Sir, Oliver Kamm (Comment, August 16; see also letters, August 12, etc) accuses CND, in relation to the use of atomic bombs in 1945, of selective history and worse.

Field Marshal Montgomery, General Eisenhower and President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, all took much the same view. In his wartime memoirs, I Was There, Leahy wrote:

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 . . . In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.

Had the Allies at Potsdam assured the Japanese that the position of the Emperor would be safeguarded in any postwar settlement, or had we encouraged the Soviets to enter the Pacific war earlier, there would have been no question of a ground invasion of Japan.

As it was, when the Soviets did come in on August 8, they overran most of Manchuria in ten days.

However, neither the Japanese leaders nor the Americans wanted a partial or total Soviet occupation of mainland Japan.

The claim that but for the bombs an invasion would have had to happen, and that it would have cost a million casualties, is more fantasy than fact, however much apologists for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want to promote it.

BRUCE KENT
(Vice-President, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
Islington, London

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