US A-bombing of Hiroshima act of wartime terrorism: Historian

Press TV has interviewed Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review from California, to discuss the 70th anniversary of the deadly atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States.

What follows is a rough transcript of the interview.

Press TV: Do you think there is any guilt on the part of the US that this even occurred?

Weber: No. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a powerful conclusion to a war that still regarded the United States as a so-called good war, as a morally unambiguous conflict in which the United States emerged clearly the triumphant victorious and so there is really no a soul searching about in the United States about this even though the US bombing of Hiroshima 70 years ago was a criminal, a militarily unnecessary and a shameful act of wartime terrorism.

Press TV: It certainly reeks of a lot of hypocrisy, doesn’t it? In today’s world, Barack Obama speaks about a world free of nuclear weapons and apparently he is putting effort force towards that end but we have not seen any results of that. Certainly a lot of hypocrisy here, isn’t there?

Weber: That’s very true. In fact, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the United States is a signatory on requires that the United States itself and the other signatory powers all to make good faith efforts to dismantle their own nuclear weapons arsenals and the Unites States has never seriously undertaken to do that. So that, as you point out or as you mention, the hypocrisy about nuclear weapons especially in the time we are living in right now in which so many fingers are being pointed at Iran in the United Sates is all the more a brazen hypocrisy.

Press TV: And finally I want to bring up this point which I found interesting in an article in an interview with a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima. This was an Australian media which pretty much pointed out that this was Japan’s fault that this occurred and the Japanese survivor essentially agreed with that. How important is that outline of this narrative that Japan was to blame for the US bombing it?

Weber: The narrative is now changing in the sense that there is a wide consensus among historians that the bombing of Hiroshima-Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary because Japan was doing everything it could to try to come to the end of the war, to arrange a peace with the United States on the sole condition that it be allowed to hold on to the emperor. But the United States insisted on something called unconditional surrender which itself is a very morally well contemptible thing I think. But the consensus is changing and public opinion polls show even in the United States, especially among younger people; there is a change in view about the rightness of the devastating attack on Hiroshima-Nagasaki with atomic weapons.   

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