The frightening reality surrounding the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan remains the fact that US leaders widely regarded its' use as a forgone conclusion. They made the decision in increments over the course of years as scientific development merged with the bloody-minded myopic vision of a long and costly war. Were there alternatives to its' use? Maybe, but none that rose to a significantly feasible level as far as the policymakers were concerned. Was it a immoral? Most certainly, but what is the difference between the atomic bombing of Hiroshima sixty-four years ago today and the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945? Both killed and maimed in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, both left many more homeless and destitute. Is there really a moral difference between the two? And yet, we made the decision to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians as an acceptable outcome in the war effort long before August 6th, 1945.
Bureaucratic Momentum
Despite the fact that Albert Einstein signed and sent a letter to FDR in August of 1939; a letter in fact drafted by the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, stating that Germans might be working on a nuclear fission based bomb, the US did not begin their attempt to build such a weapon until late Spring of 1941. From the outset, the project was Anglo-American, as British scientists supplied some early breakthroughs--being already at war they possessed the higher motivation. Its' eventual use against Germany provided the assumption that drove development. In the early stages, however, while the physics supported the possibility of such a weapon, none of the scientists could be sure that what they developed would be actually deliverable. Some speculated its size and weight might require a barge or ship for delivery--making it a suicide weapon. Others worried for years that we lagged behind the Germans and that they would get there first.
The US constructed an entire lab complex in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Four years and $2 Billion later the weapon neared completion and so did the war in Europe. Since many of the scientists escaped fascist Europe, with the threat of fascism removed, they began to question the efficacy of the bomb. Leaders in Washington DC, in the War Department and in FDR's and later Truman's White House held no such reservations. The US spent a fortune on this weapon, and the few who actually knew of the program went to great efforts during the war to keep it largely secret. This proved difficult as Congress funded it--they needed to see where such an exorbitant amount of money went, and over the years it required a great deal of effort to put them off. Had they known of the weapon, however, they most certainly would have supported its' use if only to save a handful of their constituents' sons let alone the 35 to 65 thousand estimated losses in the initial invasion of Japan.
The Allied Bombing Campaign
During the war, the US and Britain led a brutal bombing campaign against Germany which killed civilians in the hundreds of thousands; 25,000 in Dresden alone in one night. Wholesale civilian death proved the necessary by-product to defeating the German war machine. Similarly, the US bombed Japan with B-29s from China and late in 1944 when the US captured the Mariana Islands, raids began from there. Before August 6th, 1945 the death tolls for Japan totaled well into the hundreds of thousands; some put the figure as high as 400,000 without the atomic bombs. Clearly for the US Army Air Corps and the civilian leadership back in Washington DC, such practices and their subsequent results long ago gained acceptability. It remains important to note, however, that large scale public awareness of such slaughter did not really exist. In addition, even in the European theater the US Army and government willfully suppressed the Dresden story as they felt it might create too much sympathy for Germany if it became widely known. This continued well into the post-war world with Dresden. Deaths caused by the conventional air raids of Japan received similar treatment. For this reason, the use of the atomic bomb stood out in public consciousness as the complete destruction of a city and its inhabitants appeared for all to see.In the early months after the end of the war, a significant number of people questioned the necessity of the atomic bomb. This perspective caught fire in many intellectual circles due to the publication of the book Hiroshima by John Hersey in 1946. The book described in graphic detail the death and suffering after the blast. In answer to this, some of the policymakers involved began to give reasons for its use, and the rational for their decision.
The Post-War Writing of History
Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War presided over the entire Manhattan Project. In the Fall of 1946, James Conant, President of Harvard, who served as a science adviser to the government during the war asked Stimson to write an article explaining the Truman decision in a way to satisfy the critics. The result appeared in the February 1947 issue of Harpers'. In this article, Stimson wrote of an Interim Committee of policymakers and scientists including himself, James Conant and J. Robert Oppenheimer. According to Stimson, the committee decided whether to use the bomb or not and how to use the bomb. He spoke of discussion that ranged over topics and considered alternatives. He even mentioned the Franck Report which outlined the position of many scientists from the Chicago Lab and their objections to the bomb's use. He also wrote in the Harper's piece of the upcoming invasion of Japan, "I was informed that such operations might be expected to cost over a million casualties, to American forces alone." Thus Stimson confirmed similar statements made by Truman. In the end the Harper's article and other such efforts seemed to put the issues to rest in the late 1940s. The standard explanation emerged: American leaders considered all the alternatives and chose to use the atomic bomb to end the war as quickly as possible saving untold numbers of lives.
New Sources Become Available
In the 1960s, a number of sources became available to finally examine the record claimed by those who wrote the immediate post-war history. Items such as the Stimson Diaries, the Interim Committee minutes, and the MAGIC transmissions (MAGIC was the codename for the intercepted Japanese cable traffic that was available to US policymakers on the eve of Pearl Harbor and throughout the war), and military planning documents made all sorts of information available to historians. This resulted in an immediate wave of Revisionist histories. Recently de-classified documents revealed numerous issues ignored in the previous accounts of the decision leading up to the use of the bomb. Issues like the influence of relations with the Soviets, Truman's preparations for the Potsdam Conference, the Japanese efforts to surrender revealed in the MAGIC transmissions, postwar planning and discussions about the future of atomic energy, and on and on.
Gar Alperovitz wrote the most controversial and well known among these books, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, published in 1965. In this book, Alperovitz argues that: 1) The war with Japan was over at least by July of 1945 2) US Leaders were well aware of this fact 3) They used the bomb against Japan primarily to make the Soviets more tractable. While Alperovitz produced numerous citations to show the concern US policymakers had with negotiations with the Soviets and the clear idea that emerged in their thinking that the atomic bomb provided a powerful counterweight to the Soviet Red Army, his argument still misses the point. Implicit in the careful reading of the same documents is the assumption that the bomb will be used. US leaders contemplated such subjects as the relations with the Soviets, larger bombs that invariably could be developed and other postwar issues because the decision to use the bomb has already been made. Only briefly did they discuus some scientists' concerns over the use of the bomb (The Franck Report)and this was done over lunch and minimized due to the fact that Oppenheimer clearly supported its' use. In fact, in the Interim Committee minutes, a concern is expressed that the bomb will perhaps not be so impressive due to the extensive bombing campaign that already decimated many Japanese cities with conventional bombing. The atomic bomb would be impressive psychologically due to the fact that hundreds of planes created the conventional damage, and only one plane dropped the atomic bomb. Indeed, as another New Left historian, Gabriel Kolko points out, "...the Americans decided to use the bomb as a known and now predictable factor of war, an economical means of destroying vast numbers of men, women, and children, soldiers and civilians. Well before August 1945 they had reduced this to a routine." The Politics of War p. 567.
Alperovitz's argument contained significant references to Japanese peace efforts in 1945. Many Japanese representatives began to search for peace negotiations through diplomatic channels in Switzerland and other places. Alperovitz uses this evidence to bolster his claims that the US knew Japan was defeated, and in fact on the brink of surrender. He further implies that US policymakers willfully ignored this information. While this evidence certainly looks convincing initially, the problem with the "peace feelers" as they came to be known, is that they were not tied directly to the ruling Japanese government, but instead largely centered around Prince Konoye who worked on behalf of the Emperor. In fact, one can easily refute this part of Alperovitz's case with the excellent work of Robert Butow written over a decade before Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy. In Japan's Decision to Surrender (1954), Butow constructed the definitive study based primarily on Japanese documents and interviews which he conducted in Japan in the late 40s and early 50s. Butow addressed the issue of peace efforts, and clearly showed that the parties surrounding the Emperor pursued their efforts in secret due to the clear intention in the Japanese military to fight to the end. By the summer of 1945, the Emperor himself expressed deep concern over the price the Japanese people were paying and sought to end the war. After the atomic bombs the Emperor decided enough was enough, and he took the unprecedented step of addressing the people directly--something he never did. On the eve of his radio address a clique of the most hard core military officers learned of the Emperor's intentions and attempted a coup to prevent him from making his public address because they knew once he did, their ability to continue the war would vanish. Once the Emperor announced the war had to end, the government had no choice other than to capitulate.
Conclusion
The anniversary of Hiroshima once again brings up the frightening prospect of the use atomic weapons. Certainly, the current capabilities of such armaments exceed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs by orders of magnitude. It remains a worthy goal to try to eliminate the legitimacy of these weapons from any nation's arsenal, and then to eliminate them in fact. However, with the number of nations that already possess such weapons, that end seems as far away as ever.