1945 And All That

Today is the anniversary of the glorious victory at Hiroshima, which was achieved thanks to the sterling efforts of the Truman administration in the United States, a leading ally of Britain in the war against Fascism. The Japanese government had been trying to surrender since the destruction of Tokyo in May 1945, so the Truman administration was forced to stall until the bomb was ready. This was called Allied efforts to end the war quickly and save lives. The Japanese were prepared to surrender provided the Emperor was retained; the Truman administration, intensely concerned about the danger to world peace, refused this arrangement until after the bomb was dropped, whereupon the Truman administration accepted Japan's surrender and allowed the Emperor to be retained; this was called unconditional surrender. The glorious victory killed about seventy thousand people on the day the bomb was dropped, rising to about a hundred and forty thousand by the end of the year, rising yet further as the benign effects of radiation later documented by the noted positive thinker Edward Teller began to make themselves felt. Most of the dead and injured were civilians; this was known as destroying Japan's capacity to make war. The glorious victory also served as a warning to the USSR, which since the glorious victory over Germany had cunningly metamorphosed from a brave and tenacious ally into a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy against world peace, democracy and the United Fruit Company. Hence the glorious victory at Hiroshima was a Good Thing, as it led to the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, and the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, which kept the peace in Europe for forty years, despite inexplicably losing its miraculous effectiveness when applied to the Middle East in the twenty-first century.

The immediate effects of the glorious victory at Hiroshima were so devastating that the Japanese government did not at first realise what had happened, and failed to respond with sufficient alacrity to the Truman administration's next demand for unconditional surrender, leading to the glorious victory at Nagasaki on 9 August.