Sonali Kolhatkar speaks with Gar Alperovitz about if nuclear weapons are truly necessary.

August 6th marks the 75th anniversary of the first time in human history that a nuclear bomb was dropped onto a major city as an act of war. American students of history are told that the decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then 3 days later on Nagasaki, was necessary in order to send a message to Japan and decisively end World War II.

My guest just wrote in an op-ed in the LA Times that, “the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.” 

Read Gar Alperovitz’s op-ed in the LA Times, ‘U.S. leaders knew we didn’t have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway,’ HERE.

Gar Alperovitz, formerly a Fellow of Kings College Cambridge, the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and Lionel Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. He is also currently a Principal of The Democracy Collaborative, an independent research institution in Washington, D.C. 

Rising Up with Sonali is a radio and television show that brings progressive news coverage rooted in gender and racial justice to a wide audience. 

Rising Up With Sonali was built on the foundation of Sonali Kolhatkar's earlier show, Uprising, which became the longest-running drive-time radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles hosted by a woman. 

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