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The war was effectively over, Japan trying to surrender but Roosevelt spurned overtures. He had other plans, one the firebombing Tokyo before the greater ones under Truman in August. On February 24, 1945, one square mile of the city was destroyed before the major March 6 attack demolishing 16 square miles, killing around 100,000 in the firestorm, injuring many more, and leaving over a million homeless. Five dozen other Japanese cities were also firebombed at a time most of the country's structures were wooden and easily consumed.
Yet early in 1945, Japan sent peace feelers, and two days before the February Yalta Conference, Douglas MacArthur sent Roosevelt a 40-page summary of its terms. They were nearly unconditional. The Japanese would accept an occupation, cease hostilities, surrender its arms, remove all troops from occupied territories, submit to criminal war trials, let its industries be regulated, asking only that their Emperor be retained.
Roosevelt categorically refused. So did Truman months before using atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By December, their combined death tolls topped 200,000, but they rose in succeeding months and years. Radiation poisoning kills or causes grievous illnesses, disfiguration, and birth defects. Decades later, they're still being felt. It was gratuitous slaughter against a prostrate country on the verge of surrender, lies then used to justify it.
The attacks were the first salvo of the Cold War, showing the Soviets our strength. Howard Zinn added other reasons - "tin, rubber, oil, corporate profit (and) imperial arrogance."
New Genocides for Old
Post-WW II, America had no enemies nor was any country a threat. Yet millions of North Koreans and Southeast Asians were gratuitously slaughtered to complete Washington's conquest of Asia. In both cases, US confrontations began hostilities, unprovoked acts of war to install client regimes.
Korean expert Bruce Cumings explained "the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing, to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final states of war. (The) air war leveled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. (There was no escape, and by) 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea has been completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves."
Of the North's 22 major cities, 18 were half or more obliterated, the large industrial ones 75 - 100% destroyed, and villages reduced to "low, wide mounds of violent ashes." This was "limited war." Achieving no more than an armistice, a stalemate, America was on a roll. Southeast Asia was next.
Gabriel Kolko called it a predictable consequence of America's ambition, strengths, weaknesses, and quest for world dominance - one conquest at a time on the way to full control.
Like Korea, bombings were horrendous and indiscriminate, dropping eight million tons from 1965 - 1973, threefold WW II's tonnage, amounting to 300 tons for every Vietnamese man, woman and child.
As in Korea, napalm and other incendiary devices were used, plus terror weapons like anti-personnel cluster bombs spewing thousands of metal pellets, indiscriminately hitting everyone in their path.
From 1961 - 1971, dioxin-containing defoliant Agent Orange was used, mainly in the South, Cambodia and Laos. Millions of gallons were sprayed with devastating consequences because dioxin is one of the most toxic known substances, a potent carcinogenic human immune system suppressant. It accumulates in adipose tissue and the liver, alters living cell genetic structures, causes congenital disorders and birth defects, and contributes to diseases like cancer and type two diabetes.
In 1970, Operation Tailwind used sarin nerve gas in Laos, causing many gratuitous deaths. In 1998, former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Admiral Thomas Moorer, confirmed its use on CNN. Then, under Pentagon pressure, the cable channel retracted the report and fired its reporter and producers for refusing to disavow it.
The war also engulfed Cambodia and Laos killing around 600,000, mostly civilians, and destroying dozens of towns, villages and hamlets - again with secret bombings and terror weapons.
Both in Korea and Southeast Asia, three to four million were killed, vast amounts of destruction inflicted, and incalculable levels of human suffering felt to this day. It was genocide by any definition.
So is America's complicity in Palestine, funding Israel's militarism, belligerence and occupation, causing an estimated 300,000 post-1967 deaths and much more, including 3,600 avoidable under aged five ones annually. In an early 2009 report, UNICEF said:
