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Hiroshima

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Hiroshima: The Bombing that Blasted Away the Truth
For the United States, World War II was a very costly war that seemed as if it would not end. For the United States to end their assault on Japan during World War II, a nuclear bomb was dropped in Japan to force them to surrender. On August 6th, 1945, the U.S. military dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima killing over 150,000 people and (along with the later bombing of Nagasaki) effectively caused the Japanese to surrender. This tactic is highly polarized in the international community; on one side, it is considered to be justified and the only action for the United States to take, and on the other side, it is considered to be a barbaric act of terrorism perpetrated by the U.S. military. In the essay, Hiroshima by John Berger, the author correctly argues that the bombings were terroristic acts that are fundamentally evil; however, he is incorrect that they are unjustifiable.
To diagnose whether the bombings were acts of terrorism, one must be able to understand the definition and criteria of one such act. A commonly accepted definition of terrorism is an act that includes the premeditated use of violence by an organized group against non-combatants to achieve political ends. Berger’s argument includes all the criteria in that definition so the bombing must be terrorist acts.
Berger begins his argument by describing all the violence caused by the bombs. Throughout the essay, he quotes passages from Unforgettable Fire, a book containing drawings and descriptions from the survivors of Hiroshima, detailing their accounts, showing the death and destruction caused by the bomb; he calls them “images of hell” (317). The descriptions outline scenes of people who were “burned and swollen all over from the effects of the A-bomb,” whose “burned skin slipped off” to the touch, and dead children lying on

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