Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

78 years ago (11:02am August 9, local time), "Fat Man" a 21-kiloton implosion-type with a solid plutonium core atomic bomb exploded ~1,650 feet over Nagasaki, missing its intended target point by 1.3 miles, but killed an estimated 70,000 men, women, and children and injuring some 60,000 more.



Gen. Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s military director, and others, including journalists worked for years to deceive the public regarding the truth about the most devastating effect of nuclear weapons: radiation (both prompt ionizing and fallout). More about that here and newly declassed documents:

78th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings: Revisiting the Record

HIROSHIMA
WHO DISAGREED WITH THE ATOMIC BOMBING?

From what we read in the general media, it seems like almost everyone felt the atomic bombings of Japan were necessary. Aren't the people who disagree with those actions just trying to find fault with America?

DWIGHT EISENHOWER

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY
(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.

GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR

MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."

William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.

More notable quotes on the atomic bombing.

My late grandfather was Gen. MacArthur's personal typist & message traffic handler.


August 9, 1965: at Titan II launch complex 373-4 11 miles north of Searcy, Arkansas, as 55 civilian contractors were modifying the missile silo to better survive a nuclear attack, a flash fire and dense smoke asphyxiated 53 men, the deadliest accident involving a US nuclear weapon system. Only two of the 55 workers who were inside the silo at the time survived.



The missile’s massive 6,200-pound 9-megaton W53 warhead had been removed for the duration of the modifications, which is why the Strategic Air Command did not consider this a 'Broken Arrow', per se, and why it is not included on 'official' lists of US nuclear weapons accidents.

The 103-foot tall, 330,000-pound Titan II ICBM, however, remained in the silo, fully loaded with volatile liquid fuel and oxidizer. Had the fire caused temperatures and pressures to rise too high, it could have exploded.



The Titan II in silo launch complex 373-4 was one of 18 built in Arkansas. First deployed in 1962, 54 Titan IIs were kept on constant alert in Arizona, Arkansas, and Kansas. Because the ICBM in Searcy was undamaged by the fire, it was put back into service about a year later.

Survivor recalls 1965 Titan II missile silo fire that killed 53

Human error in a nuclear facility nearly destroyed Arkansas


On September 19, 1980, at a silo outside Damascus, Arkansas, a fuel leak caused by an accidentally dropped large socket "down the missile shaft—66 feet—bounced off the shaft mount ring, and hit the side of the missile, puncturing its eighth-inch hull. Fuel vapor started to fill the silo." That led to a massive explosion that killed one person, injured 21, destroyed the missile and silo, and hurled the 9-Mt warhead through the 750-ton silo doors. Serious pucker factor!



We Almost Blew Up Arkansas  |
Explosive era: Tour visits site where Titan II blast in 1980 sent warhead flying

August 9, 1981: Pres Reagan reversed Carter’s 1978 cancellation of the "neutron bomb" and without consulting NATO, authorized production and stockpiling of enhanced radiation versions of the W70-3 (for the Lance missile) and the W79 (for the 8-inch artillery-fired atomic projectile).


NY Times



Although Carter effectively canceled the neutron bomb program in 1978, the United States still produced and stockpiled 308 1-kiloton enhanced radiation versions of the W70 warhead for the Lance surface-to-surface missile, but we are told they were never deployed to Europe.

Physicist Sam Cohen (1931-2010) inventor of the neutron bomb and considered it "the most discriminate weapon ever devised", explaining how he sought to use nuclear radiation "as an effective means of waging ground warfare in a relatively moral way" ...morally superior to "regular" nukes. A true madman you can listen for yourself in this short clip:



Harold Brown, former director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (which designed the W70 warhead) and Carter’s secretary of defense, nicknamed the neutron bomb the "capitalist bomb" because it killed people but left property/infrastructure intact. Soviet leaders used his moniker to denounce it.



The United States did briefly deploy one version of the neutron bomb. From Oct. 1975 until Jan. 1976, 70 Sprint anti-ballistic missiles armed with 1-kt W66 enhanced radiation warheads were fully operational at the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex (sinister pyramid) in Nekoma, North Dakota. The $6 billion dollar missile complex was shutdown the very next day by Congress...due to fears of radiation exposure.

China became interested in developing its own neutron bomb in 1977, in response to the US decision to do so that same year, and successfully tested such a device on September 29, 1988. However, we are told there is no evidence China ever deployed such weapons.

Source: Red China’s “Capitalist Bomb”: Inside the Chinese Neutron Bomb Program (PDF)


'Deep Impact" day...head for your shelter!!




Just a coincidence this all took place on the 29th anniversary of Nagasaki atomic bombing.



The last hours of Richard Nixon’s presidency and the first hours of Gerald Ford’s.


Nixon’s Daily Diary August 1, 1974 – August 9, 1974 (PDF)

Ford daily diary (PDF)




Departure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09TcGuZI6xg

Swearing in Ceremony of Gerald R. Ford as 38th President of the United States, August 9, 1974:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5qExW0HFCI