The Original Shock and Awe (Must See Flash Video)

[Clara T]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12364.htm

[ClayZ]

1. K and R

[jaxx]

2. Thank you.

If that doesn't say no to war and destruction, nothing will.

[1620rock]

4. Awsome...thank you.

[BlackHeart]

3. Anti-Democrat propaganda

What would they have had us do, start a land invasion of the home islands? How many more Americans would have died then to stop a war started by the Japanese? Undoubtably there would still have been as many Japanese deaths.

[Clara T]

6. That is an historical myth

The Myths of Hiroshima
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
 
Sixty years ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.

The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 — just five days after the Nagasaki bombing — Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.

This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.

<snip>

Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" — and many other historians have long argued — it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0805-24.htm

There are countless documents in the archive to disprove this myth.

Peace

[BlackHeart]

9. Oh come on

Russia declared war because we dropped the bombs and wanted in on the action.

[spindrifter]

5. Lest we forget.

[bpilgrim]

7. that's what i always say... the bomb that keeps on killing, reach'n across

the generations, right up into the womb & beyond :cry:

thanks for sharing :toast:

peace

[Swamp Rat]

8. kick and recommended n/t