Issued on July 26, 1945, by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Clement Atlee and Chairman of the Nationalist Government of China Chian Kai-shek, the Potsdam Declaration stated that unless Japan surrendered immediately and unconditionally, it faced “complete and utter destruction.”

Of the four available options, President Truman had elected to use atomic weapons to defeat the Japanese Empire. World War II historian Thomas Childers argues that Truman never “decided” to use the atomic bomb as this course of action was a “foregone conclusion.” Speaking of discussions at the Potsdam Conference about using the atomic bomb, Truman would later write, “There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table. … Never did I hear the slightest suggestion that we do otherwise.”

David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Truman,” stated: How could President Truman “answer to the American people if when the war was over, after the bloodbath of an invasion of Japan, it became known that a weapon sufficient to end the war had been available by midsummer and was not used?”

Truman had no intention of having to answer that question. A few months after the war ended, he stated, “It occurred to me that a quarter-million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they are and were.” Truman also believed that bringing the war to a rapid conclusion using atomic bombs would save countless Japanese lives. According to some estimates, it would have taken months if not years to completely subdue the Japanese population via an invasion.

On Aug. 6, a B-29 bomber the Enola Gay (named for the mother of pilot, Col. Paul W. Tibbets), dropped a uranium bomb dubbed “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. The bomb detonated approximately 2,000 feet above the city, and between 65,000 and 80,000 were killed, many vaporized within the blink of an eye. Another 70,000 to 90,000 were injured, with a significant number later dying of radiation sickness.

When the Japanese did not surrender, a second bomb, this one a more deadly plutonium weapon named “Fat Man,” was dropped. Kokura (home to one of Japan’s largest munitions plants) was the intended target, but inclement weather over that city forced the crew to fly to a secondary target — Nagasaki. Between 40,000 and 75,000 people were killed instantly, and 60,000 severely injured.

Even after the bombing of Nagasaki, hardliners in the Japanese military refused to surrender. When Emperor Hirohito spoke in favor of ending the war, some junior officers contemplated kidnapping him. Finally, on Aug. 14, Hirohito addressed the nation announcing the war was over — Japan had surrendered. V-J Day, Victory in Japan Day, had finally arrived. On Sept. 2, the Japanese signed the surrender papers aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in the presence of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and representatives of our allies: Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Japan’s surrender was welcome news not only to American forces in the Pacific but to hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors in the European theater of war, who would be returning home instead of going to the Far East in preparation for an invasion. A 21-year-old Army lieutenant stated, “When the bombs dropped and the news began to circulate that (the invasion of Japan) would not, after all, take place … we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Shortly after Nagasaki was bombed, Truman received a telegram from Protestant clergyman Samuel McCrea Cavert, imploring him to stop the bombing. Two days later, the president responded to Cavert defending his position to use atomic weapons. Truman stated, “When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.”

Not all of Truman’s many critics were clergymen and others with little or no understanding of military matters. To the contrary, some of the president’s harshest critics were the most respected senior commanders in the United States armed forces, including Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff; Henry “Hap” Arnold, commanding general of U.S. Army Air Forces; Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz; Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr.; Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command; and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Two months after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Admiral Chester Nimitz stated “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.” In his 1950 memoir, William Leahy said “the use of this barbarous weapon in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Gen. Eisenhower said that upon learning of the decision to use atomic weapons from Secretary of War Henry Stimson, I “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on my belief that Japan was already defeated … and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

David McCullough argues that several military intelligence reports indicated Japan was defeated “long before” Truman became president upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945: “Japan’s defeat, however, was not the issue. It was Japan’s surrender that was so desperately wanted since every day Japan did not surrender meant the killing continued.”

According to Gar Alperovitz, former professor of history at the University of Maryland, what prompted Japan to surrender after Nagasaki was not the loss of life, as Japan had suffered the partial or complete destruction of dozens of cities in the past year. What Japan’s leaders feared was the destruction of the nation’s military “by an all-out Red Army assault” as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan two days after Hiroshima was destroyed.

Alperovitz states some of Truman’s closest advisors viewed the atomic bomb “as a diplomatic and not simply a military weapon,” noting that Secretary of State James Byrnes believed using atomic bombs would help the United States dominate the post-war era. From this perspective, the nascent Soviet Union aggression in Eastern Europe also figured into the decision to use weapons of mass destruction against Japan. The implicit (if not explicit) message to the Soviets was that the United States was now the world’s pre-eminent military power.

While the morality of developing an atomic bomb and the military necessity of using it to defeat Japan will be long debated, there is no doubt these weapons of mass destruction have had and will continue to have implications for global politics.

As of January 2016, nine countries had an estimated 16,300 nuclear warheads, with the United States and Russia accounting for 93 percent of these weapons. About 1,800 Russian and American nuclear weapons are on high-alert status and can be launched within minutes of a decision to do so.

A 2014 Smithsonian Magazine article stated that for the past 25 years, U.S. Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs and elite Marine Corps units have been trained in the use of small “backpack nukes,” some of them more powerful than the bomb used to destroy Hiroshima. No doubt other nations possess these highly portable nuclear weapons as well. What might happen if backpack nukes somehow end up in the hands of terrorists or if sword-rattling North Korea attacks South Korea with nuclear weapons? The gigantic mushroom cloud that engulfed Hiroshima after the atomic blast hangs over all of us.

George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego.

Sources:

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