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America orginally said it wanted to bomb Hiroshima because it would help us to win the war and save lives. But was it also a race and revenge issue? America wanted to bring terrorrize the millions of Japanese people by making an example with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harry Truman was the president during the bombing, and he did not like the Japanese and had a prejudice towards them. Benson and Boas write of how Truman wrote a letter to his fiance, confessing that he "Hates Chinese and Japs....It is race prejudice I guess." Truman also thought the destruction was the greatest thing in history. This also could have been one of the deciding factors as to why he attacked Hiroshima. Attacking with an atomic bomb because of a race is people is not an ethical reason to destroy an entire city and kill so many innocent people.

__Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima __

After Pearl Harbor happened in 1942, Japanese citizens were put into internment camps, similar to the concentration camps in Germany. Over 120,000 were forced into these camps (Wikipedia). Most of these camps were in the western United States. Here were Japenese people, many of them American citizens, who were put into camps because of their backgrounds and the "idea" that they were involved in Pearl Harbor. It seems as if America had an animosity towards Japan. They could have wanted to have their revenge by bombing two of of their biggest cities. But not everyone in America had a prejudice towards the Japanese. Many were shocked that we held people in internment camps and we dropped a nuclear weapon on not just soldiers, but unknowing people during Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But clearly race seemed to be an issue during this time period.


 * Steve Benson and Phil Boas. "Were We Wrong to Drop the Bomb?." Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ) Aug. 4 2002: V1-V3. SIRS Researcher. Web. 13 January 2010. **