The debate over whether the United States ought to have used the bomb against Japan is complicated and vexing. Did the United States have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war? Should the United States have done so, even if military necessity dictated?
I. The Pacific War
German surrender on May 8, 1945 enabled the Americans at last to turn their undivided attention to war in the Pacific theater. By 1943 the pace of the Pacific war had slowed. American political and military leaders by then assumed that only the invasion and conquest of Japan would bring it to an end. To accomplish that objective, the Americans orchestrated a combined land and sea assault to reduce the Japanese defensive perimeter and render Japan itself vulnerable.
Admiral Chester Nimitz, in command of U. S. naval forces, sought first to regain control of the island chains in the central Pacific: the Solomons, the Marianas, the Gilberts, and the Marshalls. The ultimate targets were Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the latter of which was within 325 air miles of the Japanese islands, close enough for fighter planes to accompany bombing missions. Advancing from the south, General Douglas MacArthur’s ground troops, composed of soldiers from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, hacked and fought their way through the jungles of Papua New Guinea to rendezvous with Nimitz’s task force in the Philippines where they were to prepare for the final assault on Japan.
Even before the war in Europe had come to an end, the Americans were already escalating aerial bombardment. Concentrating on key Japanese war industries, especially aircraft manufacturing and shipping, as well as major Japanese cities, American planes dropped 40,000 tons of bombs on Japanese industrial centers in one month, between March and April, 1945. A single raid against Tokyo on March 10, 1945 killed approximately 85,000 persons. Despite the extensive bombing campaign, the Japanese continued to put up fierce resistance and to inflict heavy casualties. As a consequence, American military strategists began to plan an invasion.
For Operation Olympic, the U. S. Navy allocated 90 aircraft carriers and 14,000 combat aircraft, which was larger than the force deployed for the Normandy invasion. Since the Japanese were sure to mount a fanatical defense of their homeland, American military leaders feared massive casualties would result. By 1944, few if any doubted that the United States would win the war. The only questions were how long it would take to subdue Japan, and how many lives it would cost. Those uncertainties and fears encouraged American officials to use atomic weapons against Japan once they became available, in the hope of ending the war without the catastrophic loss of American lives.
II. The Development of the Bomb
The climactic blow of the Pacific war had been in preparation even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and had originally been aimed at Germany, not at Japan. In 1939, a group of refugee physicists from Eastern Europe had urged the American government to explore the possibilities of creating an atomic weapon before Nazi scientists could develop one. By 1941, the project was well underway. In utmost secrecy, imposed to conceal progress from the Soviets as much as from the Nazis, groups of scientists at work in separate laboratories scattered across the United States struggled against time to master the secrets of the uranium atom.
The bomb was the result of the discovery, made in December 1938, of nuclear fission, the splitting of the uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons. Theoretically if many fissions occurred in rapid succession, the accumulated energy would create a powerful explosion. Scientists were initially uncertain whether what was feasible in theory was possible in practice. Uranium naturally occurs in two forms, identified as U-235 and U-238. Scientists had to find a way to separate the U-235, which is fissionable, from the U-238, which is not. In 1941, Glenn T. Seaborg, a physical chemist at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered that bombardment with neutrons changed U-238 into a new element, which he called plutonium. (For his work, Seaborg received the Noble Prize in Chemistry in 1951.) Just like U-235, plutonium was fissionable. Seaborg reasoned that if the abundant but non-fissionable U-238 could be fashioned into a controlled, chain-reacting pile, it could be transformed into enough fissionable plutonium to generate a powerful atomic explosion. Encouraged by Seaborg’s experiments, Vannevar Bush, the director of wartime scientific mobilization, obtained permission from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in December 1941 to proceed with the construction of an atomic bomb.
In January 1942, a group of chemists and physicists gathered at the University of Chicago to put Seaborg’s theories to the test. They sought to initiate a chain reaction using U-238 to determine whether it would yielded plutonium, and in qualities sufficient to create an atomic weapon. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi constructed such a pile in a doubles squash court beneath the stands of Amos Alonzo Stagg Field, the unused football stadium. Eleven months later, on December 2, 1942, forty-two scientists watched as Fermi ordered the withdraw of the pile’s control rods until a chain reaction occurred, producing the first self-sustaining release of nuclear energy. To commemorate the event, the scientists drank Chianti from paper cups.
Recognizing that construction of the atomic bomb required an immense coordinated effort, Bush arranged for the work to be assigned to the new Manhattan District of the Army Engineers. Although creation of the bomb was technically a military project, civilian scientists controlled the research and testing under military supervision. The so-called Manhattan Project involved three major operations. First, scientists and engineers developed a cluster of methods for separating U-235 from U-238, and installed them in tandem at a huge facility for producing fissionable uranium located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Second, they designed a nuclear reactor and processing works for the making of plutonium at Hanford, Washington. Third, they established a laboratory for the design, development, and testing of nuclear weapons in the deserts of Los Alamos, New Mexico. To obtain a powerful explosion, sufficient fissionable material to form a critical mass had to be brought together quickly and kept together long enough to release a great deal of energy. The most direct method for achieving this result consisted of using a gun to fire one subcritical mass of fissionable material into another with the speed and force of an artillery shell, such as the bombardment of uranium atoms with neutrons. The “gun method” worked for U-235 but not for plutonium, for which scientists had to devise another means. To that end, they conceived implosion, by which a subcritical mass of plutonium was surrounded with high explosives, such as dynamite, that, when detonated, produced a spherically symmetrical shock wave traveling inward toward the center of the bomb. This shock wave compressed the plutonium into a critical mass and kept it compressed while a chain reaction developed that released atomic energy. The process of implosion is akin to squeezing a rubber ball in your hand as hard and for as long as you can, and then opening your hand and letting the ball rapidly expand.
The scientists at work at the laboratory in Los Alamos had confidence in the gun method. In early July 1945, they assembled a uranium bomb, code named Little Boy, for shipment to the 509th Composite Air Group, a specially trained B-29 unit stationed in the South Pacific. The scientists were less certain that they could detonate a weapon using implosion. In an exercise code named Trinity, they tested the implosion device just before dawn on July 16, 1945 in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The blast produced was equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. After the first exhilarating cheers at their accomplishment, the scientists who observed the explosion fell silent. In an interview conducted in 1965, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of Los Alamos laboratory, later said that a line from the Hindu poem Bhagavad Gita came to mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Whatever Oppenheimer may have thought at that moment, or remembered twenty years after the event, the reality at the moment was less dramatic and profound, but no less chilling. He turned to his brother Frank, a particle physicist who had been assigned to the project in late 1943, and said: “Well, it works.”
III. The Decision to Use the Bomb
President Harry S. Truman learned of the successful test while attending a meeting with Josef Stalin and the new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee (Atlee had replaced Churchill during the conference), at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. Truman’s advisors, especially James F. Byrnes, whom Truman had nominated to become Secretary of State, and the Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, urged him to use the bomb against Japan to eliminate the need for an invasion that experts believed would produce at a minimum one million American casualties. The Americans also found unacceptable the peace overtures that the Japanese government made to the Soviets in the weeks before the Potsdam Conference had begun. (Allied leaders gathered at Potsdam on July 17 and the conference ended on August 2, 1945.) The Japanese asked the Soviets, who had signed a peace treaty with Japan and had not yet declared war, to mediate a settlement with the British and Americans with the caveat that unconditional surrender was unacceptable.
Byrnes advised Truman to oppose this concession, arguing that the Japanese would interpret assent as a sign of weakness that would prompt them to make further demands. Instead, the Americans responded by warning the Japanese of the grave consequences that would follow if they continued the war. On July 26, 1945 Truman and Attlee issued the joint Potsdam Declaration, calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan but reassuring the Japanese that the Allies would treat them humanely. If Japanese leaders refused to capitulate, Truman and Attlee promised that Japan would suffer “prompt and utter destruction.” A day earlier, on July 25, 1945, Stimson and the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General George C. Marshall, had authorized the use of the atomic bomb against Japan any time after August 3, the day following the end of the Potsdam Conference, as soon as weather conditions permitted. When, on July 27, 1945, the Japanese government rejected the Potsdam Declaration as “unworthy of reply,” Truman ordered the bombing of Japan to proceed.
At 2:45 A.M. on August 6, 1945 three B-29s assigned to the 509th Composite Air Group departed Tinian Island in the Mariana chain for Japan, 1,500 miles to the north. In the belly of the lead plane, the Enola Gay, was Little Boy, which the bombardier released over the city of Hiroshima at 8:15 A. M., killing approximately 80,000 persons, while maiming and poisoning thousands more, many of whom died within weeks from burns and radiation poisoning. Some sources place the initial death toll at closer to 100,000. Japanese military officials nonetheless refused to allow the politicians to surrender. As a consequence, two days later, on August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria (Manchuko), destroying the million-man Japanese Kwantung Army in a little less than a month, between August 9 and September 1, 1945. When no word of surrender came from the Japanese government, the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb, Fat Man, which was a plutonium implosive device, on August 9, 1945, razing much of Nagasaki and killing another 39,000 persons. Despite the devastation that Japan had suffered, it still took the personal intervention of Emperor Hirohito to overcome the resistance of the military high command to ending the war.
On August 10, 1945, the Empire of Japan offered to capitulate provided that Hirohito be permitted to keep his imperial title and remain on the throne. The United States government formally accepted that condition on August 14, with the understanding that Hirohito would renounce all claims to divinity and yield power to the American commander of the occupation forces. The next day, August 15, 1945, Hirohito made his first ever radio broadcast to the Japanese people, announcing, in what must be the greatest understatement of the twentieth century, that the war “had not necessarily developed in a manner favorable to Japan.” On the deck of the battleship Missouri at anchor in Tokyo Bay, officials of the Japanese government and General Douglas MacArthur signed the articles of surrender on September 2, 1945. The Second World War had come to an end with a bang not a whimper.
IV. The Debate Over the Bomb
The debate over whether the United States ought to have used the bomb against Japan is complicated and vexing. Did the United States have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war? Should the United States have done so, even if military necessity dictated? Once Americans learned that the military had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, public opinion overwhelmingly favored its use since doing so promised to end the war more quickly with far fewer American casualties. As one young American officer destined to take part in the invasion of Japan reflected when he heard news of the bombs and the Japanese surrender: “We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.” He spoke for his generation.
Deploying the atomic bomb also seemed to many American military and political leaders, to say nothing of ordinary citizens, to be an efficient use of air power and an effective means by which to punish a fierce and unrelenting enemy, terrorizing them into surrender. In addition, officials knew that the government had spent so much money to develop and test the bomb that the American people and their representatives in Congress would expect it to be used and the vast expenditures thereby to be justified. Finally, some military and political leaders reasoned that the bomb would not only defeat the Japanese and end the war, but that it would also intimidate the Soviets and give the United States a distinct advantage in the postwar world.
Critics of Truman, Stimson, and Byrnes at the time and since have argued that they saw the bomb primarily as a means not of ending the war with Japan but of tempering postwar Soviet ambitions. J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, recalled that Stimson went to Potsdam intent on convincing the Soviets to cooperate in controlling atomic weapons, but that once there he perceived them to be so implacably hostile to Western values that he lost his nerve. After learning of the Trinity test while at Potsdam, Truman did seem to Churchill to be “a changed man” who was eager to tell “the Russians just where they got on and off.” Truman gave Stalin perfunctory notice about the bomb, casually mentioning it to him on the last day of the conference. Stalin, who already knew about the Manhattan Project from Soviet spies, such as Klaus Fuchs, said that he hoped only that Truman would put the bomb to good use. But when Stalin he returned to the Soviet Union, he accelerated the Russian nuclear program, ordering scientists to redouble their efforts to develop an atomic weapon.
More recent critics of the American decision have suggested that the war could have been won without using the bomb and without an invasion of Japan. They point out that the Japanese had made peace overtures to the Soviet Union, which the Americans might profitably have explored but chose not to do so. They further cite the judgments of American military and government officials that Japan was virtually defenseless before the Americans dropped the atomic bombs, and was, in fact, already a defeated nation that would have been unable to continue fighting beyond the middle of autumn, 1945. The critics who question the need to use the atomic bomb make compelling arguments about the imminent Japanese collapse. American attacks against Japanese shipping would have starved the Japanese into submission in less than a year.
But these judgments have all come well after the fact. At the time, the Americans noted the determined and bloody resistance that the Japanese had put up in defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa as late as July 1945. The battle for Iwo Jima, a tiny, desolate island of only eight square miles, left 19,938 Americans dead, wounded, or missing, while costing the Japanese 21,000 casualties. At Okinawa, General Mitsuru Ushijima realized that victory was impossible, but sought to inflict as much damage as possible on American troops. Anticipating American expectations that the Japanese would resist the invasion tenaciously on the beaches only to be driven inland by American air power and artillery, Ushijima adopted a contrary scheme of defense. He instructed his men to permit the Americans to land unopposed, and then to draw them into battle against what he regarded as impregnable defensive entrenchments, while at the same time turning loose kamikaze fighters against American vessels. His aim was to drive the ships away, stranding the 50,000-man landing force to be destroyed at leisure.
On April 6, 1945, Ushijima unleashed 300 kamikazes. By the end of the day, they had sunk three destroyers, two ammunition ships, and a landing craft. Repeating their attacks on April 7, the kamikazes damaged a battleship, an aircraft carrier, and two destroyers. The Americans responded by increasing their radar scans in order to give captains and crews advanced warning of an attack. The Japanese then targeted the radar ships themselves. Between April 6 and July 29, 1945, Japanese suicide pilots sunk fourteen American destroyers, together with another seventeen transport vessels and an assortment of landing craft. More than 5,000 American seamen died as a result of the kamikaze raids at Okinawa, the largest number of casualties the United States Navy suffered in any engagement of the Second World War, including, of course, the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Japanese ground troops put up equally powerful resistance, and commonly fought to the death. Not until June 21, 1945 did Japanese resistance on Okinawa collapse, when more than 7,000 troops, most of them too seriously wounded to commit ritual suicide, surrendered. From the American perspective, Okinawa was the worst of all Pacific battles. The Army suffered 4,000 killed and the Marines lost 2,938. Add to those numbers the 5,000 sailors who died, and the American death toll amounts to approximately 11,938. An additional 33,769 were wounded. The Japanese shot down or destroyed 763 aircraft and sunk 38 ships. The Japanese themselves, meanwhile, lost 16 ships and 7,800 airplanes, more than one thousand in kamikaze missions. Japanese losses totaled 110,000.
Finally, in deciding to use atomic bombs against Japanese cities, the Americans also took in to account the existence of a million-man Japanese army concentrated in Manchuria. No one could have imagined that the Soviets would dismantle that force in less than a month. Truman and his advisors thus concluded that dropping the atomic bombs was the least costly alternative. Critics also fail to recognize that had the United States not used the bombs against Japan, the military would certainly have continued conventional bombing raids, which cost at least as many Japanese lives as did the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Some critics, of course, maintain that racism against the Japanese impelled the Americans to use atomic weapons against Japan. Certainly, many Americans, angry about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and about the Japanese treatment of American prisoners of war, were anti-Japanese. But the Americans had originally intended to use the atomic bomb not against Imperial Japan but against Nazi Germany, and would have done so had it been available soon enough and had the war in Europe continued long enough. Finally, if the bombing of Japan implies American racism against the Japanese, why do the horrific Allied bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, and other German cities not imply racism against a European enemy? Anti-Japanese sentiment there was in abundance, but racism by itself does not adequately explain why the Americans decided to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
Truman’s expectation that the bomb would frighten the Soviets, rendering them more amenable and easier to manage after the war, may well have distracted him from pursuing other ways of bringing the war to an end. Yet, the alternative that loomed largest in his mind was the possibility of an American invasion. No president able to end a war with a single bombing raid could have ever justified to his actions to the American people by ordering an invasion that would have costs hundreds of thousands of American lives and perhaps as many as one million casualties—and would have cost even more Japanese lives as well, since many more Japanese soldiers and civilians would have perished as the result of an American invasion than had died in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman believed that, all things considered, dropping an atomic bomb on a Japanese city was the most likely to end the war, although that consequence does not render his decision an less tragic.
It is too easy to condemn decisions that men and women in the past have made that today seem myopic, unnecessary, and even savage. That concession notwithstanding, the Second World War admitted no thought but the necessity of victory to be achieved by killing the enemy and destroying his factories, his cities, his country, and by killing as many of his people as possible. Every aspect of life–political, economic, financial, industrial, social, intellectual, and cultural–was transformed to sustain the war effort. Any consideration that impeded total war, including considerations of humanity, mercy, and compassion, had to be swept aside, and any measure that led to total victory, no matter how inhumane or horrific, had to be embraced.
The Second World War nearly obliterated the distinction between soldier and civilian, between combatant and noncombatant. The bombing raids that both sides conducted against civilian targets put an end to all such discrimination. They spared not men, women, or children; they killed rich and poor, old and young alike. No one anywhere in any theater of war enjoyed immunity from such destruction. Mass killing robbed the cradle and filled the grave. Bombs set London and other English cities ablaze. Bombs turned Dresden and Tokyo into a rubble and ashes. Bombs had destroyed ancient sites, such as the monastery at Monte Cassino and the shines at Nuremburg–all before atomic bombs pulverized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These incidents offer undeniable evidence that a war of unlimited objectives will consume humanity itself.
Such developments are so contrary to the foundations on which civilized life has rested that they cast into doubt the possibility of recovery. The restraints of religion and humanism alike proved inadequate to stay the tide of destruction. Even Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman, the leaders of the democratic alliance fighting to defeat tyranny, were vulnerable. Churchill declared that he considered no extreme of violence too great in pursuit of victory. Roosevelt remained confident that the United States was entirely in the right even as the American military showered unimaginable destruction on the civilian populations of Germany and Japan. Truman said that, having given the order to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, he went to bed and slept soundly, without being troubled by feelings of doubt, guilt, regret, or remorse. The exigencies of war prevailed.
The object of this brief reflection is not to fix blame for any particular atrocity that occurred during the Second World War. It is instead to ask, eighty years after the use of atomic weapons against Japan, whether civilization during the twentieth century did not inflict a mortal injury on itself from which it has not, and may never, recover, whether a residue of violence and inhumanity still hovers over the world, including and, in many ways, especially the United States, which itself, ironically, escaped the worst devastation—a residue of violence and inhumanity that conditions us now to accept all manner of atrocities as a matter of course.
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The featured image combines photographs, “Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (Q55435471)” and “Atomic Cloud Rises Over Nagasaki (Q55437339).” This image is a work of a United States Department of Energy (or predecessor organization) employee, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.