The World after the Atomic Bomb



The World after the Atomic Bomb

Introduction

Many researches support the view that top U.S. officials, understood that use of the bomb as not required to end the war before an invasion. However, as Robert Messer observed in the August 1985 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the implications of Truman's diary and letters alone for the orthodox defense of the bomb's use are devastating: if Soviet entry alone would end the war before an invasion of Japan, the use of atomic bombs cannot be justified as the only alternative to that invasion. 1

Minimally, the president's contemporaneous diary entries, together with his letter to his wife, raise fundamental questions about Truman's subsequent claims that the atomic bomb was used because it was the only way to avoid "a quarter million," "a half million," or "millions" of casualties. The range of opinions even among expert defenders of Truman's decision is extraordinarily suggestive. For instance, McGeorge Bundy--who helped Stimson write a classic 1947 defense of the bombing, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb" in Harper's Magazine--now holds that the necessity of bombing Hiroshima was "debatable," and the bombing of Nagasaki was "unnecessary." In a MacNeil/Lehrer interview on the 40th anniversary of the bombing, Bundy went so far as to state that he was "not disposed to criticize the use of . . . the bomb to help to end the war, but it does seem to me, looking back on it, that there were opportunities for communication and warning available to the United States government which were not completely thought through by our government at that time." 1In July and early August, 1945, the United States government knew three things that the Japanese government did not. One was that the bomb was coming into existence, had been successfully tested. One was that the United States government was prepared to allow the emperor to remain on his throne in Japan, and the third was that the Russians were coming into the war. And the question, it seems to me, that was not fully studied, fully presented to President Truman, was whether warning of the bomb and assurance on the emperor could not have been combined in a fashion which would have produced Japanese surrender without the use of the bomb on a large city, with all of the human consequences that followed.

Fighting was minimal in August 1945 as both sides regrouped, and the most that can be said is that the atomic bombs might have saved the lives that would have been lost in the time required to arrange final surrender terms with Japan. That saving lives was not the highest priority, however, seems obvious from the choices made in July: If the United States really wished to end the war as quickly and as surely as possible--and to save as many lives as possible--then, as Marshall pointed out as early as June, the full force of the Russian shock plus assurances for the emperor's future could ...