Hiroshima Nagasaki
The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War.
More than 100,000 people were killed instantly by the atomic bombs, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Many hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries later, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness.
Yet American leaders claimed the bombs were "our least abhorrent choice"—and still today most people believe they ended the Pacific War and saved millions of American and Japanese lives. In this gripping narrative, Ham demonstrates convincingly that misunderstandings and nationalist fury on both sides led to the use of the bombs. Ham also gives powerful witness to its destruction through the eyes of eighty survivors, from twelve-year-olds forced to work in war factories to wives and children who faced the holocaust alone.
Hiroshima Nagasaki presents the grisly unadorned truth about the bombings, blurred for so long by postwar propaganda, and transforms our understanding of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian journalist Ham (Sandakan) re-examines the atomic attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, confronting the popularly held belief that the nuclear attacks were justified because they ended WWII in the Pacific without a costly invasion of Japan's home islands. Ham's central argument is that such an invasion would not have occurred because the American leadership had deemed it too costly in potential U.S. casualties. Ham backs up his assertion by pointing out that both American and Japanese commands were well aware that Japan was already defeated by the summer of 1945 through the combined effects of naval blockade and conventional air bombardment. He counters the common justification for the atomic attacks by proposing that the strongest influence for the attacks was the threat of Russia entering the Pacific War and dominating Asia after the war. An absorbing and thoroughly researched work, it is a must-read for those interested in the moral aspects of total war and military strategy in general. Ham's work will be cited as an important addition to a debate that continues 70 years after the event.
