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No evidence to show A-bombs were dropped to save lives

I refer to Mr Chen Junyi’s letter “Irresponsible to claim that Japan would have surrendered” (May 25). The job of a historian is to gather and review the truthfulness of both primary and secondary sources of information.

I refer to Mr Chen Junyi’s letter “Irresponsible to claim that Japan would have surrendered” (May 25). The job of a historian is to gather and review the truthfulness of both primary and secondary sources of information.

Instructions, conversation records and minutes of meetings written shortly after an event are considered more reliable than speeches made years later. Historians are normally careful with government propaganda publications and memoirs because these are considered self-serving.

The historian then proceeds to analyse the information and construct a probable scenario of what happened. Technically speaking, there is no right or wrong. Based on the sources of information used to reach an argument, the reader can decide for himself whether the argument is convincing.

The matter in hand is not whether Japan was right to start a war nor about how to have punished the Japanese for their crime. The issue is whether the atomic bombs were dropped with the intention of saving lives.

Based on historical documentary evidence, the answer is probably no.

My letter “Atomic bombs unnecessary as Japan had plans to surrender” (May 18) was principally based on information in the 52 historians’ letter to the Smithsonian Institution and Professor B J Bernstein’s paper in the Journal of Military History.

The 52 signatories are historians and professors from reputable universities, including Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and University College London, and are therefore unlikely to have cut short the historiographic process. Also, the two sources together cited more than 50 references to substantiate their argument.

Now that much information about the atomic bomb has been declassified, one can find them on the Internet.

I have yet to find historical evidence saying categorically that the atomic bombs were dropped with the intention of saving lives, especially Japanese lives.

General George Marshall told United States President Harry Truman on June 18, 1945 that the estimated US casualties would not exceed 63,000 out of the 190,000 troops for the operation on the Japanese mainland.

Truman inflated the figure as he grew older. This was documented by Prof Bernstein.

Mr Chen charged that the US War Department’s intelligence division was irresponsible to conclude in its study that the war would have ended with the Soviets’ entry. What evidence was there for this allegation?

Did the US War Department have a motive for framing its president of an act that, by today’s standards, would be considered genocide? Was there a rebuttal from another credible institution?

One must not allow the repugnance of Japan’s atrocities to blind us to another horrendous act.

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