Excerpted from:
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
by Gar Alperovitz
With the assistance of Sanho Tree, Edward Rouse Winstead, Kathryn C. Morris, David J. Williams, Leo C. Maley III, Thad Williamson, and Miranda Greider.

INTRODUCTION: A Personal Note

Among the many remaining puzzles surrounding the decision to use the atomic bomb, perhaps the most intriguing concern two of the nation's highest World War II military leaders. A few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, Admiral William D. Leahy went public with the following statement:

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender . . .

"My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

Leahy was not what one might call a typical critic of American policy. Not only had the five-star Admiral presided over the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (and, too, the Combined American-British Chiefs of Staff), but he had simultaneously been Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, serving Roosevelt in that capacity from 1942 to 1945 and Truman from 1945 to 1949. Moreover, he was a good friend of Truman's and the two men respected and liked each other; his public criticism of the Hiroshima decision was hardly personal.

We can imagine what it would mean today if General Colin Powell were to go public with a similar critique, say, of the massive bombings he presided over as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War--and on decisions made by his friend, President George Bush.

A similar puzzle concerns Dwight D. Eisenhower, the triumphant Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force who directed British and American operations against Hitler--and also, subsequently, of course, president of the United States. In the midst of the Cold War--shortly after his famous Farewell Address criticizing the "military-industrial complex"--Eisenhower also went public with a statement about the Hiroshima decision. Recalling the 1945 moment when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson informed him the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, Eisenhower stated:

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, attempting to surrender with a minimum loss of "face". . . ."

Something clearly had caused Leahy and Eisenhower to break the unwritten rule that requires high officials to maintain a discreet silence in connection with controversial matters about which they have special knowledge. But Leahy and Eisenhower were not the only military figures who broke the rule. And less than a year after the bombings an extensive official study by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey also published its conclusion that Japan would have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war and without an American invasion.

Again, it is not only the substance of the conclusion reached by this official body, but the fact that it was made public and received wide publicity which forces itself into awareness, now, nearly fifty years after the fact.

I have had the privilege of participating in the policy process at high levels of the U.S. Department of State and of directing legislative work in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. Statements made by official bodies, even those designated as independent or semi-independent, which run directly contrary to major government decisions rarely see the light of day.

On the fortieth anniversary of the launching of the nuclear era historian Paul Boyer introduced a thoughtful reflection on the meaning of the atomic bombings in this fashion: "`Hiroshima.' `Nagasaki.' The very words, familiar to the point of banality but restlessly alive, remind us that we have yet to assimilate fully what they represent into our political, cultural, or moral history."

In part this book had its origins in a recurring feeling that we Americans have, in fact, overlooked something profoundly important by not probing the Hiroshima story deeply--by not, for instance, asking serious questions about statements like those made by Leahy, Eisenhower and the Strategic Bombing Survey.

The issue goes far beyond the validity of military judgments, important as they are. It involves the simple fact that most of us--unlike Leahy and Eisenhower--have not as yet allowed our response to Hiroshima to move to what Boyer called "a deeper plane of moral complexity . . ." Exceptions to the "denial of the enormity of the event" are few and far between. In connection with the more difficult issues silence mostly reigns--and denial.

The gnawing sense that it is simply wrong to continue to pass over the troubling underlying questions as the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima approached was one of the things which prompted me to undertake this study.

Another was personal:

Many years ago, as a very young graduate student at Britain's Cambridge University, I happened upon the then recently opened diaries of Henry Stimson. These clearly showed that long before the atomic bomb had been tested, American leaders had begun to calculate that the new force might greatly strengthen their hand against their wartime ally, the Soviet Union. In May 1945, for instance, Stimson judged that

"It may be necessary to have it out with Russia on her relations to Manchuria and Port Arthur and various other parts of North China, and also the relations of China to us. Over any such tangled wave of problems S-1 [i.e., atomic bomb] secret would be dominant . . ."

Stimson's diary also shows him to have urged that until the new weapon was tested

". . . the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words. . . . It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way. . . . this was a place where we really held all the cards . .. They can't get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique. . . . Now the thing is not to get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves."

When the Cambridge Ph.D. thesis I wrote using such documents was published in 1965 under the title Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, it became the center of a rather intense controversy over why the atomic bomb had been used. This question had not, in fact, been my primary focus. I had been interested in how the bomb impacted diplomacy, not why it was used. In a few concluding remarks, however, I had observed that the then available evidence "strongly suggested" that the view James F. Byrnes had reportedly urged to three atomic scientists (also in May 1945) was an accurate statement of policy:

"Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war . . . Mr. Byrnes's . . . view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe . . ."

Since Byrnes was Truman's personal representative on crucial atomic bomb issues and his first Secretary of State, I thought his views significant. I had also written that I did not believe questions concerning the influence of diplomatic considerations on the decision to use the atomic bomb could be fully answered "on the basis of the presently available evidence . . . ," that "no final conclusion can be reached on this question . . ." and, that "more research and more information are needed to reach a conclusive understanding of why the atomic bomb was used."

Atomic Diplomacy was researched and written in the late 1950s and very early 1960s. However, in the atmosphere of heated debate over the then escalating Vietnam war--as Professor Gaddis Smith has observed--fine distinctions and careful caveats were not much in vogue. Oversimplified versions of my argument (together with some obvious graduate student errors) were pounced upon by a range of critics who at the time could not abide such criticism of the Hiroshima decision. In part, I suppose the following text is thus also a much delayed response to my own call for "more research and more information" on these matters. Although the once controversial idea that diplomatic considerations related to the Soviet Union played a significant part in the Hiroshima decision is now commonplace among serious scholars, I should stress, however, that this book is not, primarily--or even significantly--an attempt to resolve remaining questions of the precise impact diplomatic consideration had on the Hiroshima decision.

I am largely concerned with other, perhaps even more difficult matters as we approach the fiftieth year since the events reported in these pages occurred.

In a very real sense this book is the result of my own extended confrontation with the psychological resistance I, too, share to penetrating to "a deeper plane of moral complexity" concerning the bombings. What pushed me over the edge (in 1990) was an encounter with the following statement:

"Careful scholarly treatment of the records and manuscripts opened over the past few years has greatly enhanced our understanding of why the Truman administration used atomic weapons against Japan. Experts continue to disagree on some issues, but critical questions have been answered. The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it . . ."

The writer, J. Samuel Walker, Chief Historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission--the institutional locus of conservative, often pro-nuclear thinking. Nor was Walker stating a personal opinion: he was offering a summary of the most recent expert research on the Hiroshima decision in the respected scholarly journal Diplomatic History. (The conclusion of a similar review in another journal was that the most recent documentary discoveries were "devastating" to the traditional explanation of the decision.)

What struck me initially was the simple honesty of the challenging assessment of the literature which Walker had provided. If after surveying the modern expert research, a careful government scholar could come to this conclusion, it occurred to me that just possibly others might be able to confront the Hiroshima story in a new way. Some scholars, of course, still disagree with the general "consensus" Walker described; and the implications of the expert literature has not yet reached many "general" historians who are not specialists in this particular area. And, of course, in the following pages each significant remaining objection must be examined and confronted head-on. Walker, however, was unequivocal, even blunt about a central point: "It is certain that the hoary claim that the bomb prevented one-half million American combat deaths is unsupportable."

A rather obvious question now also fairly jumped off the page--one which, of course, had been there all along, at least since the time of the Leahy, Eisenhower and Strategic Bombing Survey statements.

How could it be that what leading military figures believed--and now many historians had concluded--was so radically different from what the majority of Americans still believed?

Throughout the half century that has passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were totally justified--and, moreover, that they had saved a very significant number of lives which might otherwise have been lost in an invasion.

Either Leahy, Eisenhower, the Strategic Bombing Survey and now many modern researchers were totally wrong about the facts--or the American people had been allowed to believe something that was false. That was the question which now would not go away. Even leaving aside continuing expert differences and the remaining areas of uncertainty, the possibility of some measure of deception--or at least extraordinary exaggeration--could not be excluded.

Initially, I thought I might do a short article on the problem. As I dug into the modern documents with the help of a group of young researchers, however, I found dramatic new evidence about how the decision to use the atomic bomb was really made. And, as I probed the question of why the views of most Americans came to be what they were, I discovered, not surprisingly, that this was no accident. Some leading officials (and their associates) had wanted the American people to believe what they came to believe--and they had worked hard to make sure that they achieved their objective.

An article, clearly, could not do justice to such issues, and (after timely nudges and encouragement from my friends Bernd Greiner and Ronald Goldfarb) I decided to undertake a full-blown study. In what follows, Book I attempts straight-forwardly to assemble and report what is now known (and still not known) about the decision to use the atomic bomb. Book II explores why, precisely, what most Americans still believe is different.

In an Afterword to the main text, I examine certain additional points and several "theories" concerning the Hiroshima bombing which have been offered by various authors. The word "theories" may surprise some readers--but, note carefully, this is in fact what historical accounts can only be called when there are significant gaps in the record. Historians like to use the softer word "interpretation" as a substitute for the word "theory," and some still write from Mt. Olympus as if they had all the facts and therefore were simply and smoothly telling the unquestioned story of what happened.

However, very few knowledgeable scholars, if pressed, would claim they could offer definitive answers to some of the most important questions.

As the reader will soon see, much of the information contained in the following pages is not presented in the usual narrative mode of most history-writing (including my own previous work). Instead, I have chosen to reproduce rather substantial passages from White House and other documents at numerous points of the argument. Often the reader is `spared' the details of the living documents of the time. In my experience--and especially in connection with some of the truly critical issues--the documents themselves are far more compelling than any interpretation offered by after-the-fact writers. Indeed, many readers have found them to be gripping, even exciting--and (as in case of the Stimson diaries) almost always highly revealing.

Another reason for inviting the reader into the documentary discovery process has to do with the question of why what we now know is so different from what most Americans have been taught to believe. Practically speaking, the way "history" is constructed is that documents are discovered; then new facts are put together with old facts; then a new "story" emerges from the resulting new mosaic. Looking back over five decades it is extraordinary how the available documents, known facts, and resulting "story" have changed over time. Especially during the last decade and a half there have been extremely important documentary "finds".

A first-hand feel for the actual documents is necessary to grasp how our understanding of events actually emerged over time--how (sometimes very erratically) some of the most important facts were discovered, and how new insights were agonizingly developed. Book I is thus not only an attempt to assemble "what we now know," but also a cautionary illustration (and warning) about the way "official" versions of reality get promoted, and how later--often far too much later--they are commonly contradicted by previously suppressed or otherwise unavailable evidence.

Some of the issues connected with the decision to use the atomic bomb are still so controversial that nothing can be gained by taking shortcuts. The only way to answer the hardest questions is to lay out the evidence.

Furthermore, on some crucial matters there are still huge gaps in the record (and in some cases evidence, too, of the destruction of important documents). The most straightforward approach in situations where direct evidence on an important issue is simply not available is to assemble all the information that can be found, and then attempt to narrow the field of possibilities. Although some additional detail must be presented, this, too, allows the reader to join in the process of investigation so he or she can judge the import of the available evidence. (Whenever feasible I have for this reason also cited easily accessible published sources rather than difficult to check archival files.)

Although I think the scholarly detective aspects of the tale have a certain fascination of their own, I have also tried to limit the scope of the reporting in certain areas--in part simply to hold down its length. As we shall see, the real decisions connected with the use of the atomic bomb were made by a very tiny group of officials. I have accordingly sharpened the focus in Book I to what men at the very top of the U.S. government did during the summer of 1945, and I have referred readers to other studies for additional detail. Many excellent accounts are now available of how the atomic bomb was developed; of lower level bureaucratic and other in-fighting; of, say, how some atomic scientists maneuvered at the last minute to attempt to head off the weapon's use by urging a "demonstration" rather than the destruction of a city.

Book II proceeds in a slightly different manner in its exploration of the question of how the American people came to believe what most still believe about the bombing of Hiroshima.

Ask nine out of ten people why the United States used the atomic bomb at the end of World War II and the answer almost always is: "To save perhaps a million lives by making an invasion unnecessary." In a special 1985 "Nightline" broadcast on the 40th anniversary of the bombings, ABC's Ted Koppel put it this way:

"What happened over Japan . . . was a human tragedy . . . But what was planned to take place in the war between Japan and the United States would almost certainly have been an even greater tragedy . . ."

Where, precisely, did this idea come from? How did it become so widespread? If, in fact, the bomb was not needed to prevent an invasion--and this was known at the time--the notion that it was the only way to save large numbers of lives is clearly a myth. And clearly, too, in a very general sense the public has obviously been misled.

We have been very poorly served by the print and electronic media in connection with the Hiroshima story. Over the past fifty years most journalists have reported what government officials have said about the decision as if it were fact--evidence to the contrary not withstanding. (A courageous and impressive thread of challenging reporting also exists--a reminder that here, too, there have always been people willing to speak out, to penetrate the silence. And again, some of the most forthright reporting was done not only by critics but also by highly respected military journalists or well-known business magazines.)

At another level, there is the routine government classification of major documents for a substantial period (usually thirty years in the case of significant diplomatic and military issues). For decades--especially during the early postwar period when the public's views about Hiroshima were being consolidated--thousands of documents were off-limits to researchers.

Classification practices--and especially the all too easy way in which claims of "national security" are used to suppress information--clearly need to be questioned.

We also lack knowledge of many private discussions between James F. Byrnes and President Truman during April, May, and June 1945, when Byrnes served as the President's personal representative on the Interim Committee. And we know almost nothing about the critical planning sessions the two men held during the eight-day Atlantic crossing before the Potsdam conference and the bombing itself.

That the documents one would need to resolve many of the most difficult issues related to the Hiroshima decision have simply not been available is fully understood by the nation's best scholars. The author of one important study, Martin Sherwin, for instance, asked in 1973: "Was an implicit warning to Moscow, then, the principal reason for deciding to use the atomic bomb against Japan? In light of the ambiguity of the available evidence the question defies an unequivocal answer." Two decades after Hiroshima, another scholar, Barton Bernstein, similarly observed that several key questions "cannot be definitively answered on the basis of presently available evidence . . ."

An obvious question arises: Why is this so? If the decision to use the atomic bomb was simply a matter of obvious military necessity--as had repeatedly been stated--why hadn't everything long since been made public? What was there to hide?

In impressive displays of scholarly reflection and integrity over time, a number of scholars--including Sherwin and Bernstein--had revised various aspects of their interpretations of the decision, and of their judgments.

Bernstein stated to a 1990 gathering: "The task I have is to try as a historian, as an individual, to make some sense on a problem that I've labored on for many years. I've had various formulations . . . I'm sure that each would change and will change over time."

"Evidence almost never on interesting matters entails answers. It only provides leverage for answers. [On other matters] . . . evidence is useful, the leverage is more contingent, and well-intentioned, ardently researching people looking at the same material can plausibly come to different conclusions."

Still another well-known scholar, Steven Ambrose, sent me a personal note on the subject in early 1993 which stated: "For my part I've gone back and forth on the A-bomb decision so many times I can't have much confidence in hard conclusions."

As I began to probe the more puzzling aspects of the record, it also appeared quite obvious that something besides the usual government classification procedures had been at work. The documentary trail is, in fact, punctuated by numerous quite obvious gaps--in some cases because apparently no records of important discussions were kept; in others, for reasons that are unexplained. Also, some documents appear to have been hidden or destroyed.

Specialized work being done on certain specific elements of the story by other scholars also pointed to a common problem: many important documents had evidently been actively suppressed--and others appeared to have been manipulated in odd ways or even in certain cases systematically rewritten to "improve" the historical record.

It seemed plain that the oddities also turning up in other research (for instance, concerning the suppression of information related to radiation experimentation) were no accident--that there was a general problem which needed to be investigated.

The modern term for a process characterized by practices of the kind we are discussing is "cover-up". However, the term is far too blatant and conspiratorial for our purposes. Perhaps the plural form, "cover-ups," might be more appropriate. Moreover, although some of the men involved were indeed blatant and conspiratorial, others appear to have been caught up in events and seem themselves to have been somewhat blinded to what was happening. What they did, even if it resulted in the suppression of information, was not the same as a blatant cover-up.

Several of the people involved, it seems clear, also may ultimately have come to believe the things they later said which are now contradicted by the available documents. Nonetheless, some form of misrepresentation was--and is--certain; and as we shall see, misstatements of fact, manipulation of the documentary record, the withholding of information for many decades, and in some instances, clear evidence of outright lying, define a process which would easily warrant more dramatic labeling in our own era.

Put another way, it would be very surprising indeed if the widespread and continued belief in the mistaken notion that the atomic bomb had been needed to prevent massive loss of life had simply occurred without official encouragement and the denial of access to contrary information.

How were the ideas most people were taught propagated and sustained?

Any effort to find out, of course, is handicapped from the outset: The process is inherently covert. Moreover, some of the parties involved were extremely diligent in covering their tracks. Still, it is possible to sketch the main outlines of what happened by assembling bits and pieces of information from a wide range of sources--and, also, by comparing the public statements of key officials with the evidence which, after fifty years, is now in hand.

The various officials, it turns out, are all rather different. Each in his own way is complex; there are no cardboard characters in this drama.

President Truman, for instance--to take the most notable example--is a far more interesting figure than many commonly understand. He is not simply the straight-shooting, lovable cracker-barrel "man of the people" of recent mythology. It is important to remember that Truman was, after all, the hand-picked senatorial candidate of the notorious Kansas City Pendergast machine--and a shrewd poker player to boot. On several occasions there is indisputable evidence of the president lying about important aspects of the Hiroshima story--both to the American people and to his own Cabinet.

Moreover, as we shall see, his writings on the subject systematically eliminate information on many crucial aspects of the tale which, we can now document, run counter to the official version of events.

On the other hand, Truman was a newcomer to office and for a long time was clearly over his head. There is also ample evidence that at the outset of his Administration he was manipulated by the shrewd politician he made his personal representative for atomic bomb matters--the man he privately called his "conniving" Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes. Often the record shows the president's personal instincts to have been quite different from Byrnes' policy. Through a rather complex process, it appears that ultimately the president himself probably came to believe what he said on many occasions--namely that the bomb simply had to be used to prevent an invasion. (It does not seem to be the case, however, that the question never troubled him.)

The other major figures involved range from the sick and aging Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to the tough-minded, aggressive general in charge of the Manhattan Project, Leslie R. Groves; and they include a host of lesser military and other officials. Late in his life Stimson was rolled forward onto the stage of history to set out the official line (with the help of a young man who later became famous in his own right, McGeorge Bundy.) Characteristically, Stimson--a man of great personal integrity--was to change his mind on what he initially said with Bundy's help, and he subsequently retreated on some crucial issues. Groves was always clear about what had to be done; he did not hesitate to suppress documents, propagandize and even intimidate to make sure his version of events was broadcast far and wide.

Then, of course, there is Byrnes--the man who, in the end, was perhaps most responsible for advice on the decision and for convincing the president to reject other available alternatives. We shall learn a great deal about this man--including his nimble capacity to stay out of the line of fire for decades after the fact in connection with the Hiroshima decision.

We should also reflect on an obvious psychological reality concerning why the Hiroshima myth has been sustained for so long. How many people, in truth, could find the strength to publicly repudiate what had been done and what been said? It is understandable in human terms that many of the men involved probably came themselves to accept as fact things which documents now available show they did not believe at the time.

In our own time in history, most Americans have come to take for granted the obvious fact that government officials regularly lie to the people and then attempt to cover their tracks. Many people are cynical in a way they were not fifty years ago. We are also sentimental: We don't like to think that the men of earlier days might possibly have acted as men do today.

The Hiroshima story reminds us that government deceit (even by good men) is hardly a recent invention.

I wish to stress that term: "good men." None of the officials involved in this tale had evil intentions. What can be said of them, I believe, is that some became so taken by the power the atomic bomb seemed to give them to do good (as they defined it), that they seem to have become carried away.

Stimson put his finger on a key point when he observed privately to his colleague Joseph Grew that they were "very fine men"--but also that they "should have known better . . ."

This returns us to the question of why certain individuals like Leahy and Eisenhower not only reached the conclusions they did about the Hiroshima decision, but why they chose not to continue to affirm the public myth by their personal silence. Both, it seems clear, felt that the use of force could not be allowed to transcend all ethical limits--even the use of force for what was judged to be good: ". . . so I voiced to him my grave misgivings. . . ." "I was not taught to make war in that fashion. . . ."

The manipulation of the public by elites, the seductive belief that overwhelming force confers unlimited power to determine good and evil, and the fragile nature of the limits we seem willing to accept on our own prerogatives are all ongoing issues--as, finally, is the terrible question of what it means for a democracy to delegate to one person such extraordinary discretionary power in an era when the next Hiroshima could be the globe.

As Maya Angelou urged in the poem she read on Inaugural Day, January 20, 1993:

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki--now--I think, have very little to do with the past.

How we choose to deal with them, I believe, may have everything to do with the future.

We are all fine Americans who should have known better about our own silent refusal to confront the enormity of nuclear weapons.