore that you've got Alan Dulles of the OSS got the message from Japan.
Hey, we want to talk and they shut it down.
Yeah, well, there that's why and I'm you know, I there there are historians.
Very respected historians, even some of them I know well, who know who attribute the decision use the bomb mainly to wanting to send a signal to Russia, mainly to stop them from getting closer to Japan, mainly as a Cold War, beginning of the Cold War.
And I've always believed that that is a factor.
But it's you know, it's just one of several factors, but, you know, an important factor, perhaps.
But as you say, there were top people far from those who felt, gee, you know, we have to be crazy to not, you know, to not modify our surrender demands and not wait a few days for Russia to declare war because the Japanese feared the Russians far more than they feared the Americans.
They had a long history with Russia, not not with the US.
So I think it's plausible.
It's not guaranteed, but I think it's plausible.
As many of these Truman people recognized at the time, and I think fed why Eisenhower and Leahy and all these other people were against the use of the bomb to believe that the combination of the Russian declaration and the allowing the emperor to stay on the throne most likely would have ended the war, if not in the same day, within the same week that it did end.
And you would have saved all those civilian lives that were lost and the signal to the world, A, that the bomb, you know, could be a good thing.
B, that we used it and we're glad and we might use it again and be glad.
And prevented this black mark.
I know Americans don't feel it's such a black mark on our US reputation, which, of course, is in tatters and other things as well.
But, you know, most of the world sees this as a war crime, sees this as unnecessary, does not speak well for us.
So that could have been avoided, probably, not certainly, but probably if these other options had been tried.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite.
After World War Two, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey, y'all.
Mike Swanson is a successful Wall Street trader with an Austrian school understanding of the markets, and therefore he has great advice to share with you.
Check out Mike's work and sign up for his list at wallstreetwindow.com.
And that's what you'll get, a window into all of Mike's trades.
He'll explain what he's buying and selling and expecting and why.
I know you'll learn and earn a lot.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
That's wallstreetwindow.com.
So back to some of the lies that made it not just the false premises for the war, I mean, for the nuking in the real world, but some of the lies that made it into the, and some of these were given to the general public as well, but also made it into the movie here.
And the one that seems the most important is the thing about the leaflets, but also the flack and kind of the rest of it.
They really reframed the whole thing where at this point, even though Japan is completely beaten, we're still the rebel alliance and they're still the empire, right?
Well, I mentioned, of course, them allegedly having atomic weapons themselves.
Right.
Yeah.
Oh, they're going to meet us on the beaches with their own atom bombs that somehow they haven't seen fit to deploy up until this point.
Right.
But the, you mentioned a couple of examples there, but this was part of the need in this movie to picture this attack on Japan within the bounds of American decency because, you know, of course we were very happy to denounce the Japan for so long for their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor cowardly.
They got no opposition at first flying over Pearl Harbor.
So here we were attacking these two defenseless cities.
Now in real life, our bombers reached the Hiroshima and Nagasaki without any opposition.
There was no anti-aircraft fire.
You know, they just dropped their bombs from an incredibly high altitude and got the hell out of there.
But of course the movie had to picture this as part of the usual US valor and bravery and risk.
So they had to introduce in the script bombers coming under attack by light flack and then it was turned into heavy flack and anti-aircraft fire.
And then finally Japanese fighter planes in the distance are ready to fire on them.
So it had to show this as incredibly risky.
You mentioned the leaflets.
It's another good example.
The film claims at least twice, maybe four times that the US dropped millions of leaflets to warn the people that this new weapon was coming.
And so this was not a sneak attack with an atomic weapon.
In real life, we did drop leaflets in advance, but it did not warn of any new weapon or anything beyond the ordinary that you would drop to say you should get your government to surrender.
They did prepare millions of leaflets, specifically warning of the atomic bomb, or specifically saying after Hiroshima that we had used the atomic bomb.
But these leaflets were not dropped over any city, including Nagasaki, until the day after Nagasaki.
So if you were unfortunate enough to be in Nagasaki and survive the atomic bombing, the next day you might have found drifting down from the skies a leaflet warning you that the atomic bomb might be coming.
So it didn't do a lot of good.
But that's another myth that's introduced more than once in the movie.
Yeah.
Well, and in fact, they even create the whole line too, where it isn't just, good thing we dropped all those leaflets, Jim, or whatever.
Even have the other guy respond.
Or first he's like, oh, we've been dropping leaflets on them every day for 10 days or some kind of, which makes no sense, right?
You're claiming this is a military base.
Why would you warn them to put all of their weapons on railroad tracks and get them the hell out of there for 10 days?
Are you saying it's a city full of civilians?
Well, that's kind of different.
But anyway, and then the guy responds, geez, I only wish they dropped leaflets and gave us warning at Pearl Harbor.
Yeah.
Like that time that they wiped Honolulu off the map and killed all the civilians, right?
Oh, but that's not what happened.
They sank a couple of military ships.
That's different.
Yeah.
Well, again, this is, I mean, you basically have that accurately, but again, it shows the revisions.
That's what makes it fascinating.
That was not in the original script.
It was not in the first round of many rounds of revisions ordered by the military.
That snuck in towards the end.
But they were fine tuning this.
Yeah.
The more they watched it, the more they were like, geez, we really look like cold-blooded murderers here, man.
Maybe we need to propaganda this thing up a little bit here.
Yeah.
Well, again, that's what makes it interesting, these specifics.
It's not just like a general, oh, it started this way and it ended up that way.
And isn't that a shame?
It goes through the...
And there's a whole other...
Wait, wait, real quick.
Sorry, I'm being stupid to interrupt here.
The same thing they say about Star Wars was saved in the edit where the first time, once Han Solo comes and Darth Vader's ship goes spinning off, then Luke goes all the way around again and he's got all this time to take the shot and there's no tension at all.
And then a good editor came in there and said, oh yeah, no, Darth Vader's right about to kill him right up until the point that he takes the lucky shot and then it works out perfect.
Same kind of thing.
Well, I will bow to your knowledge of Star Wars, which is almost non-existent for me.
But it's a perfect parallel to what's going on here.
Like, geez, they're not in danger.
Let's put Darth Vader right on their tail and then that way they're defending themselves as they nuke this city.
Well, you mentioned the whole question of the military base.
And in fact, Truman's initial announcement, although he cut it later, but the first day announcement to the world on this bombing was simply a press release from the White House, from Truman, that in the very first sentence it said, you know, X number of hours ago we bombed, we used this revolutionary new weapon to destroy a Japanese military base, destroy Hiroshima, a Japanese military base.
And no mention that it was a city, of course.
And now there was a military headquarters in Hiroshima, but that was not the target of the bomb.
The bomb was in the center of the city.
Now that Japanese headquarters was destroyed and there are estimates that perhaps as many as 10,000 Japanese military may have perished.
But of course, that's a relatively small number when there's 125 or 150,000 others.
So, and Nagasaki, there was not even, you know, there, I mean, estimates now are that maybe 150 to 200 military died total in the bombing out of, you know, 100,000.
So there's a naval base in Nagasaki, but it was on the edge of town and it was basically untouched.
The bombing was over the city.
So, but again, that's part of the myth that we had to do this, but these were legitimate military targets.
And of course there are, we'd been firebombing the cities for months.
And of course there's the argument that any city with industry is a military target.
You can imagine if the U.S. was ever bombed, they just, you know, bombed a city, you know, bombed Detroit or something or Pittsburgh and said, well, you know, they didn't have big military bases there, but it's, you know, a lot of industry.
Well, and the fact that McNamara and LeMay had not already burned these two cities to the ground with firebombs was proof of what low priorities they were.
And that was why they were chosen was because we'll get a good test out of this thing.
Right.
They wanted a pristine, you know, pristine city.
So, so, I mean, that's all, that's all part of the, you have to get at the official narrative with the, you know, legitimate military targets and so forth.
And again, I, you know, there are people who raise very interesting historical evidence and points.
There are people who have, there's evidence of how the Japanese, how difficult it was to enact the surrender.
They raise images of the Japanese fighting on and, you know, women and children with spears and everything like that.
And, you know, there are certainly are reasons to, as I've already said, reasons to not be certain that Japan would have surrendered in that near term without the use of the two bombs.
You can never prove that.
But however, it, it has to bother one that when people raise the possibility that they weren't necessary and, you know, you raise moral issues, you raise human issues, the dead civilians, women and kids, where the majority of people who died were women and kids.
And that's supposed to be kind of off the limits, you know, you really shouldn't raise those issues.
So, you know, that's, but, you know, again, just to say one more time, the reason it matters so much today is that the example it sets, the precedent it set, the media coverage we get that endorses the use then.
And again, why, if you endorse them, if you endorse it then, you know, you're giving a signal that to Trump or anyone else that these weapons are usable, no matter how often we read that they're not really usable.
They're only for deterrence.
Well, you know, you quote somebody in the book here too.
I'm sorry, I forgot who it was saying that.
Look, if this was a contemporary critic back then saying that, look, we hold the Japanese people collectively responsible for the crimes of their government.
And that's our excuse for doing this to them.
Same thing for carpet bombing German cities and saying, well, they should overthrow the Nazis for us or something like this as an excuse.
But then our country is a democracy.
So that means that the civilians of our country would then be that much more responsible for this particular act, for example, when you couldn't hardly blame the average Japanese citizen when the emperor and his military command have total power over the society and they have essentially none whatsoever in comparison to it.
Unlike the American people, which I'm not sure I buy the premise.
Actually, I'm certain I don't.
But he makes a good point as far as the people he's talking to, the ones who are dropping this bomb on these helpless people who frankly were in no way responsible or able to determine their government's policy on any issue whatsoever.
I know we're coming near the end here.
So I just wanted to mention you referred to this earlier and I wanted to make sure people there are people who will like this, just would like to read about this, is that you mentioned the Ayn Rand in passing and people.
Yeah.
What was Ayn Rand have to do with this?
This is hilarious, everybody.
For libertarians, you know, there's a long standing beef and some overlap between libertarians and objectivists.
But we all like making fun of her because she is a clown.
So go ahead.
Many I imagine Ayn Rand fans may know this, but most people don't know that she was for a period in the early 40s, mid 40s, was a Hollywood screenwriter, like so many, you know, went out there to make her fortune.
And she did write two or three screenplays.
And then when this I mentioned MGM going ahead with this movie, the same practically the same month that MGM went ahead with this movie, Paramount decided to do the same thing.
And there's there was going to be this race for the race for the bomb.
This is a race for the first bomb movie.
And so Paramount launched their major effort and they hired Ayn Rand as the screenwriter and to write their film.
And and so I was able to go through all her papers and scripts and outlines and so forth at the Motion Picture Academy Library and chart her involvement, why she got involved, how she got involved, what she set out front the film was going to be like.
And then her early scripts and even the fact that she managed to do two interviews with Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
MGM wasn't able to accomplish this.
She sat down with Oppenheimer twice.
And ultimately, the film, the Paramount film fell through, I think, largely because the producer, Hal Wallace, recognized that Rand's script was kooky.
And so he sold out to MGM.
So the competition ended.
But Ayn Rand went on to base, well, she immediately started writing a little book called Atlas Shrugged with her free time, and she used Oppenheimer as her model for one of the key characters, the scientist Stadler.
So she did get something out of this.
But it is I mean, it's quite a bit of this in the book.
It's again, some people may find it amusing.
Some people may find it horrifying.
But, you know, Ayn Rand in Hollywood is, you know, it's quite a sight to behold.
And of course, she was coming off of big success with, you know, with her first book, which had been sold to the movies.
And so she was a well-known quantity.
And so people were interested in her doing this.
And but anyway, I it is a it is a pretty detailed sections, several sections of the book.
Yeah, no, and it is hilarious, too.
And for anybody who's not too familiar with her character, I suggest you Google Mozart was a red, which is a really funny play that Murray Rothbard wrote about his character his time being introduced to the Rand cult in New York back in the 60s or whatever it was, which is hilarious.
And so that's, you know, you think about a very kind of young Ayn Rand, but still with the cigarette holder and the the passionate self-interest and all of that.
And then the way she decides to frame the whole thing is that this is all the free market that did this and individualism that did this and the creative genius.
This wasn't.
Merely not just a government program, but the worst government program of all government programs that had ever been devised in world history.
No, this was individual men triumphing over goals and all these things and trying to spin it as essentially a heroic tale of individualism when you're talking about building a giant bomb for the state.
Yeah, well, they've all thanks to thanks to industry, DuPont and all the rest.
Yes, that's right.
We never could have done this without DuPont, young man.
You ungrateful person.
Her biggest her biggest fear was that FDR would get any credit.
So she wanted to she said the word one of her outlines, Paramount, she said, basically, I'm going to quit.
This would be basically a crime against humanity if such a film attributed any of the success to Franklin Roosevelt, even though it's an immigrant's tale.
Yeah.
It had to be individual scientists, industry, a flash of genius from, you know, from a free, you know, free men.
And the only reason we could create this was because, you know, we're America.
The Nazis could have never.
Now, I think most people would say the Nazis could have.
If the scientists, the Jewish scientists had stayed there, the Nazis would have beaten us to the bomb.
But, you know, history turned out different.
Yeah.
Same kind of thing happened with their doctors.
Some Thaddeus Russell wrote about, oh, you kicked all the doctors out of your society.
Let me know how that works out for you here in a little while.
Yeah.
So fortunately, they did not.
And and they went off on and we know now that they went off on bad dead ends.
And that's when you hear to quite a bit.
Oh, the Germans were about to get it.
Yeah.
No, they weren't.
They had gone off on rabbit trails and given up on them, you know, not too long into the war.
So there wasn't even progress being made in Germany at that point.
You know, there were there were scientists, you know, as I talk about in the book, some of these scientists who were against the use of the bomb against Japan, they may have signed off on the use against Germany.
They had those Jewish scientists particularly had special reasonable.
Grudge and fears about, you know, Hitler takeover.
But, you know, two months later, Japan's surrounded.
Japan's not as big a threat.
And so they said, you know, OK, Germany, maybe.
But Japan, no.
And so that that fed their their views.
Yeah.
And that's really kind of a common thread throughout the whole thing is all these scientists thinking better about what they had done.
And trying to do something about it, right?
Well, they you know, they it's too long a story.
There was really only one real whistleblower who really tried to tried to get something done.
Leo Szilard, the famous scientist, launched a petition campaign and got many top scientists to sign this petition asking Truman to hold off.
And it never even really got to Truman's desk.
But what's again, one of these subplots in the book is that while all this was going on, just very briefly, MGM had to chase Oppenheimer and Einstein and Szilard and others to get their permissions and a contract to be portrayed in the movie.
And so that can also have some amusing characters character to it.
But at the very same time, J. Edgar Hoover was surveilling, the FBI was surveilling the same men because of their alleged communist or left wing credentials.
And so we in the book, we see Einstein having his mail opened and telephone calls monitored, Szilard being followed in the street, sort of cops and robbers, his mail open, Oppenheimer's phone being tapped.
So which yields an actual whole scene in the book where Oppenheimer talks about how terrible this movie is, thanks to an FBI transcript.
But then ultimately, they all signed their contracts.
So all these things in a way come together.
MGM, FBI, atomic scientists, it's all in the mix there.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, again, the book is called The Beginning or the End.
And hang on.
I just got a page up to the subtitle here so that I get it right instead of wrong.
How Hollywood and America learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
And in fact, that's the title of the movie as well, The Beginning or the End.
And you can find that on the Pirate Bay.
If you look there, that was where I got it.
And I'm going to try to find time to watch the whole thing.
But great book.
And I'm going to finish it, even though the interview is over, because I really liked it.
And I want to know how it is.
So I'm almost done.
There's an epilogue that takes you from 1947 to 2020.
So you still have to get to that.
Great.
All right, you guys.
That's Greg Mitchell.
The book is The Beginning or the End.
Thanks again.
Thanks, Scott.
