To the Editor:

With the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki upon us, we are asking, “Why, if we had to show the Japanese the power of our new atomic bomb to end the war quickly and with the least suffering, didn’t we drop it over an uninhabited island, or at least a military target, as our own military recommended?”

And why the city of Hiroshima? And why, once that was done (which certainly was sufficient to prove our point), was another bomb dropped on [Nagasaki], a few days later?

The only explanation I have heard that makes sense is one known to millions of people in India, although practically no one in America has even heard about it.

Indians who were fighting for their independence from England had established a nationalist Indian government in Singapore under Japanese protection and, with a substantial Free India Army, advanced across Burma and attacked India in 1944.

These nationalists say British Prime Minister Winston Churchill considered their leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, a greater threat to British domination of India than Ghandi.

Churchill knew that if India won her independence, the whole British colonial empire would follow, and he had been trying to kill Bose since Bose escaped from British imprisonment in 1941.

These Indian nationalists believe British intelligence learned Bose was in Japan seeking further support. They say Bose was in Hiroshima on Aug. 5, 1945, and that Churchill pressured the hesitant new American president, Harry Truman, to drop the bomb on Hiroshima to kill Bose!

But Bose left Hiroshima before the bomb exploded. If you travel around the villages and towns of India even today, you will see posters of Bose, depicting an airplane flying away from a mushroom cloud. And where did Bose go? NAGASAKI!

This is the only explanation I have heard for Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, that makes sense.

The claim that the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was aimed at the Mitsubishi shipyards, but missed, is highly questionable, and still doesn’t explain Hiroshima.

The alternative is a numbed confusion about how we could have unnecessarily killed over two hundred thousand innocent civilians, mainly women and children, and maimed and caused untold suffering to over a hundred thousand more.

Allan M. Keislar

Graduate Student Instructor

Deparment of South and Southeast Asian Studies

University of Southern California, Berkeley