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Originally Posted by Ronin4hire
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Unfortunately John Pilger article is based on a flawed conclussion of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946' .
"Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion."
This startling conclusion was directly traceable to the truncated targeting work performed by a backstabbing bureacrat - Paul Nitze in early summer 1945'.
Unlike with the European work, where the USSBS staff conducted deep and searching interrogations, the abrupt end to the Pacific war caught the survey team with an open-ended theory and no data to prove it. Even so, Nitze and the report authors ended up putting the theory into the Pacific war summary.
Paul Nitze, who directed the USSBS, injected this passage at the last minute in response to a bureaucratic slight with the the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Again and again this same Nitze plan was also rejected by Nitze’s close friend James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, and future Secretary of Defense. Nitze also used back channels in his failed attempt to promote his plan - He’d gone so far as to take the same plan to James F. Byrnes, who would become President Truman’s Secretary of State.
When Nitze pasted 'his theory' into the Pacific war report, it sparked a controversy that has lasted for generations. Thirty years later, Nitze sat for an important oral history in which he allowed, “It seems to me that Mr. Truman made the only possible decision.” By then, though, Nitze was too late. The Pacific war survey, with its hedging about atomic attacks, had already given critics the leverage they needed.