US paper

Besides religion making giving a Mandate of Heaven to the emperor, government programs served to silence any political opposition that may have risen. The Imperial Rule Assistance Association, or the IRAA, was in charge of civilian “domestic repression. [IRAA] monitoring of dissidents increased. The Special Higher Police (Thought Police, Tokko) and the Military Police (Kenpei) carefully monitored religious sects, Koreans, and suspected leftists and pacifists (Home Front).” Through the governments complete dominance of Japanese thought, media, and culture, they had the ability to project any image of the war they liked into the minds of the people through propaganda. They successfully fooled the people of Japan into believing that Japan was winning the war. Speaking of a captured Japanese man, Karl Compton, a scientist charged with interrogating the soldier, said, “This young Japanese told us that all his fellow soldiers believed that Japan was winning the war. To them the losses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were parts of a grand strategy to lure the American forces closer and closer to the homeland, until they could be pounced upon and utterly annihilated (Compton).” This shows that there was no shortage of patriotism among the japanese soldiers, and pure dedication to their country. Even after major territory and personnel losses at the hands of the US, the soldiers still believed victory would be theirs. Furthermore, because of the dedication to their country, Japanese soldiers believed death was prefferable to capture of surrender. One captured officer, when asked about how long the war would last, said, “We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated (Compton),” with ‘defeated’ re...

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...o work on it. If they feared such controversy over the fact that the United States was making a nuclear weapon, then the controversy that arose about the fact that the United States had actually used a nuclear weapon must have been exponentially greater. This is why Truman delivered the speech about the nuclear weapon so soon after it was used. He wanted the public to hear his side of the story first, instead of hearing about it initially from the media and newspapers, which may have tried to dramatize the situation even further. Because of the massive death toll of the atomic bomb, the deliberate attack on defensless civilians, and the fact that the United States government tried to hide the Manhatten Project’s true purpose from its workers, it is easy to conclude that everything about the nuclear bomb was immoral, cruel, and unjust.

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