a different history

[Monte Davis]

Wellerstein's an excellent historian of the nuclear weapons complex -- see
his blog at http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
<http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/>.

There's no knowing how long Japan might have withstood a blockade with
Manchuria gone (and undoubtedly further Soviet advances or threats into
northern China), but that alternative too would have been far from
bloodless: see German health and mortality late in WWI, Leningrad and the
1944-45 "hunger winter" in the  Netherlands in WWII. Japanese nutrition was
already hurting badly by mid-1945; unless and until the Emperor endorsed
surrender, I can imagine hundreds of thousands of additional civilian
deaths from malnutrition and disease.

That said, my 1960 reaction to reading 'Hiroshima' remains the same: like
all the "strategic" bombing of cities from 1939 on, it was terrorism and it
was wrong in any context -- as was the rationale for 70 years of nuclear
weapons development and deployment.



On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> https://ideas.aeon.co/viewpoints/alex-wellerstein-on-what-options-were-there-for-the-united-states-regarding-the-atomic-bomb-in-1945
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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