A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On Quora, the debate over whether the U.S. should have sought other ways to end the Pacific War instead of dropping atomic bombs on Japan continues. Yesterday, I replied to this question by James Germain: Did the atomic bomb really have to be dropped as U.S history books state? It’s not just “U.S. history books” that state the necessity for the use of atomic weapons against Japan; many Japanese historians also say the same thing. Now that we’ve got the “handwringing over the bomb” part out of the way, let’s consider the alternatives that were available to President Harry S Truman, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur: Before President Truman decided to use atomic weapons to shock the Japanese militarists into accepting the Potsdam Declaration and agreeing to surrender unconditionally (with, perhaps, private guarantees that the Emperor could retain his position as a  ceremonial  head of state), he had several alternatives, non...

(C) 2007 Hyperion Books The Korean War is, as the shopworn cliche describes it all too aptly, America's "forgotten war." Sandwiched between the last undisputable and clearcut victorious conflict - the Second World War - and the tragic quagmire that drove a stake through the nation's heart (Vietnam), Korea is only on the national consciousness due to a few factors: the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, which was set in Korea but deep down was really about Vietnam; the long and eventually successful campaign by  Korean War vets for a monument in Washington, D.C.; and more recently, President Donald Trump's bizarre attempt to take credit for the first tentative attempts toward  detente between the Communist dictatorship that has ruled North Korea since 1945 and the democratic (and U.S.-allied) South.  The three-year-long Korean conflict was, in retrospect, doomed to be forgotten except, sadly, by the brave men and women who served in a U.S.-led United Nations for...