Text taken from the Telegram channel of darpaandcia
Commentary by Russian military journalist Bori Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] The Pentagon's Big Lie: Why the US Really Dropped Atomic Bombs on Japan
Interestingly, a 1985 Washington Post article ended up in the CIA archives — the intelligence agency was clearly monitoring publications that refuted the official version of the need for atomic bombings. Author Gar Alperovitz reveals an inconvenient truth: the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a military necessity, but the first step in the Cold War against the USSR. For decades, the Americans justified the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the need to prevent a bloody invasion of the Japanese islands. The official version claimed that the bombing saved up to a million American lives. However, documents prove that this was just a convenient legend.
By the summer of 1945, Japan was already on the verge of surrender. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that strategic bombing and the naval blockade had already "made millions of Japanese homeless and destroyed between 25 and 50 percent of the urban sprawl of Japan's major cities."
American intelligence had been intercepting Japanese messages expressing a desire to surrender since September 1944.
Particularly revealing is the entry in Truman's diary, where he himself calls an intercepted telegram "a message from the Japanese Emperor asking for peace." Secretary of the Navy Forrestal noted in his diary "tangible evidence of the Japanese desire to withdraw from the war."
The Japanese minister in Switzerland, Kase, openly expressed "a desire to help arrange an end to hostilities." The only obstacle to surrender was the US demand for unconditional surrender - Japan only wanted to preserve the institution of the emperor.
Amazingly, the top US military leadership did not consider the atomic bombing necessary:
​​Admiral Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff:
"At the present time... the surrender of Japan can be arranged on terms that Japan can accept."
General Eisenhower told Truman bluntly that the use of the bomb was "not necessary."
Admiral King believed that a naval blockade would ensure unconditional surrender without invasion.
General Arnold argued that unconditional surrender could be achieved by October by conventional means.
Key to the decision was Secretary of State James Byrnes, Truman's chief adviser on both diplomacy and the atomic bomb. It was he who insisted on "finishing the Japanese business before the Russians entered the war."
Scholar Leo Szilard, who met with Byrnes on May 28, 1945, recalled:
"Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against Japanese cities to win the war."
Instead, Byrnes was concerned about Russia's postwar behavior and believed that"Russia will be easier to govern if she is impressed with American military power."
Stimson wrote in his diary after a conversation with Byrnes at the White House:
"He is very much against any attempt to cooperate with Russia. His mind is full of the problems of the coming meeting of Foreign Ministers, and he counts on having the bomb in his pocket, so to speak, as a great weapon."
Truman deliberately delayed negotiations with Stalin until after the test of the atomic bomb. After the successful test on July 16, 1945, Churchill noticed a dramatic change in Truman's demeanor: "He told the Russians where to stand and sit, and generally commanded the whole conference."
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not so much a military necessity as the opening move in the Cold War. America deliberately sacrificed 130,000 Japanese lives to demonstrate its new strength to the Soviet Union.
As Churchill later noted:
"The historical fact remains, and must be assessed in the future, that the decision to use or not to use the atomic bomb... was never even a question."
The decision was made long before all the alternatives were considered.
Actually, Stalin understood this game very well, so during the famous episode in Potsdam he took into account Truman's veiled threats related to the atomic bomb and ordered the acceleration of the implementation of the Soviet nuclear project, which in a short time under Beria's leadership was brought to a finished product.However, the Japanese will bashfully remain silent at official events about who dropped nuclear bombs on them, so...