On this memorial day for Nagasaki, a Canadian historian looks at what REALLY ended World War II.
Nuclear weapons makers, and the Japanese leadership itself, both attributed Japan's surrender to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was a great story - but it's not true.
Other Japanese cities sustained even more savage attacks from conventional firebombing,
What panicked the Japanese leaders into surrendering was the entry of the Soviet Union into the war and the fact their blitz wiped out the Japanese military in Manchuria and was just one island away (and just 40 miles) from Japan itself on the country's unprotected western flank.
So why did the Japanese and the US lie?
The Japanese to save face.
The US?
Probably PR agents for the uranium industry had a hand in it. The same people who brought you the entirely bogus radiation "cure" for cancer.
