Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years

[Octafish]

Below is Fat Man, the bomb which destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.



If you have a few minutes, please read what Dr. Daniel Ellsberg wrote regarding nuclear weapons:

Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years

Posted on Aug 5, 2009
By Daniel Ellsberg

EXCERPT...

Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I’m convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I’m not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and public’s ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.

SNIP...

But the scientists knew something else that was unknown to the public and even to most high-level decision-makers. They knew that the atomic bombs, the uranium and plutonium fission bombs they were preparing, were only the precursors to far more powerful explosives, almost surely including a thermonuclear fusion bomb, later called the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb. That weapon—of which we eventually came to have tens of thousands—could have an explosive yield much greater than the fission bombs needed to trigger it. A thousand times greater.

SNIP...

Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its detonator. (I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last 50 years.

Our popular image of nuclear war—from the familiar pictures of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—is grotesquely misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090805_hiroshima_day_america_has_been_asleep_at_the_wheel_for_64_years/

After reading the article, you might see who and what we in what I call the Peace Party -- a place filled with my fellow Liberal and Progressive Democrats -- are up against today. The weapons that can destroy the world and all who live here are in the hands of the same types who thought it was OK to exterminate "the Japs" and to kill "the Injuns" and to enslave "the Niggras." What's worse today, their ideological descendants have incorporated into their armamentarium myriad new totalitarian "sources and methods," including secret government.

Unless we realize the true situation and get organized PDQ, we will continue down the low road to Hell. Thanks for giving a damn about that, my Friends.

[jody]

1. Thanks to FDR who ordered the project, to Truman who ordered the bomb be dropped and all who

participated in the development and operational use of the bomb to end WWII.

[NoPasaran]

2. And thanks also to our brave men and women in uniform

Who continue to protect and defend us, just as much today as they did sixty or more years ago.

[jody]

7. Hear, Hear!

:toast:

[Octafish]

11. I also salute the men and women who defend our country. It's the warmongers in charge I can't stand.

Thanks for reminding me, jody. It's one thing to talk about the brave men who defended our nation in World War II and it's another thing to talk about warmongers. Members of the Bush family, for example, have used their positions in public office and private trusts to advance their own power and profit.

See: Know your BFEE -- Money Trumps Peace. Always.

How many know the Bushes and the people they hang with profited most handsomely from the production and control of nuclear weapons?

See: US nuclear tab at $5.8 trillion and Know your BFEE: Cheney & Halliburton Sold Iran Nuke Technology.

Almost forgot, the point, that is the people who most profited in terms of power and profit from the Cold War:

Know your BFEE: Scions of the Military Industrial Complex

Know your BFEE: Spawn of Wall Street and the Third Reich

[jody]

12. As many DUers know, "WAR IS A RACKET" as Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote from experience.

CHAPTER FIVE

TO HELL WITH WAR!

I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won't.

So..."

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."

Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.

And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.

There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.

The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.

Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munitions makers.

So...I say,

TO HELL WITH WAR!

[Violet_Crumble]

21. Yeah, thanks to all involved in the mass-murder of so many Japanese civilians!

USA! USA! ;)

[Johonny]

27. Yawn

Those citizens seemed so upset when the Japanese killed civilians in China and the USA. Really these I hate the greatest generation thread today were all really stupid and boring. You mean in post cold war America we have different moral standards than America during WWII. I can't believe it.

[Violet_Crumble]

43. Yeah, yr justification for the mass-murder of civilians was rather dull...

Lots of coffee will keep you awake next time you type it out...

[jody]

30. I assume you are thanking the USA for preventing Japan from capturing Australia. You're Welcome! n/t

[Violet_Crumble]

44. No, I wasn't saying that. I was responding to the orgasmic glee you displayed at mass-murder.,..

Why would you assume I'd say something that anyone who's studied WWII knows wasn't true. Japan could never have invaded Australia. Their supply lines were stretched to the max at New Guinea and apart from that, geography made Australia impossible physically to invade. I won't hold my breath waiting for you to thank me for correcting you on that, seeing as how you appear pretty emotionally invested with thinking everyone and their dog should be bowing at the feet of the US...

[jody]

46. "Japan could never have invaded Australia." ROFL You need to read history more carefully and

don't ignore the battle at Midway that saved Australia from Japanese occupation.

You can certainly learn much by visiting THE BATTLE FOR AUSTRALIA 1942-1943

[Pavulon]

31. Japan was so nice to manchurians..

they were so kind as occupiers in korea and china that they are still loved there today.. They treated our prisoners so well.

To bad teller did not come up with a working super in 43.

[Violet_Crumble]

45. I didn't say Japan wasn't....

But how is it that you blame all Japanese civilians and think that justifies their killing? The number of civilians killed in WWII outnumbered that of combatants, which is why international law was created after WWII that protected civilians in areas of conflict. I realise more than a few Americans think protection of civilians in war is a bit wussy and all, and that it's really patriotic to have an almost orgasmic glee over the bombing of Hiroshima, but I find it rather nauseous when I encounter it. I've read from historians who disagree on whether it was necessary to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and some agree and some don't, but none of them are gleeful about it happening the way some DUers are. It was a truly terrible thing that happened to Hiroshima, and it's sad that some DUers can't acknowledge that....

[Raskolnik]

32. You're right. Japan was just minding its own business, not hurting a soul, when all of the sudden

out of the blue, the U.S. decided to drop two atomic bombs on them.

[Violet_Crumble]

42. I didn't say that, but thanks for trying to put words in my mouth n/t

[Me.]

3. To Your Point

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6233113

[Octafish]

13. Thank you, Me.

It's hard to believe, but the people in charge are more than gangsters. Remember, Curtis LeMay?



Most importantly: Excellent thread, Yours. I'm K&R57. I'll be back, as they say.

[bananas]

4. k&r - I really like the last sentence in the article.

"Using the new opportunities offered by the Internet—drawing attention to newly declassified documents and to some realities still concealed—I plan over the next year, before the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, to do my part in unveiling this hidden history."

[Octafish]

15. That hidden history could expose the heart of the national security state.

I wonder who could lie there?

[glitch]

5. Thank you for giving a damn and staying true to informing us. K & R nt

[Octafish]

17. Pictures at the Hotel Armageddon

Dienststelle Marienthal: Eine Gebäudemonographie von Andreas Magdanz

Mehr licht:

Pictures at the Hotel Armageddon

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

NYTimes - Published: January 11, 2004

In the final minutes of the movie "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," with a nuclear conflagration on the horizon, the only person in the Pentagon's war room who remains upbeat about the prospect of mass annihilation is Strangelove himself. Doing slide-rule calculations in his wheelchair, this proud father of the Doomsday Machine assures the president and his generals that thousands of Americans can ride out Armageddon inside the country's deeper mine shafts.

"Of course," Strangelove, the not-so-ex-Nazi, says brightly, "it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition." The men in the room listen raptly to his proposal for a "ratio of 10 females to each male." As survivors, the madman tells them, they should feel no guilt about the tens of millions incinerated above ground but instead enjoy their new subterranean lives in "a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead."

The 25 photographs by Andreas Magdanz at the Janet Borden Gallery in SoHo, from Saturday through Feb. 21, are like a glimpse of Strangelove's demented vision of a nuclear sanctuary translated into historical truth. One set of plans for a postnuclear-war world, it turns out, were almost as fantastic — and banal — as those in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire. The Dienstelle Marienthal (or Marienthal Office) is among the most ambitious but least-known monuments to "thinking the unthinkable" ever conceived. This vast underground tunnel complex, built from 1960 to 1972 outside Bonn, was once so secret that to acknowledge its existence could bring charges of treason in West Germany.

Designed to house 3,000 of that government's essential personnel in case of nuclear attack, it represented one of the most exclusive fraternities in the world. (Membership in the American version, under the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's tenure, was even more restricted. It accommodated only 1,000 people. After the 535 members of Congress and their top aides were assigned spaces, little room was left for anyone else hoping to survive.)

The Germans, however, built on a grander scale. The mountain caverns in the Ahr Valley near Marienthal had been hollowed as a railroad tunnel before World War I. Invading French troops dynamited passages, and the place was abandoned until World War II, when the Nazi military discovered that the cathedral-like spaces, beneath 350 feet of slate, were ideal for assembling V-1 and V-2 rockets beyond the reach of Allied bombs. After joining NATO in 1955, West Germany began to plan to use the site in case of a nuclear war, expanding and upgrading it so that a community could live deep underground, in theory, for at least a month.

There are 25,000 doors in the bunker complex at Marienthal, only 38 of which open to the world outside. Among the hundreds of rooms where the sun never shone are 897 offices and conference areas and 936 sleeping cubicles. Canteens, showers, medical areas, a printing shop, a hair salon, a television studio and — most touchingly — a post office were provided for the inhabitants, along with two large bays for bicycles, the chief form of transportation around the nearly 12 miles of galleries and tunnels.

Mr. Magdanz, a 40-year-old German based in Aachen, began the project in 1998 after reading a newspaper item about the structure. His request to photograph it was grudgingly honored by the Interior Ministry, which granted him a three-day permit. Persistence led to a seven-month extension. He was the first person authorized to photograph there, although he had access to only the three sectors in the east half of the complex. (There were five sectors in all, linked but different.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.firstpulseprojects.net/bombproject/magdanz.html

You're welcome, glitch. A reporter at heart, I'm the dull mirror, more than anything.

[proteus_lives]

6. You are aware that we were fighting the most racist people on earth, right?

"are up against today. The weapons that can destroy the world and all who live here are in the hands of the same types who thought it was OK to exterminate "the Japs" and to kill "the Injuns" and to enslave "the Niggras."

It makes me laugh when people try to incorporate racism into the bombings because the Japanese Empire was the most racist and hateful group on earth. (They stand neck in neck with the Nazis) Well, the bomb stopped them from enslaving and exterminating the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Guineans, etc, etc.

[jody]

8. Don't bother people with facts when they are in the throes of Mass hysteria. n/t

[Archae]

9. Actually, the Bomb didn't stop them.

They were losing, and they were down to their last main islands.

But they refused to give up.

Even AFTER the Bombs, a group of fanatical officers tried a coup.

It took three big shocks to the Japanese military, to finally stop the war.
The two Bombs, and Emperor Hirohito himself giving a speech on the radio saying enough was enough.

[Octafish]

18. The rightwingers screamed bloody murder upon the election of an African American.

Their overlords are the ones controlling the nukes.
They don't let anything or anyone get in their way.

New Tapes: JFK Questioned Value of Nuclear Build-Up

For Immediate Release: February 6, 2002
Further information: Tom McNaught [phone]

Boston: The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library today made public 240 minutes of newly declassified tape recordings of White House meetings and conversations that took place in the Cabinet Room on November 21, 27 and 29, and December 5, 1962.

Portions of the tapes may be heard by visiting the John F. Kennedy Library’s web page at www.jfklibrary.org.

The conversations between President John F. Kennedy and his advisors took place shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis and centered on U.S. policy toward Cuba, the accuracy of American press reports on matters of national security, the military budget, and the value of nuclear weapons, both as a deterrent and as a practical weapon.

Of particular interest are President Kennedy’s candid views of nuclear weapons, nuclear war and deterrence. At one point during the December 5 meeting with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other military advisors, President Kennedy questions the usefulness of nuclear weapons as a deterrent, stating:

"If the purpose of our strategic buildup is to deter the Russians, number one; number two, to attack them if it looks like they are about to attack us or be able to lessen the impact they would have on us in an attack…if our point really then is to deter them…we have an awful lot of megatonnage to put on the Soviets sufficient to deter them from ever using nuclear weapons. Otherwise what good are they? You can’t use them as a first weapon yourself, they are only good for deterring…I don’t see quite why we’re building as many as we’re building."

In discussing deterrence and the buildup of nuclear weapons, President Kennedy also states:

"Our big danger is the Soviet Union is going to get in a position where they are going to have so much on us, such nuclear capabilities to deliver on us and cause us so many casualties, that we will not initiate a nuclear attack on them. And that being true, then they will use their conventional force to take whatever they want, anyplace—well not in this hemisphere—but in Europe and in Asia. That is the danger we are going to face, that I’ll—or whoever is President—will not want to fire this weapon to stop this conventional attack."

Concerning the Soviet missile buildup, the President observes "What is it that will deter them?… Even what they had in Cuba alone would have been a substantial deterrent to me."

At the December 5 meeting, Secretary McNamara presented to the President a review of the Department of Defense’s $54.4 billion budget for FY 1964. Recommendations on funding, programs and forces for each of the service branches are also discussed in detail, and discussion and debate among all the attendees takes place during the program review.

During the meeting the President also speculates on a diminished US military presence in Europe and where a future war could possibly occur, the measuring of deterrence, an increased Civil Defense shelter program, and the usefulness of a military plan to attack specific targets in a nuclear exchange. Regarding this targeting plan, the President questions its usefulness, asking his military team, "What’s the sense of taking out a train center marshalling yard in Poland in a nuclear exchange?"

Later in the meeting Secretary McNamara discusses possible military complaints about some of the budget cuts. He is concerned that individuals within the Pentagon might create a myth of military weakness, similar to the wide-spread, and later disproved belief of the 1950’s and early 1960 that there existed a missile gap between the US and the USSR. McNamara states:

"There was created a myth in this country that did great harm to the nation. It was created by, I would say, emotionally guided but nonetheless patriotic individuals in the Pentagon. There are still people of that kind in the Pentagon. I wouldn’t give them any foundation for creating another myth."

The President initially responds by poking fun at himself, evoking laughter from his military staff, stating, "As one of those who put that myth around – a patriotic and misguided man…"

He then calls for an investigation into the beginnings of the missile gap theory:

…the fact of the matter is, if I may say so, the previous administration accepted (the missile gap)…it wasn’t just Generals at the Pentagon and the Democratic opposition, I think it was an administration decision – the missile gap – and I want some research on it….I think if we could dig up the record of the quotes that were made….Otherwise what it looks like is we, some of us, distorted the facts and created a myth of the gap that didn’t exist. The point I think that is really true is that from the top to the bottom they (the previous administration) really believed there would be."

Identified participants at the taped meeting are: President John F. Kennedy; Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense; Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor; George Ball, Under Secretary of State; and Jerome Weisner, Special Assistant to the President.

SOURCE:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK+Library+and+Museum/News+and+Press/New+Tapes+JFK+Questioned+Value+of+Nuclear+Build+Up.htm

Not a pretty picture, but that is the way it is.

[Me.]

22. And Then There Is That ‘”oldie but goodie” Operation Northwoods

Which never got off the ground. Not of the level as Hiroshima by any stretch. But then these things when unchecked have a way of taking on a life of their own.

“In response to a request for pretexts for military intervention by the Chief of Operations of the Cuba Project, Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, the document lists methods (with, in some cases, outlined plans) the authors believed would garner public and international support for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. These are staged attacks purporting to be of Cuban origin.

1. Since it would seem desirable to use legitimate provocation as the basis for US military intervention in Cuba a cover and deception plan, to include requisite preliminary actions such as has been developed in response to Task 33 c, could be executed as an initial effort to provoke Cuban reactions. Harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized. Our military posture throughout execution of the plan will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban response justifies.
2. A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.

a. Incidents to establish a credible attack (not in chronological order):
1. Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
2. Land friendly Cubans in uniform "over-the-fence" to stage attack on base.
3. Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
4. Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
5. Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
6. Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
7. Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.
8. Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
9. Capture militia group which storms the base.
10. Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires—napthalene.
11. Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be in lieu of (10)).
b. United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base.
c. Commence large scale United States military operations.

3. A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms:

a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.

4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.
The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement, also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.
5. A "Cuban-based, Castro-supported" filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation (in the vein of the 14th of June invasion of the Dominican Republic). We know that Castro is backing subversive efforts clandestinely against Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Nicaragua at present and possible others. These efforts can be magnified and additional ones contrived for exposure. For example, advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. "Cuban" B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with "Cuban" messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and "Cuban" shipments of arm which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach.
6. Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact. The primary drawback to this suggestion appears to be the security risk inherent in obtaining or modifying an aircraft. However, reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months.
7. Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba. Concurrently, genuine defections of Cuban civil and military air and surface craft should be encouraged.
8. It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.
b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will begin transmitting on the international distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.

9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.

a. Approximately 4 or 5 F-101 aircraft will be dispatched in trail from Homestead AFB, Florida, to the vicinity of Cuba. Their mission will be to reverse course and simulate fakir aircraft for an air defense exercise in southern Florida. These aircraft would conduct variations of these flights at frequent Intervals. Crews would be briefed to remain at least 12 miles off the Cuban coast; however, they would be required to carry live ammunition in the event that hostile actions were taken by the Cuban MIGs.
b. On one such flight, a pre-briefed pilot would fly tail-end Charley at considerable interval between aircraft. While near the Cuban Island this pilot would broadcast that he had been jumped by MIGs and was going down. No other calls would be made. The pilot would then fly directly west at extremely low altitude and land at a secure base, an Eglin auxiliary. The aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number. The pilot who had performed the mission under an alias, would resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would then have disappeared.
c. At precisely the same time that the aircraft was presumably shot down, a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc., at approximately 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast and depart. The pilots returning to Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew. Search ships and aircraft could be dispatched and parts of aircraft found”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods.

[Octafish]

24. It gets worse. JFK rejected a plan for a pre-emptive NUCLEAR ATTACK on the USSR.

As in NORTHWOODS, it was something straight out of the Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper playbook:

Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?

Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell | September 21, 1994


EXCERPT...

The Burris Memorandum

The memorandum reproduced here was written for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who did not attend the meeting, by Colonel Howard Burris, his military aide. Declassified only in June of 1993, it has not previously received any public attention so far as we have been able to determine.

The first paragraph introduces General Hickey and his group, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee. Although the subcommittee report is described as "annual," this would be the first one given to President Kennedy and his advisors, and it is not clear whether President Eisenhower received such reports in person. General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stepped in to explain the "assumption" of the 1961 report: "a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." The question arises: A surprise attack by whom on whom?

The following paragraphs answer the question. The second paragraph reports that after hearing the presentations, President Kennedy asked the presenters "if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R. which would be incurred by a preemptive attack." Kennedy also asked for an effectiveness trend since "these studies have been made since 1957." Lemnitzer responded that he would later answer both of the President's questions in private.

Paragraph three records Kennedy asking a hypothetical question: what would happen if we launched a strike in the winter of 1962? Allen Dulles of the CIA responded that "the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved." Lemnitzer then cautioned against putting too much faith in the findings since the assumptions might be faulty. The discussion thus provides a time-frame. December of 1962 was too early for an attack because the U.S. would have too few missiles; by December of 1963 there would likely be sufficient numbers.

Paragraph four reports one more Kennedy question: how much time would "citizens" need to remain in shelters following an attack? The President receives a qualified estimate of two weeks from a member of the subcommittee. The group was clearly talking about U.S. citizens protecting themselves from the globe-encircling fallout following a U.S. nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R.

Paragraph five adds to the intensity of the document with Kennedy's directive "that no member in attendance disclose even the subject of the meeting."

CONTINUED...

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_the_us_military_plan_a_nuclear_first_strike_for_1963

Like your excellent post on Operation NORTHWOODS, Me., this stuff really should be in every high school and college U.S. history book.

[Me.]

25. Stunning

In a ghastly way

[Octafish]

53. Gen LeMay and Gen Power WORKED TO START WORLD WAR III.

From The Cult of the Presidency" by Gene Healy, Cato Institute, of all places.

If there's anything to praise about JFK's leadership during the crisis, it's that he resisted efforts to get him to escalate the conflict still further. Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command, and Curtis Lemay, the Air Force chief of staff, both tried to push the Cuban Missile Crisis into a full-scale war with the Soviets. Both men, like much of the military establishment at the time, were enamored with the concept of preventive war, in which the United States would kill off its superpower rivals before they grew too strong. When Lemay had served as head of SAC from 1948 to 1957, he hoped to provoke an incident that would allow him to deliver his "Sunday Punch," 750 nuclear bombs in a few hours, leading to an estimated 60 million Russian dead. Without authorization, in 1954 Lemay ordered B-45 overflights of the Soviet Union, commenting to his aides, "Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started." General Power, Lemay's successor at SAC, and a man that even Lemay considered "a sadist,” chastised a colleague at a 1960 briefing on nuclear strategy, yelling, "Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards....Look: at the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!" The colleague replied, "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman."

At the height of the Missile Crisis, Power allowed the prescheduled test launch of an Atlas ICBM, in an apparent attempt to spook the Soviets into action. Lemay in turn repeatedly challenged Kennedy's courage, urging the president to approve air strikes on the missile installations. That action would likely have led to the nuclear exchange Lemay had long lusted after. As we later learned, during the crisis, the Soviets had 20 operational, nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, as well as nine tactical nuclear weapons that Russian field commanders had been authorized t use in the event of an attack. In his book Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, historian Richard Rhodes writes, "If John Kennedy had followed Lemay's advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide."

That presidents advised by such men had in their hands the means to kill millions should be unsettling to people of normal human sensibilities. That presidents showed restraint while in possession of such power gives us cause for thanks, but it is, at best, an uneasy source of comfort.


SOURCE: http://books.google.com/books?id=PFHD_fp-S80C&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=%E2%80%9CAt+the+end+of+the+war,+if+there+are+two+Americans+and+one+Russian,+we+win!%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=GYfL8oQ8I7&sig=_elPVv37oBT0MC5iqYvXyT73WWY&hl=en&ei=ggV_SvDMHIe4NuGo-PYC&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CAt%20the%20end%20of%20the%20war%2C%20if%20there%20are%20two%20Americans%20and%20one%20Russian%2C%20we%20win!%E2%80%9D&f=false

With all the radiation in the "Garden of Eden," Adam and Eve wouldn't have a chance. Dunno about the snake.

[G_j]

10. thanks

I might have missed this excellent article by Ellsberg!

[Octafish]

20. What do you need to do to have a 70-pct chance of surviving an H-Bomb from a distance of 3 miles?

http://www.norad.mil/about/CMOC.html

“The National Security Act of ‘47 gave us the National Security Council. Never have we had a National Security Council so concerned about the nation’s security that we’re always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was invented, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do as measured against something we invented in 1947."
-- U.S. Navy Admiral Gene La Rocque in PBS Documentary "The Secret Government"

http://www.wanttoknow.info/050423secretgovernment

You're welcome, G_j. I owe you many thanks for many articles. And thank you for fighting the good fight.

[ShamelessHussy]

14. WOW - What a great read and I can not wait to hear from him again on this subject

Thank you for sharing :toast:

K&R

[Octafish]

23. You're welcome, ShamelessHussy. There is something I forgot...

...There are a good many conservatives in the Peace Party, as well.
They're nothing like the folks who crawled out from the wreckage of the Third Reich, at all.

Know your BFEE: Nazis couldn’t win WWII, so they backed the Bushes.

More than ideology, like pretending to hate hanging out with the hippies,
the real conservatives believe in the law and our Constitution,
that includes defending and respecting the rights of those who don't agree with them.

[RedCloud]

16. And no concentration camps for German and Italian Americans either.

Just the Japanese. To this day I have never met a Japanese American who was disloyal to America. A few Italians. And quite a few German Americans who grew up proud of Hitler. When we played "army guys" those future Republicans always and proudly volunteered to be the Nazis.

[Octafish]

33. In America, German POWs were treated better than African Americans.

Greatness walked off a Kansas stage...

Lena Horne

EXCERPT...

Despite her great fame, Horne continued to experience humiliating racial rebukes, and in the late 1940s she sued a number of restaurants and theaters for race discrimination and also became politically allied with Paul Robeson in the Progressive Citizens of America, a leftist group combating racism. While entertaining troops at Fort Reilly, Kansas during World War II, she saw German POW's seated in the front row and African American soldiers forced to sit behind them. Horne left the stage immediately, went to the local NAACP office and filed a complaint. MGM Studios pulled her off the tour, so she used her own money to travel and entertain the troops. She also assisted Eleanor Roosevelt in her quest for anti-lynching legislation. After the war, Horne worked on behalf of Japanese Americans who faced discrimination.

SOURCE:

http://www.answers.com/topic/lena-horne

The mindset did not die with the surrender at Appamatox or the fall of the Reich and Imperial Japan.

Thank you for remembering, RedCloud.

[Rage for Order]

19. Somebody cue The Gap Band, please

"You dropped the bomb on me, baby...you dropped the bomb on me"

:nuke:

[Octafish]

35. Mike....for ''megaton.''

The ships looked like toys tossed in a bathtub.

"Mike" Test

On November 1, 1952 the United States detonated a hydrogen device in the Pacific that vaporized an entire island, leaving behind a crater more than a mile wide. The test, code-named "Mike" was the first successful implementation of the concept for a superbomb that physicist Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam had outlined in a report a year and a half earlier. A team of scientists assigned the task of turning the Ulam-Teller concept into an experimental device, met for the first time in October 1951. They achieved the designated goal, one that required a tremendous engineering effort, in little more than a year.

SNIP...

As the date for the test approached, a number of prominent scientists not involved with the project pushed to have it postponed. The reasons they gave were political. "Mike" was scheduled to be detonated just three days before a general election. Many scientists felt that it was wrong to burden a new president with the responsibility for a nuclear test that he had not authorized. They also argued that by testing "Mike" the U.S. would effectively eliminate any opportunity it had for reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union for a moratorium on thermonuclear weapons. But after listening to the arguments, President Truman decided to proceed as planned.

The test was to take place on Eniwetok Atoll, which is in the Marshall Islands about 3,000 miles west of Hawaii. It was an enormous operation. Staging began in March and by October more than 11,000 civilians and military personnel were in the vicinity of Eniwetok working on the project. A six-story cab was built on the island of Elugelab to house "Mike." And a two-mile long tunnel that extended from the device to another island was filled with helium balloons that would provide data on the progress of the fusion reaction.

"Mike" was detonated remotely from the control ship Estes, which was stationed 30 miles away from ground zero. Even those who had witnessed atomic tests were stunned by the blast. Within 90 seconds the fire ball had reached 57,000 feet. The cloud, when it had reached its furthest extent, was about 100 miles wide. The explosion wiped Elugelab off the face of the planet, and destroyed life on the surrounding islands. In their report, the survey team that went to Engebi three miles from ground zero wrote, "The body of a bird was seen, but no living animals and only the stumps of vegetation. Among the specimens collected were fish which seemed to have been burned. On each of these fish, the skin was missing from one side, as if, the field notes said at the time, the animal 'had been dropped in a hot pan.' "

Physicist Herbert York summed up the implications of the first test of a thermonuclear device: "the world suddenly shifted from the path it had been on to a more dangerous one. Fission bombs, destructive as they might have been, were thought of being limited in power. Now, it seemed we had learned how to brush even these limits aside and to build bombs whose power was boundless."

SOURCE: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX63.html

The Gap Band is tops. They create art that lasts as long as there are people to remember.

[Faryn Balyncd]

26. Thanks... K & R.

[Octafish]

36. Cheney & Co. derailed CIA's Richard Barlow, WMD expert who tried to stop spread of nukes.

The guy, like Valerie Plame and Brewster, Jennings & Associates would years later, worked to stop nuclear proliferation:

The man who knew too much

He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report
The Guardian, Saturday 13 October 2007

Rich Barlow idles outside his silver trailer on a remote campsite in Montana - itinerant and unemployed, with only his hunting dogs and a borrowed computer for company. He dips into a pouch of American Spirit tobacco to roll another cigarette. It is hard to imagine that he was once a covert operative at the CIA, the recognised, much lauded expert in the trade in Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But when he uncovered a political scandal - a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb - he found himself a marked man.

In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan. It was known the Islamic Republic had been covertly striving to acquire nuclear weapons since India's explosion of a device in 1974 and the prospect terrified the west - especially given the instability of a nation that had had three military coups in less than 30 years . Straddling deep ethnic, religious and political fault-lines, it was also a country regularly rocked by inter-communal violence. "Pakistan was the kind of place where technology could slip out of control," Barlow says.

He soon discovered, however, that senior officials in government were taking quite the opposite view: they were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology. In the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance. It provided Washington with a springboard into neighbouring Afghanistan - a route for passing US weapons and cash to the mujahideen, who were battling to oust the Soviet army that had invaded in 1979. Barlow says, "We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn't see eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the bomb.

How could any US administration set such short-term gains against the long-term safety of the world?" Next he discovered that the Pentagon was preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear bomb.

Barlow was relentless in exposing what he saw as US complicity, and in the end he was sacked and smeared as disloyal, mad, a drunk and a philanderer. If he had been listened to, many believe Pakistan might never have got its nuclear bomb; south Asia might not have been pitched into three near-nuclear conflagrations; and the nuclear weapons programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea - which British and American intelligence now acknowledge were all secretly enabled by Pakistan - would never have got off the ground. "None of this need have happened," Robert Gallucci, special adviser on WMD to both Clinton and George W Bush, told us. "The vanquishing of Barlow and the erasing of his case kicked off a chain of events that led to all the nuclear-tinged stand-offs we face today. Pakistan is the number one threat to the world, and if it all goes off - a nuclear bomb in a US or European city- I'm sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan's direction."

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/13/usa.pakistan

Weird how Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of these warmongering traitors turn up to stop the good guys. And gals.

Thank you, Faryn Balyncd. Really appreciate that you give a damn. OT: Has Faryn Balyncd always been your DU moniker?

[leftstreet]

28. K&R

[Octafish]

37. George Washington University's National Security Archives is an excellent resource.

The Atom Bomb and the End of World War II

Nagasaki, before (top) and after (bottom) atomic bombing:



That is what an A-Bomb did to a major city. Today that represents only the detonator for an H-Bomb.

[MagickMuffin]

29. Very good article, however, I'm still reading through it ;=D

Thanks for alerting me to it. Daniel is definitely a true American Hero.

Now back to the article!

[Octafish]

40. ... more ComLogic: Andrei Sakharov

An online resource about a man who built The Bomb, balanced the nuclear terror, and brought down an unjust system.

Andrei Sakharov: Soviet Physics, Nuclear Weapons, and Human Rights

Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) was a Soviet physicist who became, in the words of the Nobel Peace Committee, a spokesman for the conscience of mankind. He was fascinated by fundamental physics and cosmology, but first he spent two decades designing nuclear weapons. He came to be regarded as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, contributing perhaps more than anyone else to the military might of the USSR. But gradually Sakharov became one of the regime's most courageous critics, a defender of human rights and democracy. He could not be silenced, and helped bring down one of history's most powerful dictatorships. This exhibit tells about Sakharov's extraordinary life.

CONTINUED w LINKS:

http://www.aip.org/history/sakharov/

Really appreciate it, MagickMuffin. The more who know, the quicker things will turn for the better.

[LongTomH]

54. They had Sakharov - we had Edward Teller

Quotes from the CommonDreams.org obit on Teller:

The physicist possessed a singular capacity for inspiring both devotion and disdain. Eugene P. Wigner, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was a friend and colleague, called him ``the most imaginative person I have ever met, and this means a great deal when you consider I knew Einstein.'' Nonetheless, another Nobel Prize-winning colleague, Isidor Isaac Rabi, said, ``I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller.... I think he is an enemy of humanity.''

Teller's major contribution to the hydrogen bomb project was to develop an idea from physicist Stanley Ulam, the use of compression by radiation from a nuclear primary to detonate a fusion secondary. All the h-bombs in the world's arsenals are based on the Teller-Ulam model. Teller didn't just do theoretical work on the hydrogen bomb; he advocated strongly for it.

After the detonation of the first h-bomb - the 'Ivy Mike' test in 1952, Teller was a strong advocate of building up the US thermonuclear arsenal. You could justly call him one of the "Fathers of the Cold War," along with "Father of the H-Bomb."

Teller also campaigned against the Partial Test Ban Treaty that banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space or underwater. We don't know how many cases of cancer resulted from the fallout of nuclear atmospheric testing. We do know that, as of March 2009, the US has paid out more than $1.38 billion in compensation for sickness and injuries resulting from nuclear tests.

[Echo In Light]

34. Terrifying doc film on this subject: Original Child Bomb

http://www.originalchildbomb.com/

[Octafish]

47. Kay Bailey Hutchison: ''...so don't even THINK about lobbing a nuclear missile at us.''

Urging the Senate to vote down the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed by Clinton:

Kay Bailey Hutchison: "…(S)o that we will be able to say to the world, "We have a nuclear arsenal, so don't even think about lobbing a nuclear missile at us.”

From the movie’s page, a link to the YouTubes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRvGwVkl8pA

Thank you very much, Echo In Light. I'll be checking the Sundance Channel for "Original Child Bomb."

[burning rain]

38. Times change and generally accepted standards change.

Society evolves and so does morality. As vile warmongers as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were, in some ways they waged war more humanely than leaders who were mainstream in the WW II era: levelling cities and mass targetting of civilians in bombing raids was widely accepted then as a means of trying to break enemy morale. It was called "morale bombing." Anyone who accepts that now is a widely-despised outlier. All the same, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are rightly reviled as warmongers by contemporary standards.

[Octafish]

49. Curtis LeMay's ''Sunday Punch''

Thank you for making that point. People change, thankfully.

From The Cult of the Presidency by Gene Healy, Cato Institute (of all places):

If there's anything to praise about JFK's leadership during the crisis, it's that he resisted efforts to get him to escalate the conflict still further. Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command, and Curtis Lemay (sic), the Air Force chief of staff, both tried to push the Cuban Missile Crisis into a full-scale war with the Soviets. Both men, like much of the military establishment at the time, were enamored with the concept of preventive war, in which the United States would kill off its superpower rivals before they grew too strong. When Lemay had served as head of SAC from 1948 to 1957, he hoped to provoke an incident that would allow him to deliver his "Sunday Punch," 750 nuclear bombs in a few hours, leading to an estimated 60 million Russian dead. Without authorization, in 1954 Lemay ordered B-45 overflights of the Soviet Union, commenting to his aides, "Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started." General Power, Lemay's successor at SAC, and a man that even Lemay considered "a sadist,” chastised a colleague at a 1960 briefing on nuclear strategy, yelling, "Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards....Look: at the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!" The colleague replied, "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman."

At the height of the Missile Crisis, Power allowed the prescheduled test launch of an Atlas ICBM, in an apparent attempt to spook the Soviets into action. Lemay in turn repeatedly challenged Kennedy's courage, urging the president to approve air strikes on the missile installations. That action would likely have led to the nuclear exchange Lemay had long lusted after. As we later learned, during the crisis, the Soviets had 20 operational, nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, as well as nine tactical nuclear weapons that Russian field commanders had been authorized t use in the event of an attack. In his book Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, historian Richard Rhodes writes, "If John Kennedy had followed Lemay's advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide."

That presidents advised by such men had in their hands the means to kill millions should be unsettling to people of normal human sensibilities. That presidents showed restraint while in possession of such power gives us cause for thanks, but it is, at best, an uneasy source of comfort.

SOURCE: http://books.google.com/books?id=PFHD_fp-S80C&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=%E2%80%9CAt+the+end+of+the+war,+if+there+are+two+Americans+and+one+Russian,+we+win!%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=GYfL8oQ8I7&sig=_elPVv37oBT0MC5iqYvXyT73WWY&hl=en&ei=ggV_SvDMHIe4NuGo-PYC&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CAt%20the%20end%20of%20the%20war%2C%20if%20there%20are%20two%20Americans%20and%20one%20Russian%2C%20we%20win!%E2%80%9D&f=false

When it comes to the Sadist Department, LeMay was no slouch, either.

[burning rain]

39. I think statements of regret over these mass casualty bombings would be good.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Dresden for that matter. Particularly in Japan that could have the effect of weakening far-right nationalist sentiment there. As a practical matter, though, it may have to to wait for the last of the WW II veterans to die.

[Octafish]

48. C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s

The right never apologizes.

C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s

By TIM WEINER,
The New York Times
Published: October 9, 1994

In a major covert operation of the cold war, the Central Intelligence Agency spent millions of dollars to support the conservative party that dominated Japan’s politics for a generation.

The C.I.A. gave money to the Liberal Democratic Party and its members in the 1950’s and the 1960’s, to gather intelligence on Japan, make the country a bulwark against Communism in Asia and undermine the Japanese left, said retired intelligence officials and former diplomats. Since then, the C.I.A. has dropped its covert financial aid and focused instead on gathering inside information on Japan’s party politics and positions in trade and treaty talks, retired intelligence officers said.

The Liberal Democrats’ 38 years of one-party governance ended last year when they fell from power after a series of corruption cases -- many involving secret cash contributions. Still the largest party in Japan’s parliament, they formed an awkward coalition in June with their old cold war enemies, the Socialists -- the party that the C.I.A.’s aid aimed in part to undermine.

Though the C.I.A.’s financial role in Japanese politics has long been suspected by historians and journalists, the Liberal Democrats have always denied it existed, and the breadth and depth of the support has never been detailed publicly. Disclosure of the covert aid could open old wounds and harm the Liberal Democrats’ credibility as an independent voice for Japanese interests. The subject of spying between allies has always been sensitive.

The C.I.A. did not respond to an inquiry. In Tokyo, Katsuya Muraguchi, director of the Liberal Democratic Party’s management bureau, said he had never heard of any payments.

“This story reveals the intimate role that Americans at official and private levels played in promoting structured corruption and one-party conservative democracy in post-war Japan, and that’s new,” said John Dower, a leading Japan scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We look at the L.D.P. and say it’s corrupt and it’s unfortunate to have a one-party democracy. But we have played a role in creating that misshapen structure.”

SNIP...

A Secret Operation That Succeeded

The C.I.A.’s help for Japanese conservatives resembled other cold war operations, like secret support for Italy’s Christian Democrats. But it remained secret -- in part, because it succeeded. The Liberal Democrats thwarted their Socialist opponents, maintained their one-party rule, forged close ties with Washington and fought off public opposition to the United States’ maintaining military bases throughout Japan.

CONTINUED...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE2DA113DF93AA35753C1A962958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

To them, it's a sign of weakness.
"Lose face." They can't have that.

[anigbrowl]

41. Unimpressed by this article

I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last 50 years.

Really? You think the # of people in the US who know the difference between an A bomb and a H bomb is less than 1%? Based on...what exactly? I'm sure it's a minority, given the many wacky things Americans are on record as believing, but I have trouble believing the figure is this low.

Second, while I am no booster of nuclear weapons, I think 'asleep at the wheel' is a bit much. None have been deployed as weapons since 1945, and most of the world is signed up to the NNPT and most people (ie a majority) probably realize that an all-out nuclear war would not be a survivable event.



This graph is a bit out of date; the most recent relevant detail would be Obama's pledge with Russia's Medvedev to reduce the # of nukes held by both sides to 1500.

Sure, 1500 nukes would wipe out life as we know it if they were all fired, but obviously the trend is towards fewer and fewer nuclear weapons, fewer tests, and so on.

[Octafish]

51. Sorry. Here's what I got out of the allegory....

“Asleep at the wheel” is exactly what our nation has been and why our nation is in the mess it’s in today. The manufacture, possession, and control of nuclear weapons have led the process of transforming a democracy into a national security state where the needs of the military override the mandates of the Constitution.

In answer to your first question: Yes, I do believe fewer than 1 in 100 Americans understands the basic working of an H-bomb. Most people I've asked were unable to put the mechanics of rainfall into words. I haven't asked too many about H-bombs.

[Dreamer Tatum]

50. Least-likely sentence ever to be uttered

"I sure am glad that was just an ATOMIC bomb that just detonated over there! Why, did you know that a hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb just to detonate? Can you imagine if THAT would have been dropped?"


(point being, who gives a crap?)

[Octafish]

52. Here are 50 facts about The Bomb.

Courtesy of the Brookings Institution:

50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons

Maybe even those who don't give a crap can learn something.

For instance, what exactly have a large percentage of their tax dollars been used for over the last 2/3 of a century?