Commentary

Why America Dropped the Bomb

Donald Kagan

THE 50th anniversary of the use ofatomic bombs on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki has produced a wholly predictable de-bate over the necessity and morality of that deci-sion. Or perhaps debate is the wrong word. Alltoo typical of this year's commemorative activitieswas a proposed exhibit on Hiroshima at theSmithsonian Institution in Washington; the scriptfor this exhibit presented a picture, in the wordsof an irate Wall Street Journal editorial, of a "be-sieged Japan yearning for peace" and lying "atthe feet of an implacably violent enemy-theUnited States." Although the exhibit was subse-quently canceled, it encapsulated a point of viewthat has now endured for a full half-century, andshows no sign of waning.

ON AUGUST 6,1945 the American war plane EnolaGay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, kill-ing between 70,000 and 100,000Japanese. Threedays later another atomic device was explodedover Nagasaki. Within a few days Japan surren-dered, and the terrible struggle that we call WorldWar II was over.

At the time, the American people cheered thebombings without restraint, and for the simplestof reasons. As the literary historian Paul Fussell,then a combat soldier expecting to take part inthe anticipated invasion of Japan, would laterrecall:

We learned to our astonishment that we wouldnot be obliged in a few months to rush up thebeaches near Tokyo assault-firing while beingmachine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, andfor all the practiced phlegm of our toughfacades we broke down and cried with reliefand joy. We were going to live.At that moment, few if any Americans doubted

that the purpose of this first use of atomic bombswas to bring the war to the swiftest possible end,and thereby to avert American casualties.

But the moment was short-lived. As early as1946, challenges to the dominant opinion ap-peared and soon multiplied. To a large extent,

the early revisionists-prominent among themsuch figures as Norman Cousins, P.M.S. Blackett,Carl Marzani, and the historians William Apple-man Williams and D.F. Fleming-were influencedby the emerging cold war, whose origins, for themost part, they attributed to American policyunder President Truman. As one exemplar of thenew revisionist movement put it:

The bomb was dropped primarily for its effectnot on Japan but on the Soviet Union. One, toforce a Japanese surrender before the USSRcame into the Far Eastern war, and two, to showunder war conditions the power of the bomb.Only in this way could a policy of intimidation[of the Soviet Union] be successful.

Another phrased the same purpose in differentwords:

The United States dropped the bomb to endthe war against Japan and thereby stop theRussians in Asia, and to give them sober pausein Eastern Europe.

In 1965, in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima andPotsdam, Gar Alperovitz picked up the mainthemes of the earlier writers, arguing for themnow on the basis of new documentation and in acultural climate-the climate of the mid-60's-newly hospitable to revisionist interpretations ofAmerican motives and behavior. According toAlperovitz, the bombs were not needed "to endthe war and save lives-and . . . this was under-stood by American leaders at the time." Theiraim, he wrote, was political, not military; theirtarget was not Japan but the Soviet Union.

The chief villain was Harry Truman, who, inAlperovitz's reading, was bent on reversingFranklin D. Roosevelt's policy of peaceful accom-modation with the Soviets. Thus, when he learnedof the prospect of the bomb, Truman decided todelay the Allied meeting at Potsdam until theweapon could be tested. If it worked, he couldtake a tougher line in Eastern Europe and, per-haps, end the war before the Soviets were ableto make gains in East Asia. In his eagernessto achieve these political goals, Truman failed togive proper attention to Japanese peace feelers;refused to change the demand for uncondition-al surrender, which was a barrier to Japanese ac-

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DONALD KAGAN is Hillhouse Professor of History and Clas-sics at Yale. His most recent book is On the Origins of Warand the Preservation of Peace, and he has also written a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.

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ceptance of peace terms; and did not wait to seeif Soviet entry into the Asian war might by itselfcauseJapan to surrender. In short, the confidenceprovided by the American monopoly on atomicweapons allowed Truman to launch, at Japan'sexpense, a "diplomatic offensive" against the So-viet Union, one which would play a role of greatimportance in engendering the subsequent coldwar.

Because of his more detailed arguments, rest-ing in part on newly available documents; becauseprotest over the Vietnam war was raising ques-tions about the origins of the cold war; and be-cause a new generation of American diplomatichistorians, trained or influenced by early revision-ists like William Appleman Williams, had comeonto the academic scene, Alperovitz's book en-joyed great influence and established the direc-tion which the debate over Hiroshima has takenup to this very day. Indeed, Alperovitz is in manyways the "dean" of atomic revisionism. A secondedition of his book was published in 1985, andthe latest version has just appeared under the titleThe Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb*; a sum-mary version was published as an article, "Hiro-shima: Historians Reassess," in the Summer 1995issue of the quarterly Foreign Policy.

ALPEROVITZ'S eminence is all the moreremarkable in that both his chief

thesis and most of his arguments have, from theirfirst appearance, been shredded by other schol-ars, his fellow revisionists among them. In, forexample, The Politics of War and United StatesForeign Policy, 1943-1945 (1968), Gabriel Kolko,without mentioning Alperovitz or his book byname, directly refuted almost all his findings.Other revisionist critics found, in the words of a1974 summary of their views, that

the book strained the evidence, failed criti-cally to assess sources, neglected the Rooseveltperiod, addressed the wrong questions, exag-gerated the impact of the bomb, misunder-stood Truman, and forced events into a dubi-ous pattern.

This new generation of revisionists, notablyMartin J. Sherwin and Barton J. Bernstein, stress-ed the essential continuity between the policiesof Truman and those of Roosevelt, who had alsoinsisted on secrecy and on keeping informationabout the atomic bomb away from the Soviets.Where Sherwin found no evidence of an elabo-rately planned showdown or "strategy of delay" indealing with the Russians, Bernstein was evenmore emphatic. In his view, the hope of using theatomic bomb to produce and "cement" a peacethat was to America's liking was only "a tasty bo-nus," and was in no way "essential to propelAmerican leaders in 1945 to use the bomb onJapan."

These, the findings of two of the most scholarlyrevisionist historians, amounted to a rejection of

a basic tenet of the tradition as represented byAlperovitz. And yet, even as they demolished hisarguments, the new revisionists remained weddedto a number of his major conclusions. By the timethese newer scholars appeared on the scene, con-demnation of the bomb had become a centralelement in the larger revisionist project of prov-ing the general error and evil of American policy,and for many it could not be abandoned, what-ever the cost in faithfulness to the evidence. Andso, even as they conceded that the bomb had notbeen used to advance the incipient cold-war po-litical interests of the U.S., they shifted the cen-tral ground of argument to another question.Granting that the bomb had been used to bringthe war to a swift end in order to avoid an inva-sion of Japan and the consequent loss of Ameri-can lives, they proceeded to question whether itwas either a necessary or a morally acceptablemeans to that end. Their answer was: no.

HAT, in a nutshell, is the answerthat is still being given today, and

where the argument has to be engaged. For theschool that I have called "revisionist" now repre-sents something more like a scholarly consensus,not to say a conventional wisdom universallyparroted by educators, pundits, and the popularmedia. For distilled versions of this conventionalwisdom, one need look no farther than the essaysgathered in the "Special Report" which Newsweekdevoted to the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima(July 24, 1995), or Murray Sayle's essay in the July31 New Yorker, or the July 27 Peter Jennings spe-cial on ABC, Hiroshima: Why the Bomb WasDropped.

Let us begin with the first line of revisionistattack, which is to question whether an invasionof Japan would have been so costly in Americanlives as to justify the use of atomic bombs in orderto avoid it.

In his memoirs, President Truman wrote thatan invasion of the Japanese home islands wouldhave entailed the loss of 500,000 American lives.In their own respective memoirs, Secretary of WarHenry Stimson and Secretary of State JamesByrnes proposed the figure of one million lives,or one million casualties overall.t The revision-ists have pounced on both these estimates, pro-ducing lengthy arguments to show that they areimpossible and leaving the impression that thenumbers were cut from whole cloth to justify thebombings after the fact. All this is meant to un-dermine the probity of American leaders by show-ing them to be liars: if anticipated casualties atthe time were fewer than the claims made afterthe war, the revisionists argue, then fear of such

*Knopf, 688 pp., $32.50.t See Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victoty: The Hiro-

shima Decision Fifty Years After (University of Missouri Press,1995). I am grateful to Professor Maddox for allowing me tosee the proofs of this work in advance of publication. My debtto it here is very considerable.

WHY AMERICA DROPPED THE BOMB/19

casualties could not have been the motive fordropping the bomb.

But some anticipations of casualties at the timewere in fact quite high. A study done in August1944 for the Joint Chiefs of Staff projected thatan invasion of Japan would "cost a half-millionAmerican lives and many more that number inwounded," while a memorandum from HerbertHoover to President Truman in May 1945 esti-mated that a negotiated peace with Japan would"save 500,000 to one million lives." There is everyreason to believe that such round, frighteningnumbers lingered in the minds of Truman andStimson long after they were first received, andthat they haunted all future deliberations.

More precise estimates were made nearer intime to the use of the bombs. In preparation fora meeting with President Truman scheduled forJune 18, 1945, the army's Chief of Staff, GeneralGeorge C. Marshall, asked General DouglasMacArthur for a figure of American casualties inthe projected invasion of Kyushu (code name:Olympic). Marshall was shocked by MacArthur'sreply: 105,050 battle casualties (dead and wound-ed) in the first 90 days alone, and another 12,600casualties among American noncombatants.Marshall called these figures unacceptably high.

IN CONNECTION with that same meetingon June 18, the document that has

received the most attention by revisionists is astudy by the Joint War Plans Committee, preparedon June 15. It estimated that casualties in an inva-sion of southern Kyushu on November 1, followedsome months later by an assault on the Tokyoplain, would be a relatively low 40,000 dead,150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing, for a totalof 193,500 casualties in the entire two-prongedoperation.

There are, however, several problems withthese estimates. To begin with, they did not in-clude naval casualties, although experience atOkinawa showed these were certain to be numer-ous. A separate estimate did exist for such losses-9,700 in the Kyushu invasion-but it excluded theunknowable number of casualties that would besuffered by American soldiers and sailors ontransports struck by kamikaze attacks. InterceptedJapanese military messages revealed that theJapa-nese had about 10,000 planes, half of them kami-kazes, to defend the home islands. In addition,the Japanese counted on flying bombs, humantorpedoes, suicide-attack boats, midget suicidesubmarines, motorboat bombs, and navy swim-mers to be used as human mines. All of these"had been used at Okinawa and the Philippineswith lethal results," and the intercepts showedthat they were now being placed on Kyushu.*

The report offering the figure of 40,000 dead,moreover, was peppered with disclaimers thatcasualties "are not subject to accurate estimate"and that the estimate was "admittedly only aneducated guess." Indeed, when the report went

from the original committee up to the Joint plan-ners, it omitted the casualty figures altogether onthe grounds that they were "not subject to ac-curate estimate." The document then went to As-sistant Chief of Staff General John E. Hull. In hisaccompanying memorandum to General Mar-shall, Hull suggested that losses in the first 30days in Kyushu would be on the order of thosetaken at Luzon, or about 1,000 casualties per day.Hull's memorandum, and not the committeereport listing specific figures, was read outby Marshall at the June 18 conference with thePresident.

At the meeting itself, Fleet Admiral William D.Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, suggestedthat Luzon was not as sound an analogy as Oki-nawa. There, American casualties had run to75,000, or some 35 percent of the attacking force."Marshall," writes the historian Edward Drea,"allowed that 766,700 assault troops would be em-ployed against Kyushu. Although unstated, a 35-percent casualty rate translated to more than aquarter-million American casualties." As for thePresident, he was very mindful of the bloodbathat Okinawa, and he demanded the '"Joint Chiefs'assurance that an invasion of Kyushu would nei-ther repeat that savagery nor degenerate intorace war." There is no evidence that Truman eversaw or heard the omitted low figures for the en-tire operation that had been drawn up by theJoint War Plans Committee.

But whatever the value of any of these esti-mates, they soon became obsolete. Marshall's cal-culation rested on the assumption that Kyushuwould be defended by eight Japanese divisions,or fewer than 300,000 men, and that Americandomination of the sea and air would make rein-forcement impossible. Intercepts of Japanesemilitary communications soon made a mockeryof those expectations. ByJuly 21, the estimate ofJapanese troops on Kyushu had grown to 455,000;by the end of the month, to 525,000. ColonelCharles A. Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligenceofficer, took note of the new situation: "Thisthreatening development, if not checked, maygrow to a point where we attack on a ratio of one(1) to one (1), which is not the recipe for vic-tory." Soon the number of Japanese troops onKyushu rose to 680,000 and, on July 31, a medicalestimate projected American battle and non-battle casualties needing treatment at 394,859.This figure, of course, excluded those killed atonce, who would be beyond treatment.

Years later, in a letter, Truman described ameeting in the last week of July at which Marshallsuggested the invasion would cost "at a minimumone-quarter-of-a-million casualties, and might costas much as a million, on the American side alone,with an equal number of the enemy. The other

*See EdwardJ. Drea, MacArthur's ULTRA: Codebreakingand the War Against Japan 1942-1945 (University of KansasPress, 1992).

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military and naval men present agreed." IfTruman's recollection was accurate, this may havebeen the last such estimate before the droppingof the bomb; but whether accurate or not, therecan be no doubt that Marshall's own concern didnot abate even after Hiroshima. On the very nextday he sent a message to MacArthur expressingalarm at the Japanese strength on southernKyushu, and asking for alternative invasion sites.On August 11, five days after Hiroshima, threedays after the Soviets had entered the war, andtwo days after Nagasaki, when the Japanese hadstill not surrendered, Marshall thought it wouldbe necessary "to continue a prolonged struggle"and even raised the possibility of using atomicbombs as tactical weapons against massed enemytroops during the invasion.

As the foregoing suggests, it was, and remains,impossible to make convincing estimates of thecasualties to be expected in case of an Americaninvasion of the Japanese home islands. From thebeginning the debate has been tendentious, dis-tracting attention from more important ques-tions. The large numbers offered by Stimson andTruman in their memoirs may not have been ac-curate, but the attacks on those numbers by therevisionists are at least as suspect. No one can besure that the true figure would have been closerto the lower than to the higher estimates.

In any case, what matters is not what Americanleaders claimed after the war, but what they be-lieved before the atomic bombs were used. Onthat point, there can be no doubt. In discussionsthat were not shaped by attempts to justify usingthe bomb, since it had not yet even been tested,men like Truman, Stimson, and Marshall weredeeply worried over the scale of American casual-ties-whatever their precise number-that werecertain to be incurred by an invasion. The Presi-dent could not face another Okinawa, much lesssomething greater. That is all we need to know tounderstand why he and his associates were pre-pared to use the bomb.

Yet this conclusion, supported both by the evi-dence and by common sense, has been furiouslyresisted by revisionists and their large cohorts offellow-travelers. Thus, a 1990 account of the cur-rent state of the question reports: "The consen-sus among scholars is that the bomb was notneeded to avoid an invasion of Japan and to endthe war within a relatively short time ... an inva-sion was a remote possibility." This would havebeen welcome news indeed to General Marshall,who as we have seen was deeply concerned aboutthe difficulty and human cost of such an invasionright up to the moment of surrender.

A SECOND pillar of the argument thatthe dropping of the bomb was un-

necessary goes as follows. The Japanese had al-ready been defeated, and it was only a brief mat-ter of time before continued conventional bomb-ing and shortages caused by the naval blockade

would have made them see reason. They were, infact, already sending out peace feelers in thehope of ending the war. If the Americans hadbeen more forthcoming, willing to abandon theirdemand for unconditional surrender and topromise that Japan could retain its emperor,peace could have come without either an inva-sion or the use of the bomb.

This particular case rests in large part on aquite rational evaluation of the condition of Ja-pan and its dismal military prospects in the springof 1945, and on the evidence that Japanese offi-cials were indeed discussing the possibility of anegotiated peace, using the Soviets as intermediar-ies. But neither of these lines of argument provesthe point; nor do both of them taken together.

Even the most diehard military leaders of Ja-pan knew perfectly well how grim their objectivesituation was. But this did not deter them fromcontinuing the war, as the most reputable studyof the Japanese side of the story makes clear.*Although they did not expect a smashing and glo-rious triumph, they were confident of at leastwinning an operational victory "in the decisivebattle for the homeland." Since any negotiatedpeace would be considered a surrender whichwould split the nation apart, Japan's militaristswanted to put it off as long as possible, and toenter negotiations only on the heels of a victory.

Some thought an American invasion could berepelled. Most hoped to inflict enough damageto make the invaders regroup. Others were evenmore determined; they "felt that it would be farbetter to die fighting in battle than to seek anignominious survival by surrendering the nationand acknowledging defeat."

Premier Kantaro Suzuki supported the army'splan, and was content to prosecute the war withevery means at his disposal-for that, after all,was "the way of the warrior and the path of thepatriot." At a conference on June 8, 1945, in thepresence of the emperor, the Japanese govern-ment formally affirmed its policy: "The nationwould fight to the bitter end."

In spite of that, some Japanese officials did tryto end the war by diplomatic negotiation beforeit was too late. Early efforts had been undertakenby minor military officials, who approachedAmerican OSS officers in Switzerland in April;but they were given no support from Tokyo. InJuly, some members of the Japanese governmentthought they could enlist the help of the SovietUnion in negotiating a peace that would not re-quire a surrender or the occupation of the homeislands. It is hard to understand why they thoughtthe USSR would want to help a state it dislikedand whose territory it coveted, especially whenJapanese prospects were at their nadir; but suchindeed was their hope.

The officials sent their proposals to Naotake

*Robert J.C. Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender(Stanford University Press, 1954).

WHY AMERICA DROPPED THE BOMB/21

Sato, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow. Theirmessages, and Sato's responses, were interceptedand must have influenced American plans con-siderably.

Sato warned his interlocutors in Tokyo thatthere was no chance of Soviet cooperation. Anentry in the diary of Secretary of the Navy JamesV. Forrestal for July 15, 1945 reports "the gist of[Sato's] final message ... Japan was thoroughlyand completely defeated and ... the only courseopen was quick and definite action recognizingsuch fact." Sato repeated this advice more thanonce, but the response from Tokyo was that thewar must continue.

Revisionists and others have argued that theUnited States could have paved the way by drop-ping the demand for unconditional surrender,and especially that the U.S. should have indicatedthe emperor would be retained. But interceptsclearly revealed (according to Gerhard Weinbergin A World at Arms) that "the Japanese govern-ment would not accept the concept of uncondi-tional surrender even if the institution of theimperial house were preserved." And then therewere the intercepts of military messages, whichled to the same conclusion-namely, as EdwardJ.Drea writes, that "the Japanese civil authoritiesmight be considering peace, but Japan's militaryleaders, who American decision-makers believedhad total control of the nation, were preparingfor war to the knife."

The demand for unconditional surrender hadin any case been asserted by Roosevelt and hadbecome a national rallying cry. Truman could notlightly abandon it, nor is there reason to thinkthat he wanted to. Both he and Roosevelt hadclear memories of World War I and how its unsat-isfactory conclusion had helped bring on WorldWar II. In the former conflict, the Germans hadnot surrendered unconditionally; their land hadnot been occupied; they had not been made toaccept the fact of their defeat in battle. Dema-gogues like Hitler had made use of this opportu-nity to claim that Germany had not lost but hadbeen "stabbed in the back" by internal traitorslike the socialists and the Jews, a technique thatmade it easier to rouse the Germans for a secondgreat effort. In 1944, Roosevelt said that "practi-cally all Germans deny the fact that they surren-dered during the last war, but this time they aregoing to know it. And so are the Japs."

In the event, Truman did allow the Japanese tokeep their emperor. Why did he not announcethat intention in advance, to make surrendereasier? Some members of the administrationthought he should do so, but most feared thatany advance concession would be taken as a signof weakness, and encourage the Japanese bitter-enders in their hope that they could win a morefavorable peace by holding out. And there werealso those who were opposed to any policy thatwould leave the emperor in place. These, as ithappens, were among the more liberal members

of the administration, men like Dean Achesonand Archibald MacLeish. Their opposition wasgrounded in the belief that, as MacLeish put it,"the throne [was] an anachronistic, feudal insti-tution, perfectly suited to the manipulation anduse of anachronistic, feudal-minded groupswithin the country." It is also worth pointing out,as did the State Department's Soviet expert,Charles Bohlen, that a concession with regard tothe emperor, as well as negotiations in responseto the so-called peace feelers on any basis otherthan unconditional surrender, might well havebeen seen by the Soviets as a violation of commit-ments made at Yalta and as an effort to end thewar before the Soviet Union could enter it.

HAT if the U.S. had issued a publicwarning that it had the atomic

bomb, and described its fearful qualities? Orwarned the Japanese of the imminent entry ofthe Soviet Union into the fighting? Or, best of all,combined both warnings with a promise that Ja-pan could keep its emperor? Again, there are nogrounds for believing that any or all of these stepswould have made a difference to the determinedmilitary clique that was makingJapan's decisions.

Even after the atomic bomb had exploded atHiroshima on August 6, the Japanese refused toyield. An American announcement clarified thenature of the weapon that had done the damage,and warned thatJapan could expect more of thesame if it did not surrender. Still, the militaryheld to its policy of resistance and insisted on adelay until a response was received to the latestJapanese approach to the Soviet Union. The an-swer came on August 8, when the Soviets declaredwar and sent a large army againstJapanese forcesin Manchuria.

The foolishness of looking to the Soviets wasnow inescapably clear, but still Japan's leaderstook no steps to end the fighting. The Minister ofWar, General Korechika Anami, went so far as todeny that Hiroshima had been struck by anatomic bomb. Others insisted that the U.S. hadused its only bomb there, or that world opinionwould prevent the Americans from using any oth-ers they might have. Then on August 9 the sec-ond atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, again doingterrible damage.

The Nagasaki bomb convinced even Anamithat "the Americans appear to have 100 atomicbombs . . . they could drop three per day. Thenext target might well be Tokyo." Even so, a meet-ing of the Imperial Council that night failed toachieve a consensus to accept defeat. Anami him-self insisted that Japan continue to fight. If theJapanese people "went into the decisive battle inthe homeland determined to display the fullmeasure of patriotism ... Japan would be able toavert the crisis facing her." The chief of the armygeneral staff, Yoshijiro Umezu, expressed his con-fidence in the military's "ability to deal a smash-ing blow to the enemy," and added that in view of

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the sacrifices made by the many men who hadgladly died for the emperor, "it would be inexcus-able to surrender unconditionally." AdmiralSoemu Toyoda, chief of the navy's general staff,argued thatJapan could now use its full air power,heretofore held in reserve in the homeland. LikeAnami, he did not guarantee victory, but assertedthat "we do not believe that we will be possiblydefeated."

These were the views of Japan's top militaryleaders after the explosion of two atomic bombsand the Soviet attack on Manchuria.

Premier Suzuki and the others who were bynow favoring peace knew all this was madness.The Allies would never accept the military's con-ditions-restrictions on the extent of Japanesedisarmament, on the occupation of Japan, andon trials of Japanese leaders for war crimes-andthe continuation of warfare would be a disasterfor the Japanese people. To break the deadlockhe took the extraordinary step of asking the em-peror to make the decision. (Normally no pro-posal was put to the emperor until it had achievedthe unanimous approval of the Imperial Coun-cil.) At 2 A.M. on August 10, Emperor Hirohitoresponded to the premier's request by giving hissanction to the acceptance of the Allied terms.The Japanese reply included the proviso that theemperor be retained.

There was still disagreement within the Ameri-can government on this subject. Public opinionwas very hostile to the retention of the emperor,and in particular, as Gerhard Weinberg has writ-ten, "the articulate organizations of the Ameri-can Left" resisted any concessions and "urged thedropping of additional atomic bombs instead."At last, the U.S. devised compromise languagethat accepted the imperial system by implication,while providing that the Japanese people couldestablish their own form of government.

Although the Japanese leaders found this ac-ceptable, that was not the end of the matter.Opponents of peace tried to reverse the decisionby a coup d'etat. They might have succeeded hadGeneral Anami supported them, but he was unwill-ing to defy the emperor's orders. He solved his di-lemma by committing suicide, and the plot failed.Had it succeeded, the war would have continuedto a bloody end, with Japan under the brutal ruleof a fanatical military clique. Some idea of thethinking of this faction is provided by an inter-cept of an August 15 message to Tokyo from thecommander of Japan's army in China:

Such a disgrace as the surrender of several mil-lion troops without fighting is not paralleled inthe world's military history, and it is absolutelyimpossible to submit to the unconditional sur-render of a million picked troops in perfectlyhealthy shape....It was the emperor, then, who was decisive in

causing Japan to surrender. What caused himto act in so remarkable a way? He was moved bythe bomb-and by the Soviet declaration of war.

(That declaration, scheduled for August 15, wasitself hastened by the use of the bomb, andmoved up to August 8.) But statements by theemperor and premier show clearly that theyviewed the Soviet invasion as only another war-time setback. It was the bomb that changed thesituation entirely.

On hearing of this terrible new weapon, Em-peror Hirohito said, "We must put an end to thewar as speedily as possible so that this tragedy willnot be repeated." Suzuki said, plainly, thatJapan's"war aim had been lost by the enemy's use of thenew-type bomb." Finally, the central role of thebomb was made graphically clear in the ImperialRescript of August 14, in which the emperor ex-plained to his people the reasons for the surren-der. At its heart was the following statement:

The enemy has begun to employ a new andmost cruel bomb, the power of which to dodamage is indeed incalculable, taking the tollof many innocent lives. Should we continue tofight, it would not only result in an ultimatecollapse and obliteration of the Japanese na-tion, but it would also lead to the total extinc-tion of human civilization. Such being the case,how are We to save the millions of Our sub-jects. .. ? This is the reason why We have or-dered the acceptance of the provisions of theJoint Declaration of the Powers.

There can be, in short, no doubt that the ac-tual use of atomic weapons was critical in bring-ing a swift end to the war, and that mere warningswould not have sufficed.

INALLY, whether or not they condemnAmerican policy on instrumental

grounds, some critics assail it on purely humani-tarian ones. In particular they have asked whetherit was necessary to drop the bomb on a city.Should it not have been used for the first time ona desert island, or some uninhabited place, as ademonstration?

This suggestion was put forward even beforethe bomb was dropped, but it failed to win sup-port. A demonstration outside Japan, it was felt,would not be effective in persuading the Japa-nese themselves; and if it were announced forsome location within Japan, the Japanese mightplace Allied prisoners on the site, and make ex-traordinary efforts to shoot down the carryingplane. Also, in August 1945 the Americans hadbut two bombs, and using one for a demonstra-tion would leave only the other. There was thedanger that one or both of the devices mightfizzle, or that, even if the first one worked, thoseJapanese who wished to continue the war mightdeny, as in the event some did, that the blast camefrom a new weapon, or might argue, as othersdid, that the Americans had no more in theirarsenal.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, as director of theresearch project at Los Alamos, was on the com-mittee that selected the target cities, averred that

WHY AMERICA DROPPED THE BOMB/23

to his mind no mere display would be sufficientlyimpressive to shock the Japanese into surrender.Even the Franck Report, signed by scientists urg-ing a demonstration, doubted that this wouldbreak the will or ability of Japan to resist, andreluctantly approved use against Japan if all elsefailed. Leo Szilard, the scientist most vigorous inhis opposition to the early use of the bomb, alsoconceded that "the war has to be brought to asuccessful conclusion and attacks by atomicbombs may very well be an effective method ofwarfare." It is important to recognize that only inhindsight has moral revulsion been expressedagainst the use of atomic weapons on cities. AsMcGeorge Bundy points out in his book Dangerand Survival, "no one put [the idea] forward be-fore Hiroshima.... No one ever said simply, donot use it on a city at all."

TILL, the moral question must be ad-o dressed. It has been argued that the

nuclear bomb is a weapon like no other, so ter-rible that nothing can justify its use, and that itsuse in 1945 made its future use more likely. Butevents have not borne this out: in the 50 yearssince Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weaponshave not been used in warfare, and it is not impos-sible that their first use helped deter a repetition.

Moreover, the sharp distinction betweennuclear weapons and others on moral groundsseems questionable. In a single raid on Tokyo onMarch 9-10, 1945, incendiary bombs from Ameri-can planes killed 80,000-100,000 Japanese (asmany as at Hiroshima on August 6), wounded asimilar number, and destroyed more than 250,000buildings, leaving hundreds of thousands home-less. It is hard to see how the continuation ofsuch bombing until there were no more targetswould have been a moral improvement overHiroshima. Distinguishing nuclear weapons fromall others would seem, in fact, to give greatermoral sanction to the use of weapons and tacticsno less horrible.

If the moral complaint is to be fairly lodged, itmust be lodged against any and all warfare thatattacks innocents-which means, in effect, theoverwhelming majority of wars to the presenttime. It is a historical axiom that the longer andmore sharply contested a war, the greater thebrutality with which it is fought. The British be-gan World War II refusing to employ aerial bom-bardment; they dropped leaflets on Germany in-stead. Before the war was over, they had carriedout the fire bombing of Dresden, killing tens ofthousands of civilians. Similarly, American doc-trine at the beginning of the war was that indis-criminate bombing of cities was both wrong andunwise. Before long, however, Hitler's bombingof Rotterdam and later of London, Japan's sneakattack on Pearl Harbor and its brutal treatmentof prisoners of war, its bombing of Shanghai, therape of Nanking, the forced prostitution of Ko-

rean women, and the Bataan death march madeAmericans change their minds. "Precision" bomb-ings of targets in or near cities gave way to moreindiscriminate destruction launched out of angerand with the purpose of destroying the enemy'smorale, thereby (again) bringing the war to anearlier end.

In the history of warfare such developmentsare typical rather than unusual. It is right to do allwe can to reduce the horrors of war. But to preventthem entirely, it will be necessary to prevent war.

T US sum up. It is, I think, clear thatany strategy other than the employ-

ment of atomic weapons would have failed tocompel aJapanese surrender short of an invasionof the home islands. Even at a low estimate, thetwo planned invasions would have brought193,500 American casualties and, as Robert J.Maddox puts it, "only an intellectual could assertthat 193,500 anticipated casualties were too insig-nificant to have caused Truman to use atomicbombs." The Japanese, moreover, had plans tokill Allied prisoners of war as the fighting ap-proached the camps where they were being held;so the swift surrender brought on by the bombsaved still more American lives.

And what aboutJapanese casualties? The expe-rience of Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa showedthat such casualties would have been many timesgreater than those suffered by Americans-inva-sion or no invasion. American planes would havedealt with many more Japanese cities as they haddealt with Tokyo, and would have repeated theirattacks on the capital as well. The American navywould have continued its blockade, and starva-tion would have taken off countless civilians. Insum, the cost would have been greater than thatexacted by the bombs. As a former president ofthe Japanese Medical Association has said, "Whenone considers the possibility that the Japanesemilitary would have sacrificed the entire nation ifit were not for the atomic bomb attack, then thisbomb might be described as having saved Japan."It is a terrible thought, but the evidence suggeststhat he is right.

Gar Alperovitz, in the name of many other crit-ics of U.S. policy, has assailed "America's contin-ued unwillingness to confront the fundamentalquestions about Hiroshima" because "we Ameri-cans clearly do not like to see our nation as vul-nerable to the same moral failings as others."Americans certainly share the same weaknesses asthe rest of the human race. They need not, how-ever, shrink from a confrontation of the "funda-mental questions" surrounding Hiroshima. Anhonest examination of the evidence reveals thattheir leaders, in the tragic predicament commonto all who have engaged in wars that reach thepoint where every choice is repugnant, chose theleast bad course. Americans may look back onthat decision with sadness, but without shame.