this sunday, august 9 marks the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the second atomic bomb on nagasaki. we will be back on washington journal with more discussion author,hard frank, an and a member of american americanies -- university. that will do it for us this morning here on washington journal. thank you so much for joining us. we will be back tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. eastern. have a great day. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪

hoping to bring you live coverage of acting homeland security secretary wolf right now. there is a technical issue with our signal that we are trying to resolve. this is live coverage on c-span. let's hear from daniel on the line for world war ii family members. caller: yes. forather did volunteer world war ii and fought in europe. i just want to share that the nuclear bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki were horrible war crimes. wars are to be fought with military. any attack of civilians is a war crime. the development of nuclear weapons has given us a massive that'sof nuclear waste

leaking all over the place. we have accidents like crazy if you want to listen to john oliver's show, the comedian. he will have you scared to walk out the door from all the accidents we had. paying for nuclear weapons is against the law. we should not be paying our taxes to the federal government as long as it has nuclear weapons. we are financing terrorism. nuclear weapons are a crime against humanity. host: margaret is next in leavenworth. caller: that was a very insightful comment. you know, we have to think about when we create something. when rumsfeld was all disappointed that he couldn't drop his 20,000 pound bomb because the war ended too early in iraq, that was disgusting. make something and

you put years into it and then you've got to use it because you made it. necessary and we've got so much things we are not taking care of and beirut just blew up. do you think all our stockpiles of nuclear weapons are safe? presidentat, one dumb could do something really crazy. it's terrible. ok, thank you. video wee of the showed you, the man circling the nuclear shadows of the people who were vaporized instantly by the atomic explosion in hiroshima. darnell is in philadelphia. good morning. caller: good morning. i'm 64 and i live under the glory of america's world or to victory. but i would argue that the a-bomb was a pandora's box. was helds a child, it

as the height of intelligence that america could create the atom bomb and i believed that, too. but i believe that it's opened a knowledge. even the parallel of the knowledge we have of the internet which ultimately i don't believe that mankind can handle. i don't believe mankind has the wisdom to handle the atomic knowledge. because sooner or later, an idiot is going to make one. it's no longer a secret how to make an atom bomb. when i was a child, that was held to be the supreme seek it. is getting the uranium. sooner or later some not is going to get the uranium. host: a piece that's available at reuters, in a flash, a changed world. i wanted to show you the different bombs. a look inside the two different bombs that were created and one

dropped on hiroshima, the other dropped on nagasaki. august 6, 19boy 45. it's a uranium bomb. they show the detonator and they .ive a scale known as a gun-type fission device, it fires a mess of uranium into another to create a super fickle mass. this is the one that was dropped on nagasaki, fat man. it is a plutonium bomb. fission toapid produce an explosion. getting your thoughts on the 75th anniversary of hiroshima. arlington columbus, ohio. 1938 so iwas born in lived through it. think what trump --

host: truman? in 1945what truman did was absolutely correct. the germans were working on nuclear fission in the late 30's. so was the russians. .o somebody was going to get it i'm not at all put aside that he dropped the bomb. i'm glad we got it before anybody else. so that's my comment. host: in idaho, darrell. caller: good morning. the thing that's bad news with the entire war with the japanese is all the nations, the americans would surrender. russians, they would surrender by the thousands. the germans when they got surrounded, they surrendered by the thousands.

the japanese would not surrender. every one of the wars we confronted those people with, you had to go to the last man and sometimes they had as many as 10 or 15 people would surrender out of the thousands. it was a case where i think truman had to look at the facts. they were preparing to even have the women take on even if they were pointed sticks. we were going to be faced with a situation where you're fighting a nation that as far as war goes, you can't find a braver nation than the japanese. they even drove their planes into our ships in okinawa. they were the very first cruise missiles. we are in a war right now where on nagasakidropped are firecrackers compared to what we have now. firecrackers -- there is enough firepower that competes with all of world war

ii. we are in a situation where the world is really going into a position where one of these days it's going to be bad news and i don't know if i'm going to be alive when it happens, but i really think the scriptures predict what's called a great tribulation and you can be rest assured, we are all going to go -- hillary clinton wrote the book what happened. there you go. to send us awant text, 202-748-8003. in portland, why was it very to drop two bombs on populated areas. would it not have been sufficient to show we have the capability by dropping the bombs on relatively on populated areas. a question for ian toll. jodey sends us this. my parents took a selfie at the center of impact as they called it back then, not ground zero

when america occupied japan. connecticut,from criminal, genocidal. these were civilians. the u.s. military could have dropped the bomb in the ocean. this was payback, vengeance and brutality of epic portions. shame is too weak a word. had it been used for a free power source and developed into a side he of forward thinking and technologically advanced humans instead of the destroyers. alan on, we hear from the line for world war ii vets and their families. the 72-year-old son of a world war ii veteran in the pacific. and i have a different take on this then specifically the dropping the atom bomb. the end of world war ii, the end of the second war of empires,

because it was a war of empires just as the first world war was a war of empires, ended in an unusual way. and most people would not have insight to how the war was ended. but of course it was the surrender on the missouri. in southeast asia which had been coprosperityhe japanese empire, coprosperity mainly for japan. the japanese empire. we had the japanese empire, the nazi empire in europe, the british empire and the french empire all involved. shortly after war the surrender on the missouri actually was most represented i

what happened in southeast asia, notably what we now call vietnam. british empire major general, douglas gracie, was responsible for securing the surrender of the japanese troop that had occupied through the japanese empire southeast asia. that was done in a strange way. the french empire which controlled southeast asia was not in a position to have their because francere was the weakest of the powers, weakest of the empires. it turned out that what was done was douglas gracie, the british empire's major general, orchestrated from the british empire the surrender in vietnam. done only within

two weeks of the surrender on the missouri. host: was that two weeks after the september 15? caller: yes. in southeast asia. and the orders were, and douglas gracie the british empire's general was the senior person in southeast asia. he orchestrated surrendering the japanese troops surrendered to him. after theiately japanese troops surrendered to him, the british empire with coordination with the french empire event live ins progress. 277 separate injuries print those injuries include