At the end of World War II, the victorious Allied powers divided the Korean peninsula at the 38^th parallel. The southern portion of Korea was occupied by the United States which established a democratic government. The northern portion of Korea was occupied by Soviet troops and they established a communist government. As the Cold War took hold, hostility grew between the north and the south Korean governments.

           In 1949, the communists led by Mao Tse Tung in China toppled the government of Chang Kai Shek and installed a communist government in China. Red China became an uneasy ally to the Soviet Union and the other countries that had been occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II and set up with communist regimes, this included North Korea.

           In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. Two weeks into the war, General MacArthur sent a request to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that they consider whether or not atomic weapons should be made available to the forces fighting on the side of South Korea. At first, the JCS considered giving him 10 to 20 bombs. Then MacArthur started talking about destroying Chinese access to the peninsula and dealing with the Red China and the Soviet Union reaction. The JCS did not want the war to expand and there were not really good targets for atomic bombs in North Korea. They felt that massive firebombing was sufficient to deal with North Korean targets.

           The North Koreans drove the South Koreans and their U.N. allies far to the south of the 38^th parallel. A U.N. counter offensive drove the North Koreans back beyond the 38^th parallel towards the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and Red China.  Red China then entered the war against the Korean and U.N. forces in the south and forced them back behind the 38^th parallel. The Soviet Union was not directly involved but did supply war materials to North Korea and China. The war ended in 1953 with the 38^th parallel as the boundary between the two Koreas.

           Following the war, the Red Chinese government pursued the development of nuclear weapons after the crisis of the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954. Uranium and plutonium production facilities were up and running by 1960. The Soviet Union provided advisors and even promised to provide the Chinese with a prototype bomb. However, ideological disputes soured relations between the two communist giants and they finally parted ways in 1961 over their respective interpretations of Marxist doctrine. All Soviet assistance stopped at that point.  

           The first Red Chinese atomic test took place in 1964 and their first hydrogen bomb test took place in 1967. They have also developed intercontinental ballistic missiles and miniaturized their bombs to create warheads. Their arsenal of a few hundred nuclear bombs is very small compared to nuclear arsenals of the United States and other current nuclear powers.

Chinese nuclear bomb:

          In 1942, during the U.S. Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, physicist Edward Teller promoted the idea of using an atomic blast to trigger a thermonuclear reaction that would result in a much bigger explosion. The Project team decided to focus on atomic bombs and not to explore his idea during the war. After the war, there was resistance from some scientists about technical difficulties with Teller’s ideas and other people were reluctant to create such a devastating super bomb that could only be used against large populations of civilians. Teller and his supporters said that it was inevitable that such bombs would be created and the U.S. would be at a strategic disadvantage if we did not have them.

        In 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb much earlier of the U.S. expected, U.S. President Harry Truman made the decision to proceed with research on the creation of such a thermonuclear or hydrogen fusion bomb. The exact way to trigger such a fusion reaction had not yet been determined when the project began.

        In 1951, a feasibility test for a fusion bomb was conducted in the new U.S. Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshal Islands.  A fission bomb in the shape of a donut was exploded with a small amount of liquid heavy hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) in the middle of the donut. The hydrogen fused and created a burst of fast neutrons which caused the U-238 in the bomb to undergo fission. The fusion reaction generated little energy but did prove the principle.

       In 1952, a full test of a fusion bomb was conducted at the Pacific Proving Ground. The device was not a deployable bomb. It was a twenty feet tall and weighed over sixty four tons. The explosive yield was equivalent to ten million tons of TNT. The island of Elugelab was destroyed in the blast leaving a crater over a mile wide in the ocean floor. In 1952, less than a year later, the Soviet Union exploded a thermonuclear bomb. It was a relatively small device but it was a deliverable bomb and a powerful propaganda tool.

         By 1954, the U.S. had managed to create an actual thermonuclear bomb that could be a deliverable weapon. When it was tested at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the fifteen megaton yield was three times bigger than expected. Poor weather conditions caused a cloud of radioactive fallout to spread over inhabited areas of the Marshall Islands. The affected areas were evacuated and are still uninhabitable. The exposed natives sustained high levels of cancer and birth defects over the following years.

          Hydrogen bombs had been advertised as being cleaner than fission bombs because the fusion reaction did not produce the radioactive materials that were produced by a fission bomb. However, the publicity was misleading because a powerful fission reaction was used to trigger the fusion in a hydrogen bomb and that fission reaction did produce large amounts of radioactive fallout. Hydrogen bombs were so powerful that, in addition to the destruction of civilian areas around military targets, huge clouds of fallout could threaten cities and even other countries that were miles away from the blast. Concerns for the welfare of the whole world began to be expressed if the superpowers with thermonuclear bombs went to war with the new weapons.

First United States Thermonuclear Device Test:

 

              Soviet scientists contributed much to the development of nuclear physics during the first decades of the Twentieth Century. When nuclear fission was discovered in the late 1930s, Soviet scientists understood that theoretically, enormous amounts of energy could be released from the fission of uranium.  Work on fission research in the Soviet Union began in 1940. Stalin started a nuclear weapons program after getting a letter from a Russia physicist working on fission warning him that the U.S and its allies were working on nuclear weapons but he did not assign many resources because of the demands of the war with Germany.

           Although the Soviet Union was our ally in the fight against the Axis powers in World War II, the U. S. government did not trust Stalin. The British were informed about our Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons during the war but we did not inform the Soviet Union. Our mistrust of the Soviet Union was justified in as much as they had penetrated our Manhattan Project with spies. Stalin was aware of our work on an atomic bomb and was not particularly surprised or interested when Truman mentioned a powerful new weapon at the Potsdam Conference in late July of 1945. The Soviet spies were not actually trained agents but were rather private citizens who, for their own reasons, leaked information on our nuclear weapons research to the Soviets.

            After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II in the Pacific, the United States released a report on the Manhattan project. There was an intense international debate over nuclear weapons with the United States working to keep a monopoly. The Soviet Union lobbied for general bans on the use of nuclear weapons but were busy working on the creation of their own nuclear weapons. They used the Manhattan Project report as a guide to developing the industrial facilities necessary to an atomic bomb project. Enormous resources were expended and whole secret cities were created.

           The scientific director of the Soviet program was nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov. The administrative head of the Soviet effort was Lavrenty Beria, previous head of the Soviet public and secret police. Paranoid by nature, he did not trust his scientists or the information sent from the U.S. nuclear program. He assigned seams of scientists to work in different laboratories on duplicate projects. Their findings were compared and cross checked against the intelligence gained from the spies in the United States. The information from the United States nuclear research allowed the Soviet Union to advance more quickly than the U.S. had in the development of an atomic bomb. in August of 1949, the Soviet Union detonated a Fat Man style implosion plutonium bomb in Kazakhstan. The explosion of a Soviet bomb came much earlier than the U.S. expected.

            With the United States monopoly on nuclear weapons ended, the Cold War nuclear arms race had begun.

The first Soviet atomic bomb test:

           In 1945, The United States was pouring resources into the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb. Part of the reason that the Manhattan Project was started in the first place was the knowledge that Germany was working on their own atomic bomb project. Werner Heisenberg was heading a team  to develop a nuclear weapon for Germany but the German government failed to invest enough resources for the project to make much progress. In March of 1945, Kurt Diebner was assigned the task of making a prototype German atomic bomb in Ohrdruf, Thuringia. Research was carried out at an experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch.  

            Following Germany’s surrender in May of 1945, Project Alsos was initiated by the United States. A team of scientists followed the Allied troops into Germany to investigate the German nuclear weapons program and prevent the Russian army coming in from the east from collecting any information, equipment or personnel that might help them create their own nuclear weapons program. Project Alsos reported that although the Germans did have a nuclear weapons program, they were not even close to creating an atomic bomb by the time the war ended.

            The horrendous damage done by the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima shocked the world. The world had entered a dangerous new age of nuclear weapons of tremendous destructive power. A intense international debate raged over the question of who should control nuclear weapons. Many of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project lobbied international control of such weapons. They suggested that either an international agency be formed for the purpose of controlling nuclear weapons or that the information on how to build such weapons be distributed to all the major powers. It was not surprising that the United States, the only world power which had possession of nuclear weapons, was not enthusiastic about giving away such a strategic advantage over all other nations. The deep distrust that the U.S. had for the Soviet Union following the war encouraged the U.S. to work to maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons.

           The idea of using a fission bomb to ignite a much more powerful fusion bomb had been proposed in 1942 by Edward Teller but rejected by the Manhattan project in favor of fission bombs. While Teller lobbied for the fusion bomb and worked on the design with a few others, worked continued on refining the design of fission based nuclear weapons. The U.S. scientists and engineers working on the fission bombs were concerned about the feasibility of such weapons and were also reluctant to create a bomb that was thousands of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan.  From a strategic perspective, it was felt that it would be more useful to have a lot of powerful nuclear bombs than to have relatively few super powerful bombs.

          The situation suddenly changed when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in August of 1945. The United States was no longer the only nation with a nuclear weapon and the nuclear arms race had begun.

German experimental reactor at Haigerloch:

           By 1945, the Japanese had been losing the war in the Pacific for two years. They had been driven off the Philippines and other islands that they had occupied.  With the defeat of Germany in the European theater, the Russians deployed major portions of their armies to the Russian Far East. The Japanese merchant fleet which was critical for supplying war materials and fuel to the resource poor Japanese home islands had been destroyed. With their major factories destroyed by Allied bombing raids and their remaining battle fleet low on fuel, their situation was desperate. The Japanese tried to negotiate with the American government for a resolution to the war but found the American demands unacceptable. The Japanese prepared for a suicidal defense of the Japanese home islands against the coming American invasion.          

            In July of 1945, the United States, Britain and Russia convened in Potsdam in occupied Germany to discuss the punishment of Germany and other post war issues. During the conference, Truman was notified about the successful Trinity test of a plutonium bomb during the conference. He hinted to the Russians that the United States had a powerful new weapon but provided no details. Unknown to Truman, the Russians had penetrated the security surrounding the Manhattan project but Stalin was not impressed with what he had been told about nuclear weapons.

            On July 26, 1945 the United States, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan to end World War II. The Declaration called for the removal of the Japanese government and military command, the occupation of Japan, lost of all territories conquered by Japan, total disarmament and prosecution of war criminal. The Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War and the Emperor refused the demand and issued their own terms for surrender including allowing the existing Japanese government to remain in control of the Japanese homeland, carry out the disarmament, and prosecute the war criminals. They were also seeking confirmation of Russia’s neutrality according to a treaty they had signed.

            On August 9, 1945, the United States became the first nation on earth to use an atomic bomb on an enemy by dropping a uranium gun-type bomb called Little Boy on Hiroshima, Japan. The Russians declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, and invaded the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo on the Asian mainland. A plutonium bomb named Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. The devastation caused by the nuclear two bombs was terrible with casualties in the tens of thousands.

           In light of these new developments in the Pacific War, the Emperor convened the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War. A captured U.S. B-29 pilot had lied to his interrogators and told them that the U.S. had one hundred atomic bombs and would start dropping them on Tokyo and Kyoto in the next few days. The Emperor told the members of his war council that they should accept the Allies terms for unconditional surrender. On August 12, the Japanese sent a telegram to the U.S. government accepting all of the Potsdam Declaration except for demanding that the Emperor retain his power and status. The Allies responded that their occupational force would be the ultimate authority in Japan after the war. The Japanese argued about how to respond and the Allies waited until August 14 and then staged the biggest bombing raid of the war with hundreds of B-29 bombers raining destruction down on Japan. In the meantime, a group within the Japanese military attempted to stage a coup to seize control of the government to prevent surrender. On August 15, a recorded speech from the Emperor was broadcast to the Japanese people telling them that Japan was surrendering.

Japanese foreign minister signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender for World War II:

           After the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, the Japanese still would not surrender according to the Potsdam Declaration. Kokura had been selected as the primary target with Nagasaki as a backup target for the plutonium based Fat Man bomb. Nagasaki was a major Japanese port and was very important to the Japanese war effort due to the production of ammunition, ships, military equipment and other war supplies. Nagasaki was primarily constructed of wooden buildings and, due to a lack of decent building codes, allowed buildings to be crowded together. Some of the inhabitants of Nagasaki had been evacuated before August 1945 because a few conventional bombs had been dropped on the city.

          The bombing schedule was moved up from August 11, 1945, to August 9, 1945, because of a bad weather. On the morning of August 9, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber Bockscar piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney took off carrying the Fat Man bomb. After the Enola Gay and another B-29 flew over Kokura and reported cloud cover that would make bombing difficult, Nagasaki was chosen as the target for Fat Man and the Bockscar and its two escorts flew on to Nagasaki. If Nagasaki was also cloudy, Bockscar was going to divert to Okinawa and drop the bomb in the ocean to dispose of it.

          When two B-29 Superfortresses were sighted in Nagasaki around 11 AM, no alarm was given because it was assumed that they represented a reconnaissance mission and no bombing threat. There were clouds but a break in the cloud cover allowed the bombardier to sight the target. The Fat Man bomb with about fourteen pounds of plutonium was dropped and exploded about fifteen hundred feet above the industrial district of Nagasaki. The bomb was about two miles off target. The explosion was equivalent to twenty one tons of TNT. Most of the destruction was confined to Urakami valley. Hills inside the city protected some of the other areas. Immediate casualties were around sixty thousand and ultimately over eighty thousand died by the end of 1945. The radius of total destruction was about one mile with fires and damage spreading out another mile.

          Plans were made to manufacture and drop more atomic bombs on Japan if they did not surrender. There was a debate about whether each bomb should be dropped as soon as it was ready or whether they should be stocked piled and then dropped together in a short period. Several more Fat Man bomb assemblies were readied and plutonium cores were to be shipped to Tinian in the Marianas on August 12, 1945, three days after the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki.

          On August 9, 1945, the Japanese war council met and received the instruction from the Emperor to contacted the Allies and accept their terms for surrender. Part of the reason for the quick capitulation was the fact that the Russians had just declared war on Japan and had begun mobilizing for an invasion. One condition the Emperor requested was that his status as Supreme ruler not be challenged and this was apparently accepted by the allies. The Japanese officially surrendered to the Allies on August 10, 1945.  

Nagasaki after bombing from nuclearfiles.org:

       

              After the rejection of the demand for unconditional surrender by the Japanse government in July of 1945, the United States President, Harry S. Truman, decided to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. During World War II, Hiroshima on the Japanse island of Honshu was home to several military bases and industrial facilities that supplied the Japanese war effort. There were headquarters of commanders of the Japanese home island defense force, assembly areas for troops, communication centers and other military targets. Five antiaircraft installations protected the city. There were some concreted buildings in the middle of the city but most of the homes, municipal buildings, barracks and factories were constructed of wood. The population of Hiroshima was estimated to be around three hundred and fifty thousand.

          On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay B-29 commanded by Paul Tibbets took off from an airbase on Tinian, one of the islands in the Northern Marians. The Enola Gay rendezvoused with two other B-29 bombers over Iwo Jima and they headed Japan. After hours of flight, the squadron arrived in over Japan and Captain William Parsons armed the uranium gun-type bomb known as Little Boy.  The Japanese radar picked up the small fleet of American planes but did not activate air defenses for just a few planes. One of the accompanying planes flew over Hiroshima, reporting that the weather was clear and then turning out to sea.

          Tibbets in the Enola Gay began his bombing run at 8 AM. The bomb was dropped at 8:15 from a height of about thirty thousand feet. After falling for about forty seconds, the bomb exploded at a height of about two thousand feet above the ground. The Enola Gay managed to travel about ten miles before the shock wave hit. The bomb missed that target by eight hundred feet and detonated over a clinic with a force of about sixteen tons of TNT with less than two percent of the uranium undergoing nuclear fission. The radius of total destruction was about 1 mile with fires spread over a radius of about four miles. The Japanese estimated that about seventy percent of the buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed. Around seventy thousand people or about twenty percent of the population were killed in the blast and firestorm with another twenty percent being injured. It is estimated that eventually about half the population of the city died from the immediate effects of the bomb or from radiation related illnesses in the years following the attack.

          When communications with Hiroshima suddenly failed, the Japanese military were confused but they knew that no major air raid had taken place. They dispatched a plane to fly over Hiroshima to assess the situation. They saw a huge cloud of smoke of the devastated ruins of Hiroshima and were astonished by the destruction.   

          After the detonation of the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare, President Truman broadcast an announcement about the terrible new weapon that the United States possessed. He warned the Japanese that if they did not surrender immediately, they could expect “a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never  been seen on this earth.”

        The Japanese government was still not ready to accept unconditional surrender. They were holding out for the following conditions:

• The preservation of the existing government
• Disarmament and demobilization to be carried out by the existing Japanese military
• No occupation of the Japanese islands
• Punishment for war crimes to be carried out by the Japanese government.

 

Hiroshima after the bombing from japanfocus.org:

          After the Japanese rejected the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender in the spring on 1945, Harry Truman, the U.S. President authorized the use of atomic weapons in Japan. The Manhattan project had produced two nuclear weapons by that time, one based on uranium known as Little Boy and the other based on plutonium named Fat Man.

           The goal for dropping an atomic bomb on a Japanese city was to force surrender according to the Potsdam Declaration. The psychological impact on the Japanese was especially important. In addition, the United States wanted other nations to recognize the importance of this new weapon when news of the devastation was made public.

          The choice of targets had three constraints.

• The target had to be more than three miles in diameter and had to be an important target in a large urban area.
• The detonation of the bomb would result in significant damage to the target
• The target was unlikely to be attacked by August of 1945.

           Four potential targets were initially selected that met the required criteria including Kokura, Hiroshima, Niigata and Kyoto. Kyoto was dropped from the list of targets because of it importance to Japanese religion. Nagasaki was added to the list as a potential target to replace Kyoto. Leaflets had previously been dropped on Japanese cities warning of possible bombing raids.

           Hiroshima was ultimately selected as a target for Little Boy. It was an important army depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. Adjacent hills were expected to create a focusing effect to increase the damage of the blast. Nearby rivers made it a poor target for firebombing. Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and exploded.

           Kokura was the first selection from the primary list as the target for the Fat Man bomb.  It was felt that the distance to Niigata was too great for a successful mission. Nagasaki had already been bombed a number of times and it was spread out over hills and valleys which could dissipate the force of a big blast. The bomber carrying the Fat Man bomb took off on August 9, 1945 with the intention of dropping the bomb on the city of Kokura. However, the day was cloudy and after three passes over the city without being able to sight the target, the mission to bomb Kokura was aborted. This was fortunate for a few thousand American and Dutch prisoners of war who were being held at Kokura.

            Nagasaki was chosen as a target only after the attack on Kokura was aborted. The bomber, low on fuel, turned south and headed for Nagasaki. The weather was clear and the Fat Man bomb was dropped and exploded. With the explosion of these two nuclear bombs in Japanese cities, the United States became the first and, to date, only country on earth to use nuclear weapons against another country.

              The Manhattan Project to create nuclear bomb during the early 1940s was successful. Two bombs were created, one based on the fission of uranium-235 called “Little Boy” and a second based on the fission of plutonium-239 called “Fat Man”. Upon completion of the bombs in the summer of 1945, the U.S. President, Harry Truman was faced with making the decision of whether such terribly destructive weapons should be deployed in World War II which had been raging for years in Europe and Asia. The war in Europe ended in May of 1945 but the war with Japan in the Pacific continued.

             The U.S. had driven the Japanese out of Okinawa and Iwo Jima but they still had an army of two million in their home islands. The U.S. had demanded an unconditional surrender from the Japanese government threatening “total destruction” if the Japanese refused. The Japanese did refuse but there were hints that they would consider a conditional surrender.

            Truman said that his decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan was a purely military decision. It was estimated that if the United States staged an amphibious landing on the coasts of Japan over a million U.S. soldiers would be killed. Truman was dedicated to ending the war as quickly as possible to save both American and Japanese lives. Some of his advisors suggested a demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb to persuade the Japanese military of the futility of continuing the conflict. Truman decided against it because there was no guarantee that a successful test would end the war and an unsuccessful test might embolden the Japanese to keep fighting.

           Some critics claimed that Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan were motivated by racism and that he would never have dropped such bombs on Europeans. Other critics suggested that Truman wanted to end the war quickly so that the Russians would not have an opportunity to invade the heavily industrialized northern Japanese islands. Considering what happened in Eastern Europe after the Russians beat back the Germans, this may have been a realistic fear. Other say that Truman wanted to intimidate the Russians and that the explosions of the atomic bombs were really the opening shots in the Cold War.

          In August 6 of 1945, Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9. On August  14, the Supreme War Council of Japan surrendered unconditionally. Although great destruction had been wrought by firebombing raids over Tokyo, the sheer fury of the atomic explosions and the fact that all that destructive potential was delivered in a pair of relatively small bombs.

         Truman succeeded in ending the war in Asia with the use of the atomic bombs. He also hurled the human race into the nuclear arms race and the threat of the annihilation of human civilization that continues to this day.

President Harry S. Truman:

             On July 26, the United States, Britain and China produced the Potsdam Declaration which contained the terms that they demanded for the surrender of Japan. The Declaration required that Japan surrender immediately and without conditions. The surrender terms included:

• the elimination “for all time [of] the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest”

 

• the occupation of “points in Japanese territory to be designated by the Allies”

 

• “Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.” As had been announced in the Cairo Declaration in 1943.

 

• “The Japanese military forces shall be completely disarmed”

 

• “stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners”

The Declaration also included some clauses intended to reassure the Japanese people:

• “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, … The Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.”

 

• “Japan shall be permitted to maintain such industries as will sustain her economy and permit the exaction of just reparations in kind, but not those which would enable her to rearm for war. To this end, access to, as distinguished from control of, raw materials shall be permitted. Eventual Japanese participation in world trade relations shall be permitted.”

 

• “The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established, in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people, a peacefully inclined and responsible government.”

 

At the end of the Declaration, came the demand for unconditional surrender and the penalty for refusal.

• “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

One thing that was left out of the Declaration was the status and ultimate of the Emperor who the Japanese people considered to be divine. The question of whether he would be declared a war criminal and prosecuted or would be left free to become part of the future government was left open.

The United States made radio broadcasts to the Japanese home islands and dropped leaflets over population centers in Japan. Despite laws against listening to foreign radio broadcasts or reading dropped leaflets, most of the Japanese people became aware of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.

The Japanese Supreme War Council rejected the Potsdam Declaration and a government spokesman met with the Japanese press to tell the Japanese people that the Declaration had been rejected and that Japan would fight on.

Potsdam Conference: