Evan Thomas is the author of “Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II,” to be published in May, from which this column is adapted.
It’s easy — in the internet age all too easy — to argue that your side is right and that the other side is not only wrong but somehow morally inferior. But in the harsh world of geopolitics, the most momentous decisions are often morally ambiguous. The United States’ role in the world, as it has played out over the decades, is not susceptible to simplistic labels of right and wrong. Idealism and realism often clash. There has been a constant tension between our hopes for a better, more peaceful world of democratic progress and the exigencies of national interest.
A case in point is the decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Even the idea that there was a “decision” to drop the bomb is debatable. Some historians argue that, having spent $2 billion to create an atomic bomb, President Harry S. Truman could hardly say no to using it, especially if the alternative was a bloody invasion. Truman was like a “little boy on a toboggan,” racing down a mountain with little control, scoffed U.S. Army Gen. Leslie Groves, the commander of the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb.
But the atomic bomb did not just happen. Its delivery on two large cities filled with civilians was the outcome of morally fraught choices made by war-weary civilian and military leaders who had uncertain knowledge about the likely outcome. Only the stakes were clear: saving the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people — both American and Asian.
At the center of the process was the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, who from the very beginning of the Manhattan Project in 1942 acted as a kind of chairman of the board. He made sure that congressional lawmakers provided the funds (while telling them as little as possible about the top-secret project) and then brought together a small group of top officials, the innocuously named “Interim Committee,” to ponder how, when and where to use the bomb in the war, as well as how to control it in the postwar world. (These men, a mix of scientists and political figures, did not take long to decide that a demonstration drop on a deserted island would be too chancy and impractical. What if the Japanese, forewarned, shot down the plane before it dropped the bomb? What if the bomb was a dud?)
Stimson was known for his strict moral probity. He believed in a “law of moral progress,” albeit one that was enforced by people who looked like him. He could be a kindly gentleman, but he was relentless about using power and, if necessary, military force to achieve the ends of justice, which certainly included defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945, it was Stimson who briefed Truman about the new secret weapon, known as “S-1” or “the Super,” that was almost ready for use. Incredibly, Roosevelt had not told his own vice president about the atomic bomb, not even a hint. (It is likely that Truman had some inkling through his earlier work as a U.S. senator in charge of a committee investigating defense procurement.) In their conversations about “S-1” over the next three months, Truman and almost all his top advisers agreed that dropping it on one or more cities was necessary to avoid a bloody full-scale U.S. invasion of Japan. Although Gen. Curtis LeMay’s 20th Bomber Command had already burned scores of Japanese cities with conventional incendiary bombs, it was hoped that the destructive power of splitting the atom would shock the Japanese into surrendering.
Destruction, by 1945, was a relative term for top policymakers increasingly inured to civilian casualties. In the spring and summer of that year, Stimson agonized over the firebombing of Japan (and before that, the Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden). Unable to sleep, slowed by a heart condition, he was, at 77, nearing the end of his physical and emotional capacity to serve in such an all-consuming role. For a time, he urged Truman to issue a clear warning and give the Japanese a way out — allowing them to keep their emperor in exchange for surrender. But Stimson did not press this argument, partly because he concluded that any softening of surrender terms would embolden the militarists — the army and navy chieftains who really ran Imperial Japan — to fight harder.
Stimson’s judgment was almost surely right. The commanders of the Japanese armed forces were fanatics. On Aug. 9, after Washington dropped the second atomic bomb (on Nagasaki), Japan’s war minister, Gen. Korechika Anami, asked his fellow members of the Supreme War Council, “Would not it be wonderous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” The rulers were fatalistic about taking the rest of the nation with them. “The One Million Will Die for the Emperor” was a common headline in the state-controlled press. Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed — and the Russians had invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria — the six members of the Supreme War Council deadlocked, three to three, on whether to surrender. Consensus was necessary, so the war went on.
Overcoming his meekness and stepping out of his traditionally passive role, Emperor Hirohito finally ended the debate five days later. Hirohito did not know whom he feared most, the ubiquitous American B-29s with their deadly bombs, or his own military, who were in effect threatening to kidnap him to fight on. On the night before Japan publicly announced its surrender, there was an attempted coup d’etat, with soldiers running through the palace searching for the recording of the emperor’s speech, to smash it before it could be played to the nation and the world the next day. (The recording was safely hidden in a room reserved for the empress’s ladies-in-waiting.)
About 200,000 people died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Overruling Groves, Stimson had spared the ancient capital of Kyoto from becoming the primary target. In his diary on the day of the order went out to bomb Hiroshima and three other cities (as bombs “are made ready”), Truman wrote in his diary, “I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” The president was either in denial or not well briefed by Stimson, or probably both. In fact, the “aim point” for the bomb was a bridge in the middle of a city packed with civilian homes. More women and children than soldiers were killed.
On the morning of Aug. 8, when he showed Truman aerial photographs of Hiroshima’s utter destruction, Stimson had a small heart attack. Truman was also disturbed by the photos and, after the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, decreed that no more atomic bombs would be dropped without his explicit order. But on Aug. 14, he told the British ambassador he was afraid it would be necessary to drop a third bomb, probably on Tokyo. Fortunately, word of Japan’s surrender arrived later that day.
By forcing Japan to give up, the atomic bombs saved lives — almost certainly Japanese and other Asian lives. How many American lives remains a guess. The World War II historian Richard B. Frank has shown that by August 1945, an American invasion of Japan was very unlikely. Radio intercepts were showing such a massive Japanese buildup on the landing beaches that the U.S. Navy high command no longer supported an amphibious landing.
The alternative was an air and sea blockade that would have caused mass starvation (the Japanese were already down to about 1,680 calories a day), accompanied by disease and perhaps civil war and even the partition of Japan, with the Soviets controlling a sphere. In the end, the empire’s capitulation probably spared millions of Japanese, as well as a greater number of Chinese and southeast Asians, who were already dying at the rate of 250,000 a month under the brutal conditions of Japanese occupation.
Dropping the bomb had one other consequence worth keeping in mind today. The destruction was so horrific that it made decision-makers — not just in Washington but worldwide — never want to see a nuclear bomb used again. Indeed, since 1945, there has been an unspoken taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. As Russia and China build up their nuclear arsenals, we should pray that memories do not fade, and that a new Cold War never gets truly hot. So-called tactical nuclear weapons have about the same power as the Hiroshima bomb or smaller, but a conventional nuclear weapon at the tip of an ICBM can be at least a hundred times as destructive.
That toboggan that Truman rode? We should never let it slip down the hill again.