Hiroshima: Historians Reassess
by Gar Alperovitz
Foreign Policy (Summer 1995) No. 99: 15-34.
Copyright 1995 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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Refusing to Face the Past

There is no longer much dispute that ending the war with Japan before the Soviet Union entered it played a role in the thinking of those responsible for using the atomic bomb. There is also evidence that impressing the Russians was a consideration. Scholarly discussion of this controversial point has been heated, and even carefully qualified judgments that such a motive is "strongly suggested" by the available documents have been twisted and distorted into extreme claims. It is, nevertheless, impossible to ignore the considerable range of evidence that now points in this direction.

First, there are the diaries and other sources indicating that the president and his top advisers appear from late April on to have based their diplomatic strategy on the assumption that the new weapon, once demonstrated, would strengthen the U.S. position against the Soviet Union.

A number of historians now agree that Truman, Stimson, and Byrnes were influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by this fact when they chose to reject other available options for ending the war. Like the language of others, Stimson's specific words to describe the new "master card" of diplomacy are also difficult to ignore:

"Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. . . . we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way. . . . we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique. Now the thing is not . . . to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves."

Particularly important has been research illuminating the role played by Byrnes. Although it was once believed that Stimson was the most important presidential adviser on atomic matters, historians increasingly understand that Byrnes had the president's ear. Indeed, in the judgment of many experts, he fairly dominated Truman during the first five or six months of Truman's presidency.

Byrnes, in fact, had been one of Truman's mentors when the young unknown from Missouri first came to the Senate. In selecting the then highly influential former Supreme Court Justice as secretary of state, Truman put him in direct line of succession to the presidency. By also choosing Byrnes as his personal representative on the high-level Interim Committee--which made recommendations concerning the new weapon--Truman arranged to secure primary counsel on both foreign policy and the atomic bomb from a single trusted adviser.

There is not much doubt about Byrnes' general view. In one of their very first meetings, Byrnes told Truman that "in his belief the atomic bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war." Again, at the end of May Byrnes met, at White House request, with atomic scientist Leo Szilard. In his 1949 A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb, Szilard recalled that

"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."

In a 1968 article in Perspectives in American History, Szilard wrote that "Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania; Byrnes thought . . .that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might."

Another excerpt from Ambassador Joseph Davies' diary records that at Potsdam

"[Byrnes] was still having a hard time. . . . The details as to the success of the Atomic Bomb, which he had just received, gave him confidence that the Soviets would agree. Byrnes' attitude that the atomic bomb assured ultimate success in negotiations disturbed me. . . . I told him the threat wouldn't work, and might do irreparable harm."

Stimson's friend Herbert Feis judged a quarter century ago that the desire to "impress" the Soviets almost certainly played a role in the decision to use the atomic bomb. On the basis of currently available information it is impossible to prove precisely to what extent Byrnes and the president were influenced by this consideration. Nevertheless, just as the discovery of new documents has led to greater recognition of the role of diplomatic factors in the decision, research on Byrnes' role--and the consistency of his attitude throughout this period--has clarified our understanding of this motive. Writing in the August 18, 1985, New York Times, Yale historian Gaddis Smith summarized this point: "It has been demonstrated that the decision to bomb Japan was centrally connected to Truman's confrontational approach to the Soviet Union."

Quite apart from the basic judgment as to the necessity of and reasons for the bomb's use the issue of why the public is generally ignorant of so many of the basic facts discussed in the expert literature remains. For one thing, the modern press has been careless in its reporting. During this year's Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian, few reporters even bothered to seriously consult specialist literature, or to present the range of specific issues in contention among the experts. Instead, historians who still remain unqualified defenders of the decision as dictated solely by military necessity were often cited as unquestioned authoritative sources. Many reporters repeated as fact the myth that "over a million" Americans would have perished or been wounded in an invasion of Japan. Only a handful wrote that among the many historians who criticized the Smithsonian for its "cleansing" of history were conservatives and others who disagreed about the specific issue, but begged for an honest discussion of the questions involved.

Emotional issues were also at work. Time and again, the question of whether dropping the atomic bomb was militarily necessary has become entangled with the quite separate issue of anger at Japan's sneak attack and the brutality of its military. The Japanese people have an ugly history to confront, including not only Pearl Harbor but the bombing of Shanghai, the rape of Nanking, the forced prostitution of Korean women, the horror of the Bataan death march, and the systematic torture and murder of American and other prisoners of war. Even so, the question of Hiroshima persists.

Americans also have often allowed themselves to confuse the discussion of the modern research findings on Hiroshima with criticism of American servicemen. This is certainly unjustified (as the comments of military leaders like Eisenhower, Leahy, and Arnold suggest). The Americans serving in the Pacific in 1945 were prepared to risk their lives for their nation; by this most fundamental test they can only be called heroes. This is neither the first nor the last time, however, those in the field were not informed of what was going on at higher levels.

Finally, we Americans clearly do not like to see our nation as vulnerable to the same moral failings as others. To raise questions about Hiroshima is to raise doubts, it seems to some, about the moral integrity of the country and its leaders. It is also to raise the most profound questions about the legitimacy of nuclear weapons in general. America's continued unwillingness to confront the fundamental questions about Hiroshima may well be at the root of the quiet acceptance that has characterized so many other dangerous developments in the nuclear era that began in 1945.

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