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Much of the historical perspective on the era holds that the Japanese were prepared to fight to their very last man, and that until the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been visited upon their homeland Japanese leaders had no intention of surrendering. But in fact the Japanese had sent peace feelers to the West as early as 1942, only six months after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. More would come in a flood long before the fateful use of the atomic bombs. In her 1956 book, The Enemy at His Back, journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown supplied overwhelming...

Does President Obama ever discuss the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while he's in Japan? Thousands of American lives lost. #MDW— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2016

Jill Stein, who is seeking the Green Party nomination for President, said that President Obama should apologize during his trip to Hiroshima for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan by pledging nuclear disarmament. Dr. Stein also urged Obama to listen to the testimony of the survivors of the nuclear attack, who have dedicated their lives to the elimination of nuclear weapons so that no one else should ever experience the hell on earth they survived. "The existence of nuclear weapons threatens the survival of humanity. I pledge to eliminate all such weapons as an urgent priority," stated Stein. Despite...

It wasn’t quite an apology at Hiroshima, though some might argue that President Obama’s mere presence at the site of the world’s first use of nuclear weapons was itself an apology. What it was a reiteration of President Obama’s mantra that our weapons are the threat, whether guns or nukes, and not the criminals and tyrants that would use them against us. As the New York Times reported his remarks: We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those...

Does anyone think it an accident that President Obama chose Memorial Day weekend to give his high-sounding moral equivalence speech in Hiroshima calling for a “moral revolution”? What Obama proposed in his speech in Japan is moral disarmament, and the consequences of that moral capitulation will be horrific if the world follows his advice.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that millions of lives were saved because President Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. I know because I’m one of them. My father enlisted in the U.S. Navy the day he turned 18 in 1945. He finished his basic training as the Allies were preparing for “Operation Downfall” – the code name for the invasion of the Japanese mainland. Experts predicted it would be ten times bloodier than Iwo Jima. Casualty estimates ran into the millions – for both sides. Lest we forget, Imperial Japan was a ruthless warrior culture whose war crimes rivaled the...

An addendum to Larry’s item this morning, which correctly diagnosed Obama’s appearance in Hiroshima as a bit more apologetic than the White House wants observers to believe. If you come to the site of an act that ended four years of horrendous war and insist that a “moral revolution” is needed to ensure that such acts aren’t repeated, you’re obviously making a statement about the morality of that original act. If you want to protest guns, you don’t do it at a place where someone once used one to defend himself successfully from a threat. You do it at a...

MSNBC breaking news host and ex-NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was allowed out on MSNBC’s airwaves early Friday afternoon to discuss President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima so he could resurrect a taped report that aired in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bomb’s dropping on the Japanese city. In the course of discussing the event afterward, though, Williams threw some shade in the direction of the U.S. military and then-President Harry Truman by complaining that “we’re the only nation to have used them in anger” against the horrifying Axis Powers member.

All these threads about Hiroshima got me to do some thinking. What would have happened had by some miracle we didn't drop the nukes on Japan and they had surrendered after a the equivalent amount of firebombing but right before an invasion. Some libs would think this would have been the "best Case Scenario" but I think it would have been a disaster! This is why: After the two nukes hit Japan many news reels in the months and years after it showed off to the whole world the absolute horrors of what Nuclear Weapons could do. We saw images...

HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) - With an unflinching look back at a painful history, President Barack Obama stood on the hallowed ground of Hiroshima on Friday and declared it a fitting place to summon people everywhere to embrace the vision of a world without nuclear weapons. As the first American president to visit the city where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb, Obama came to acknowledge - but not apologize for - an act many Americans see as a justified end to a brutal war that Japan started with a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. Some 140,000 people died after...

...So I crawled in the total darkness, and I got to the opening. And by the time I got there, the building was on fire. That meant most of the girls were burnt to death. Although that happened in the morning, it was already very dark, like twilight. And the two other girls managed to come out, and three of us looked around. And in the darkness, I could see some dark moving object approaching to me. They happened to be human beings shuffling from the center part of the city to where I was. They just didn't look like...

President Barack Obama delivered a pious anti-war address in Hiroshima highlighting “humanity’s core contradiction” of war, lamenting that humanity tried to justify war because of religion. “How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause,” he said. “Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers that have claimed their faith has a license to kill.”

President Barack Obama told the world on Friday in Hiroshima that the American decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945 arose from humanity’s worst instincts, including “nationalist fervor or religious zeal.” The war that ended in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, “grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.” The speech — delivered on the eve of Memorial Day weekend — was billed by the White House as anything but an apology, but Obama’s words betrayed...

Thankfully Barry didn’t quite apologize for dropping the bomb when he went to visit Hiroshima. He did take the opportunity to call for a nuclear-free world though - which is about as realistic as a gun-free America, another of Barry’s pipe dreams (literally).An efficient pipedream delivery systemButt reality has never entered the picture when Barry has a Dream. And a nuclear free world world has been a dream of his ever since he was a young pup and “researched” the topic for his debut journalism thesis at Columbia’s Sundial.  “It’s naïve for us to think…that we can grow our nuclear...

Barack Obama on Friday paid tribute to the "silent cry" of the 140,000 people killed by the world's first atomic bomb attack and sought to renew attention in his unfulfilled vision of a world without nuclear weapons, as he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. "Death fell from the sky and the world was changed," Obama said, after laying a wreath, closing his eyes and briefly bowing his head before an arched monument in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park that honors those killed on Aug. 6, 1945, when U.S. forces dropped the bomb that ushered in the nuclear...

6 years ago, on the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, I wrote: No sitting Japanese prime minister has ever been to Pearl Harbor; and no sitting American president has ever been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Will President Obama be the first? 6 years later, we have our answer. Tom Collina at Foreign Policy: President Barack Obama will soon become the first sitting U.S. president to go to Hiroshima, the White House announced on Tuesday. Obama will go on May 27, just after the G-7 summit, to visit the historic city where the United States...

HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) -- Every gesture. Every word uttered or avoided. Every person Barack Obama speaks with, listens to and stands beside in Hiroshima. All of it will help determine the success of a trip with huge potential political and diplomatic pitfalls, both in America and Asia. The leader of the United States is already one of the world's most watched people. But that daily scrutiny will be magnified exponentially when Obama makes the first presidential journey to the place where the first atomic bomb attack killed tens of thousands 71 years ago.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the December 7, 1941, Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that killed more than 2,400 Americans. President Obama is visiting Hiroshima this week, the site of the August 6, 1945, dropping of the atomic bomb that helped end World War II in the Pacific Theater. But strangely, he has so far announced no plans to visit Pearl Harbor on the anniversary of the attack. The president, who spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, should -- given that many Americans have forgotten why the Japanese attacked the United States and why they falsely...

I expect Barack Obama to embarrass us yet again by apologizing (expressly or impliedly) for America’s dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our ridiculous pseudo-prez has got to get his feels on, I guess. He’s got to show he and his ilk are nothing like those unwashed, knuckle-dragging barbarians who made it possible for his ilk to spout nonsense in English instead of German or Japanese. Just know that he doesn’t speak for me. I’m not sorry for defeating our enemies. I’m not sorry for anything. The two most common categories of responses to the moral illiterates...

Former U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton is watching President Obama’s upcoming visit to Hiroshima at week’s end with a keen eye. Mr. Obama is due to visit the Japanese city on Friday, the first president to do so since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the site 70 years ago, by order of Harry Truman, a Democrat. Mr. Bolton, however, has already crafted his response to the visit: a public-service ad produced through the Foundation for American Security and Freedom, which focuses on national security issues here and abroad. “President Obama has made it his mission to apologize for...