Hiroshima: A Meditation on the Horror [View All]

Ronald Takaki,
Pacific News Service, Jul 26, 2005

Editor's Note: A tough-guy stance by an insecure president, racist rhetoric and a refusal to compromise led to a nuclear attack that was initially criticized by U.S. editors and military generals alike. August 6, 2005, is the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

BERKELEY, Calif.--During the days before that fateful August 6, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a surrender. “We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender daily,” one of his staff members recalled. When he was notified that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the general was “livid.” MacArthur declared that the atomic attack on Hiroshima was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view.”

Why then did the president make the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? <snip>

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