![\"Bombing\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/06\/bombing.jpeg?w=620\")
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In May, President Barack Obama\u2019s historic visit to Hiroshima reignited discussions of whether the United States actually needed<\/a> to drop atomic bombs to force Japan to surrender at the end of World War II. What these debates didn\u2019t touch on was that the U.S. military prepared to use other horrifying tactics, including starvation induced by chemical weapons.<\/p>\n In April 1944, the U.S. Army started cooking up special chemical compounds to destroy or otherwise damage crops. A year later, the ground combat branch was hard at work getting the weapons ready for a possible campaign on the Japanese home islands.<\/p>\n \u201cThe possible use of\u00a0\u2026 a chemical warfare agent, to destroy essential crops on the Japanese mainland and on the by-passed occupied islands, was given close consideration during the last year of World War II,\u201d members of the National Defense Research Committee explained in a 1946 report<\/a>.<\/p>\n When the war ended, \u201cthe development of methods of dispersing the agents was proceeding under high priority.\u201d<\/p>\n Tokyo had given up the fight after Washington destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. But had the conflict continued, the U.S. military might have decided to devastate Japanese farmlands in a massive chemical assault.<\/p>\n