Editor’s note: This article appeared in our Summer 1985 issue. We are sharing it now, on the 80th anniversary of the United States deploying atomic bombs against Japan, amid renewed global concern about nuclear weapons, deterrence and their human cost.
“To me, it was a weapon of war, an artillery weapon. We faced half a million casualties trying to take Japan by land. It was either that or the atom bomb, and I didn’t hesitate a minute, and I’ve never lost any sleep over it since.”
That was how President Harry S Truman publicly described his momentous decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan four decades ago, a decision which ushered in a hazardous new era in human history.
Truman’s decision brought death and suffering to many thousands of people. “Little Boy,” the uranium atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, wrought total destruction in a half-mile radius from the point of explosion, killed about 70,000 persons (including some 20 American prisoners of war) and injured 70,000 more. Three days later, ‘Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, creating a crater one square mile around, killing about 40,000, injuring about 60,000, and leaving a pall of radioactive dust over the city for several days. “All around me I could see people with skin peeling off their bodies,” recalled a survivor. “I thought I was living after the end of the world.”
Truman and others maintained that the bomb also prevented death and suffering by bringing to a swift and conclusive end the deadliest conflict in world history. “We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war,” he told the nation, ‘in order to save thousands and thousands of young Americans.” Henry L. Stimson, then secretary of war, caught the spirit of the times in an essay published in Harper’s in February 1947. “No man in our position and subject to our responsibilities,” wrote Stimson, “could have failed to use it and afterwards look his countrymen in the face.”
When Truman heard the news about Hiroshima, he was aboard the USS Augusta on his way back from his meeting at Potsdam with the wartime leaders of Great Britain and the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Clutching the message, Truman virtually ran around the ship, smiling proudly, telling one group, “This is the greatest moment in history.” His response may seem a bit odd in retrospect, but it can charitably, and probably accurately, be described as a manifestation of release from anxiety over the prospect of a prolonged invasion of Japan. (It was similar to the reaction of the distinguished scientists who had observed the first atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, 21 days before. One scientist, a Harvard man, threw his arms around another and embraced him with a shout of glee; others danced around.)
The initial reaction of Americans at large to the atomic bombing was overwhelmingly favorable. According to a Roper Poll in October 1945, only four per cent believed the bomb should not have been used at all, and 14 per cent said it should have been dropped only after a test on an unpopulated area. Fully 54 per cent, however, approved the use of the two bombs, and 23 per cent believed that Truman had not gone far enough, but should have “quickly used many more of them before Japan had a chance to surrender.”
In the years since, the initial consensus of support for the use of the bomb has eroded. Revisionist historians have contended that the atomic slaughter was unnecessary because Japan, in 1945, was ready to surrender. According to the revisionists, Truman dropped the bomb for other reasons: To keep the Soviets out of the war in the Far East, to get them to change their course of conquest in Eastern Europe, to impress all nations with the awesome power of the United States, and thus to gain tactical advantage in the postwar world.
The debate undoubtedly will continue. But some important things are known about the chain of human actions and events that led Harry Truman to make this decision of destiny on the 115th day of his accidental Presidency.
Late in the summer of 1939, with Europe moving towards war, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The great physicist had been persuaded by other scientists in the United States that Germany might develop an atomic weapon that could decide the outcome of the coming war, and Einstein raised this prospect with the President, urging him to begin American research toward the same end.
Roosevelt moved slowly. Finally, in 1941, he authorized Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, to find out whether such a bomb could be made and at what cost. The following year, the President initiated a project in the War Department to develop atomic bombs. It was called the Manhattan Project.
The Manhattan Project eventually employed some 150,000 persons and spent about $2 billion. Large plants were built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington; laboratory facilities were established at the University of Chicago and at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The true nature of the ongoing work was kept secret from the public, from most cabinet members, from nearly all members of Congress, from the Vice President of the United States, and from our wartime ally, the Soviet Union, though not from Great Britain.
On September 19, 1944, at Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the Anglo-American monopoly on atomic energy should continue “until terminated by joint agreement.” They further agreed that “when a ‘bomb’ is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.” The leaders believed the defeat of Germany would precede the bomb’s availability, although they did consider the use, if necessary, of an alternative device, a deadly anthrax bomb, in Europe.
That same month, Dr. Bush informed Secretary Stimson that an atomic bomb equivalent to around 10,000 tons of high explosives could be demonstrated before August 1, 1945. He also warned Stimson that the present American and British monopoly on the bomb could not be maintained for more than three or four years, and that after that, a nuclear arms race could only be prevented by international control.
In 1944, President Roosevelt twice expressed some doubt that the atomic bomb would actually be used, though he never expressed any real objection to it. On March 15, 1945, in a meeting with Secretary Stimson, Roosevelt expressed concern about criticism that the Manhattan Project was a multibillion-dollar “lemon’’ the scientists had sold him. Stimson tried to reassure the President, pointing out that every leading physicist, including Nobel laureates, was hard at work on the project. The secretary recalled that implicit in the conversation, though not clearly stated, was the conviction that Roosevelt would use the bomb once it was ready.
Twenty-eight days later, Roosevelt was dead, and Harry Truman, the Vice President for only 82 days, was sworn in to succeed him. After a cabinet meeting, Stimson told Truman that a big project was underway to develop a new explosive of awesome destructive power. That, incredibly, was all the secretary of war felt free at the time to tell the new President, “and his statement puzzled me,” Truman wrote in his Memoirs. “It was the first bit of information that had come to me about the atomic bomb.”
Finally, two weeks later, Stimson, accompanied by the director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, went to the White House to give Truman the details. They expected to test the bomb in mid-July and, if the test were successful, to have an operational weapon ready in August. A special air group was training to deliver it. This briefing was thorough except in one aspect: The briefers neglected to tell the President the code name for the operation. Nearly a month later, when Budget Director Harold D. Smith, in a conversation with the President, mentioned the Manhattan Project, Truman had to ask what it was.
Following his meeting with Stimson and Groves, Truman appointed a panel of establishment figures called the Interim Committee to advise him on all aspects of the new weapon and especially on its possible use against Japan. Chaired by Stimson, the committee included Dr. Bush and his deputy, James B. Conant, the president of Harvard; George Harrison, the president of the New York Life Insurance Company; and James F. Byrnes, soon to become secretary of state. The committee’s scientific advisory panel included Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born Nobel laureate in physics, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos laboratory, a leading figure in the developing drama.
The Interim Committee met for the first time on May 9, 1945, the date of Germany’s surrender. Many now regarded the defeat of Japan as a foregone conclusion, and in light of that some scientists questioned whether the bomb should be used at all. The discussion which followed was inconclusive, though not in General Groves’ mind: He met the same day with another committee to choose the Japanese city that would be the bomb’s first target.
On May 31 and June 1, the Interim Committee unanimously adopted a series of recommendations for the President. First, the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. Second, to demonstrate the full range of its power, it should be dropped on a dual target, a military installation or war plant near houses and other buildings highly susceptible to damage. Finally, it should be dropped without prior warning about its nature.
“In reaching these conclusions,” Stimson wrote, “the Interim Committee carefully considered such alternatives as a detailed advance warning or a demonstration in some uninhabited area. Both of these suggestions were discarded as impractical.” The debate about those alternatives continued, however, for several weeks: while the committee’s scientific advisory council explored the less aggressive alternatives. On June 16, the scientists delivered their verdict: “‘We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”
One of the scientists, Dr. Isidor I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate at Columbia University, later detailed the various objections to a “warning” demonstration on some deserted island. First, the United States would have only two atomic bombs in August, which didn’t leave a lot to spare on demonstrations. Second, if a demonstration were a dud, the fiasco likely would stiffen Japan’s resistance. Also, “who would they send,” Rabi asked, ‘and what would he report? You would have to tell him where to stand and what to measure. Otherwise it would look like a lot of pyrotechnics. It would take someone who understood the theory to realize what he was seeing. It would require a level of communications between us and the Japanese which was inconceivable in wartime.” Finally, while the Japanese “argued for weeks or maybe months over the meaning of the explosion, we would be honor-bound to wait for an answer. And what would President Truman say to the American people afterward? How could he explain to them that he had a weapon to stop the war but had been afraid to use it, because it employed principles of physics that hadn’t been used in wartime before?”
A momentum was fast developing for the bomb’s use. The Interim Committee, its scientific advisers, and the secretary of war were unanimous in their recommendations to the President: Drop it. Despite his later declarations of unhesitating resolve, Truman expressed some reluctance to Secretary of State Byrnes. He said he “wanted to weigh all the possibilities and implications” before making his decision.
Regrettably, in the spring and summer of 1945, Harry Truman was not in an especially strong position to do that. He had entered the atomic scene at the eleventh hour, and did not learn in detail about its implications until two weeks into his Presidency. Unlike Roosevelt, he was not the initiator and prime mover of the historic project; rather, he was the inheritor of a weapon that was nearly operational. Also unlike his predecessor, he did not have behind him long experience in office; he was a recently obscure politician in the role of a world-class leader. As Secretary Stimson noted, “Roosevelt had such immense prestige politically, arising from his four successful campaigns for President, that he carried a weight . . . which Truman of course could not possibly have.”
From Roosevelt, Truman inherited advisers who largely assumed that the bomb would eventually be used. It would have required considerable political courage to override that assumption. Richard Haynes, who has written the best account of Truman as commander-in-chief, concluded that the President “did not so much decide to use the atomic bomb as he decided to acquiesce in the completion of a vast project . . . that promised a speedy, life-saving, dramatic finale to the most costly struggle of international warfare. The project had developed an irresistible momentum of its own. . . . Had Truman decided to stop this process, he would have had to justify his decision to the bomb’s makers, the generals, and eventually the people.” More pointedly, General Groves recalled that Truman “was like a little boy on a toboggan who never had an opportunity to say yes. All he could have said was no.
As the summer wore on, some people urged him to say no, at least in part, to the recommendations of the Interim Committee. For example, at a meeting of the War Council on June 18, 1945, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy suggested that Japan be warned that the United States had the bomb and would use it unless the Empire surrendered. McCloy’s proposal was put aside, then reconsidered and rejected by Truman at Potsdam. A number of atomic scientists also made alternate recommendations. James O. Franck, a Nobel laureate, backed the idea of a test demonstration. Leo Szilard, one of the scientists who had urged Einstein to write to Roosevelt about the bomb, drafted a petition signed by scores of scientists and addressed directly to Truman which stressed the moral and political implications of the bomb’s use, particularly without advance warning. A poll taken among the Chicago group of scientists indicated that only 15 per cent favored an unrestricted use of the weapon; 72 per cent favored a test demonstration, and 13 per cent believed the bomb should never be used militarily. The scientific advisory council acknowledged these dissenting views when it stated in its June report to the Interim Committee, “The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous.”
How many of these dissenting views actually reached Truman is unknown. General Groves actually blocked the petition from going to the President on the grounds that since the scientists had been given an opportunity to present their views through the scientific advisory panel, ‘no useful purpose would be served by transmitting [the petition] to the White House.” It is clear that the secrecy surrounding the project also limited the number and variety of people advising the President. In. advance of Hiroshima, nuclear policy in all its aspects was never debated before Truman the way it was, for example, before President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Truman relied heavily on military advice and on the recommendations of the Interim Committee, and he apparently heard few dissenters.
On June 16, the day after he arrived at Potsdam, Truman got the news that an atomic bomb had been successfully detonated at Alamogordo, generating a blast equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT and a light that could be seen for 250 miles. The following day, the President met with his chief military advisers; everyone present gave his views. General George C. Marshall was disturbed by the idea of a surprise atomic attack. But little real discussion ensued. “The consensus of opinion,” Truman said later, “was that the bomb should be used.”
After the evening session at Potsdam on July 24, Truman ‘‘casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest,” Truman recalled. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.” Churchill, who had observed this conversation, later said that Stalin’s blase response was proof. that the Russians had been unable to break the security around the bomb project; others have contended just the opposite.
Next, the military, following Truman’s instructions, got serious about choosing targets. “I wanted to make sure it would be used as a weapon of war in the manner prescribed by the laws of war,’ Truman maintained. ‘That meant that I wanted it dropped on a military target. I had told Stimson that the bomb should be dropped as nearly as possible upon a war production center of prime military importance.” Among the candidates were Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. ‘I personally went over them in detail with Stimson [and] Marshall,” Truman continued, ‘and we discussed the matter of timing and the final choice of the first target.” Barring unexpected developments, the bomb almost certainly could be dropped before August 10, 1945. On Tinian in the Mariana Islands, B-29 crews were nearing readiness; the cruiser Indianapolis was on its way with a shipment of U-235. The first target, the group decided, should be Hiroshima, the eighth largest city in Japan. With that decision made, Truman recalled, “He then agreed to the use of the atomic bomb.”
The order was dated July 24, 1945. It was sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the Army’s Strategic Air Force. It directed that the 509th Composite Group of the Twentieth Air Force, a unit trained for this mission, ‘‘deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.” It also ordered that “additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff.”
In a handwritten journal of the time, Truman expressed far more concern about the impact of his decision than he ever disclosed elsewhere. ‘‘We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” he wrote on July 25, 1945. “I have told Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we, as the leader of the world, for the common welfare, cannot drop this terrible weapon on the old capital [of Japan] or the new.” (He was referring to Kyoto and Tokyo.) He added, “We will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them a chance.”
In reality, it wasn’t much of a chance. On July 26, the United States, Great Britain and China issued a declaration from Potsdam calling for Japan’s “unconditional surrender’’; they didn’t mention the bomb. The Japanese ignored the ultimatum.
“I had made the decision,” Truman observed. “There was no alternative now.”
At Potsdam, Truman had told Secretary Stimson that he hoped only one bomb would have to be dropped. But he never put this wish into an order or policy; on the contrary, his order of July 24 specified that “additional bombs will be delivered.”
“We gave the Japanese three days in which to make up their minds to surrender,’ Truman later wrote, ‘‘and the bombing would have been held off another two days had weather permitted.” It didn’t, and so plans for the bombing of Kokura proceeded. But by the time the fateful B-29 reached Kokura on August 9, the weather had closed in, and after three runs over the city without a glimpse of the target, with gas running low, a try was made for the mission’s second choice, Nagasaki. There, too, the weather had closed in, “but an opening in the clouds gave the bombardier his chance,” Truman wrote, “and Nagasaki was successfully bombed.”
“There was no debate ever on the matter of dropping a second bomb,” General Groves said later. “The debate had been on whether to use the atomic bomb at all.” Indeed, the Manhattan Project’s military policy committee had proposed the use of a second bomb as early as December 1944. The rationale for the “second-bomb strategy” as developed by Groves went this way: The first bomb would demonstrate to Japan the power of the weapon; the second would show that the United States could make and deliver more than one, and perhaps an unlimited number. Groves had shared his thoughts with Roosevelt, Stimson and Marshall, and “none of them appeared to question them as being unreasonable.” When he informed Truman of the plan, the President neither accepted it nor turned it down. The Interim Committee endorsed it. Finally, the idea was included in Truman’s directions of July 24. Thus, for the destruction of Nagasaki, no special order was necessary.
After Nagasaki, the general secretary of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America telegraphed Truman, opposing further use of the weapon. The President made no guarantees, saying of the Japanese, “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nonetheless true.” He later noted, “It was my responsibility as President to force the Japanese warlords to come to terms as quickly as possible with the minimum loss of lives.”
Even after the dropping of two bombs, and the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, that was no small task. The story of how difficult and even perilous it was for some of Japan’s leaders surrender is well-to arrange the Empire documented. Emperor Hirohito himself had to break the deadlock in his government and to overrule his two chief military leaders and assume responsibility for accepting the Potsdam terms. Finally, a military coup to seize the emperor, assassinate his cabinet and keep the war going was only barely averted. In August 1945, Japan still had more than 5,000 planes with kamikaze pilots and an army of more than one million men prepared to defend the homeland. Even with the atomic bombing, the country’s surrender was difficult to attain; without it, it may have been unattainable for years. “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of our young men were worth a couple of Japanese cities,” Truman remarked in December 1945. “And I still think they were and are.”
Later, Truman did express the notion that Nagasaki ought to be it—that the weapon should never be used again. He also gave several indications of unease at the indiscriminate nature of the bomb’s destructive power. In cabinet meetings following the second bombing, he said he wanted no more such bombs dropped on women and children. A few weeks after the war, he was discussing military matters with his budget director, who reminded him, “Mr. President, you have an atomic bomb up your sleeve.” Truman replied, ““Yes, but I am not sure it can ever be used again.” At a press conference in November 1950, Truman acknowledged that ‘there has always been active consideration” of the bomb’s use in the Korean War, but added: “I don’t want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.”
In his autobiography, David Lilienthal, a former director of the Atomic Energy Commission, recalled a meeting with Truman at the White House at which the President said, “It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that . . . is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we ever had.” On that occasion, Truman also seemed to have reconsidered his assertion that the bomb was just another “artillery weapon.” “You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon,” he said. “It is used to wipe out women and children, and not for military purposes.”
In time, Truman’s order of July 24, 1945, became his most controversial single action, and one of the most controversial of any modern President. Many critics have portrayed it as a rush to judgment. In Day One: Before Hiroshima and After, published last year, Peter Wyden argues that Truman’s decision was made in ignorance of the radiation implications of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. A similar view is held by a more sympathetic Truman chronicler, the historian Robert Ferrell of Indiana University. “This man with a Baptist conscience,” Ferrell wrote, “permitted a decision that killed more than a hundred thousand Japanese, men, women and children, condemned thousands more to a frightful maiming, and shortened the life of everyone within the area of radiation. In retrospect, it is clear that he made the decision to drop the bombs with insufficient forethought.”
“Honorable and humane men made the fateful decision to drop the two atomic bombs,” two noted historians, Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg, acknowledged. ‘Honorable and humane men may, in time, conclude that it was the most mistaken decision in the history of warfare.”
Consistently, throughout the balance of his life, the man who made that decision would have none of this. “The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me—let there be no mistake about it,” Truman insisted. “I could not worry about what history would say about my personal morality. ... The top military advisers to the President recommended its use, and when I talked to Churchill, he unhesitatingly told me that he favored the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war . . . I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right.
“It was not an easy decision to make,” Truman finally acknowledged. “I did not like the weapon. But I had no qualms if, in the long run, millions of lives could be saved. The rest is history.”
The late Vincent DeSantis was a professor emeritus of history at Notre Dame when this article first appeared in our Summer 1985 issue.
Professor DeSantis died in May 2011 at age 94. His official University obituary reported that, “during the Second World War, [he] served in the 24th Infantry Division’s 19th Regiment, rising from private to captain in rank. Throughout ferocious campaigns in New Guinea and the Philippines, he kept a diary from which he occasionally read aloud to his students in later and more peaceful years. Discharged in 1945, DeSantis availed himself of the G.I. Bill and earned a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University, studying under the pre-eminent American historian C. Vann Woodward, who became a lifelong friend.”