Didn't we at one time have like 10,000 warheads? What could they have been thinking? Am I missing something?

Are Edward Teller (for "making" us go from the A bomb to the H bomb) and Richard Perle (for talking Reagan out of total abolition of nukes at the Iceland summit) the greatest villians of the last half of the last century? And how about Geo. H.W. Bush's B team to reassess Soviet strenth? The idiocy is almost too much to bear.....

There was an established regime of who had access to the petroleum resources in the Middle East. Bush and Cheney were acting to protect their interests. What Bush and Cheney did was to distort the argument to make it look like the Iraq War was serving a higher purpose and that the war was serving America's interest.

In answer to your questions:

why are we fighting an unnecessary war? The generals have a stake in that question. Why did this administration embark on this war when we were not attacked or in danger of being attacked? Where are the generals criticizing the basic decision to abuse the American military to launch an unnecessary war, to launch it carelessly, and to launch it with such disastrous consequences?

Well the numbers may well have been inflated later, by guilty consciences perhaps, but I do think I can confidently say that I would never have existed if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father, just turning 20 at the time, was an infantryman on Peleliu in the South Pacific. His company was to have been part of the invasion force for the home islands of Japan. As it was, he went on to occupy Tokyo, and describes it as rather a nice time after many narrow brushes with death on Peleliu.

He figures that the atomic bomb saved his life and, incidentally, found the Japanese very accommodating, at least where he was. In contrast, Dad's brother, serving in Germany, had to warn a friend not to go off day-hiking in Bavaria, though we had won the war there; the friend ignored his advice and went walking in the woods, and my uncle never saw him again. Dad did say, though, that they found some Japanese soldiers still hiding out on Peleliu in the early 60s, living off of the little land-crabs they caught, still thinking they were fighting the war; they had to call in the soldiers' old captain to coax them out of their caves with a bullhorn, and convince them that the war was over. Our enemies had some stick-to-itiveness in them.

I don't know that we were entirely mistaken to develop the H-Bomb. It does seem that we became paranoid, and I've always thought that we escalated the Soviet Union's paranoia beyond where it should have been. When the UK, France and Israel tried to attack Egypt during the Suez crisis of 1956, we kicked France and the UK out of the region. From there on, we incidentally antagonized the DeGaullists, and more to the point, we ensured that wherever the Soviet Union and China looked, they would see America popping up, as their rival. We should have delegated. We had to be King of the Mountain, and you know what eventually happens to the King of the Mountain. Keep your eye on the currency.

To the editors:

James Carroll is greatly impressed that Reagan went against all his advisors to make peace with Gorbachev. Yet a better president wouldn't have had to, because he wouldn't have surrounded himself with such inept extremists in the first place. (The same applies to JFK.)

Oddly, Carroll doesn't seem to notice the degree to which the Reagan presidency paved the way for the later hawkish policies he deplores. For example, would the current administration be displaying such contempt for the truth, the law and innocent lives if the whole Reagan administration hadn't got away with their Iran-Contra crimes scot-free?

Yours Sincerely,

James J. Matthews

Brian,

Since you seem to think there's little profit in reading Carroll's book, let me share with you declassified information that Carroll shares with his readers in his book that you won't read.

According to the declassified documents, the Joint War Plans Committee -- which was responsible for providing the Joint Chiefs of Staff with all the information on planning for the invasion -- gave an estimate on June 15, 1945, that the invasion would cost 40,000 U.S. dead and 150,000 wounded.

Both George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur signed documents that agreed with the War Plans Committee estimates.

The reason the numbers were so low? Because the troops defending Japan itself were not exactly the cream of the crop and had been decimated by the Air Force. In fact, leaders of the Navy and the AAF thought an invasion wouldn't even be necessary.

So we see that the classified numbers from the Joint War Plans Committee estimate are far below the body count total that history has taught us and that have been repeated and inflated by successive generations.

In fact, Truman, in 1945, cited an estimate of 250,000 dead. In 1955, in his memoir, that estimate had grown to 500,000. Winston Churchill, in 1953, put the number at 1.5 million. Not be outdone, in 1991, President George H.W. Bush said the invasion "spared millions of American lives."

So the number has grown and grown over time.

Now that doesn't make the Truman's decision any easier. And Carroll never makes that suggestion. 200,000 casualties is no small number. But it does give us a far different frame of reference when we consider the events.

And who knows? If I were president and I was told 200,0000 American casualties vs. the Japanese casualty total from two atomic bombs, I might have done what Truman did. And maybe if you read the book, Brian, you'll see that Carroll doesn't paint the issue as one-sided as you seem to see it. He offers us a very complex picture of what was happening. Does he think it was wrong to drop the bombs? Yes, he does. But he also builds an interesting case that what Truman did was the inevitable result of events which preceded his tenure in the White House. He called it Groves's Toboggan, meaning it was already going down the hill when Truman jumped on and there wasn't much that coud have stopped it.

But you won't know that because you won't read the book. So it's hard to take your views seriously on what Carroll has written when you're basing them on a four page article in Salon.

And Farhad did nail you, sorry to say. Churchill did NOT agree with Roosevelt on the unconditional surrended of Japan.

MWR,

Yeah, it is pretty nuanced stuff. And I found your comment at the end of your last letter interesting.

I'm not sure we should have accepted a surrender any earlier than maybe a few months before the A-bombs. After reading Flyboys, I really gained an appreciation for how brutal and how brainwashed Japanese society had become at that point. The Japanese military had to be severely beaten to expunge their insane philosophies, which, by the way, as Bradley points out in Flyboys, had very little if anything to do with Samurai philosophy or codes of honor.

And once again, I recommend the book. A fascinating read. And mind you, I found myself disagreeing with Carroll in places. But that's okay. He makes you think. And that's the most important thing this book does.

Cheers...

-- Rob