The Bomb Was Horrifying. The Alternatives Would Have Been Worse.
Historical records show that dropping atomic bombs was the least bad option.
When word of the attack on Hiroshima, Japan, reached the scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States on Aug. 6, 1945, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was greeted at the base theater by a roaring, foot-stomping crowd. The man who had done more than any other to create the atom bomb responded by clasping his hands over his head, like a boxing champion. Yet at a celebration party later that evening, a few couples danced, but others just quietly talked and drank, unsure what to feel. Off in one corner, Oppenheimer discussed a telex that had just arrived from Washington with the first damage report. The chief scientist grew depressed. As he left the party, he saw a young scientist throwing up in the bushes. He said to himself: “The reaction has begun.”
When word of the attack on Hiroshima, Japan, reached the scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States on Aug. 6, 1945, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was greeted at the base theater by a roaring, foot-stomping crowd. The man who had done more than any other to create the atom bomb responded by clasping his hands over his head, like a boxing champion. Yet at a celebration party later that evening, a few couples danced, but others just quietly talked and drank, unsure what to feel. Off in one corner, Oppenheimer discussed a telex that had just arrived from Washington with the first damage report. The chief scientist grew depressed. As he left the party, he saw a young scientist throwing up in the bushes. He said to himself: “The reaction has begun.”
This article is adapted from Road to Surrender by Evan Thomas (Random House, 336 pp., $28, May 2023)
But it had not—not yet. Most Americans approved of dropping two atomic bombs on Japan; some wished their countrymen had dropped more. Many people—millions of veterans returning home, their long-awaiting families—were grateful to have avoided an invasion. Their worries focused more on whether Russia would get the bomb, or about whether they could find a new car or a house, a job, or a spouse.
Then, on Aug. 31, 1946, a year after Japan’s surrender, the New Yorker published an entire issue devoted to an article by war correspondent John Hersey about the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima. Writing in a just-the-facts style, made more chilling by understatement, Hersey told the story, hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute, of six survivors. The details were at once quotidian and ghastly, and Hersey described, for the first time to most readers, the grim effects of radiation poisoning.
The article, entitled, simply, “Hiroshima,” caused an instant sensation. Radio announcers read all 30,000 words aloud over the air. Editorial writers urged readers to get the full story, and in Princeton, New Jersey, even the mayor urged the town’s residents to do likewise. One Princeton resident, Albert Einstein—the scientist who, in 1939, had first alerted U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the potential of an atomic bomb—ordered 1,000 copies. Hersey’s article did not moralize or sensationalize. The journalist’s contribution was to humanize what the Air Force publicists had always taken pains to keep abstract: civilian death.
More than 75 years later, the reevaluation that began in 1946 goes on: When, if ever, is the use of nuclear weapons justified? Today, as Russia rattles the nuclear saber, China expands its nuclear arsenal, and other nations vie to join the nuclear club, the debate has an uncomfortable relevance and immediacy. U.S. President Joe Biden and the other leaders of the G-7 meeting last month in Hiroshima were reminded why the bomb has been taboo, even if it is relabeled as a “tactical” weapon. This summer, moviegoers will have the chance to experience the moral angst of Oppenheimer as portrayed in a highly anticipated film directed by Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer was not the only one of the top scientists and policymakers to have regrets, though most hid their second thoughts.
U.S. physicist Robert Oppenheimer, left, points to a photograph of the atomic bomb explosion over Nagasaki, Japan, as scientist Henry D. Smyth, Maj. Gen. Kenneth D. Nichols, and scientist Glenn Seaborg look on, circa 1945. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
James Conant, then the president of Harvard University and a key player in the Manhattan Project, followed the Hersey “Hiroshima” furor with alarm. He was particularly bothered by a growing chorus of second-guessing from scientists and intellectuals. These were the people who would teach the next generation, he said, and he worried about weakening the resolve of future Cold War leaders. Conant also did not want his students to come of age thinking that he—or any of the decent scientists who had worked so long and hard on “the gadget”—were some sort of war criminals. Conant wanted a high-profile, considered response, and he had in mind just the man to deliver it. “There is no one who can do this better than Henry Stimson,” the Harvard president wrote to Stimson’s former assistant, Harvey Bundy.
In the fall of 1946, Stimson—Roosevelt’s and President Harry S. Truman’s secretary of war, who authorized the order to deliver the bomb—was recovering from a heart attack that had nearly killed him. Still, he dutifully took on the assignment. Working with Bundy’s son, McGeorge, the old lawyer crafted a masterful brief for the defense. Like Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” it was not tendentious, just a statement of fact. The Japanese had moved close to a million men and thousands of kamikazes of one kind or another (plane, torpedo, boat, frogman) into position in anticipation of the U.S. invasion of Kyushu. The cost was projected to be several hundred thousand Americans killed or wounded. Dropping two atom bombs, Stimson wrote, was “the least abhorrent choice.” The article, which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in the February 1947 issue, carried the cover headline, “Henry L. Stimson Explains Why We Used the Atom Bomb.”
The establishment’s counterattack was effective. The New York Times promoted Stimson’s Harper’s article on its front page, and most of the mainstream media fell in line. Conventional wisdom congealed around Stimson’s conclusion—that there really was no other choice. So remained the narrative until revisionist scholars began poking at some gaps in the story. They noted that Stimson had glossed over his own on-again, off-again campaign to abandon unconditional surrender and allow the Japanese to retain their emperor, and that he omitted altogether the Truman administration’s discussion of using the atom bomb as a lever with the Soviets. Popular opinion about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to swing the other way. People started asking, were two bombs really necessary? And why not, first, a demonstration?
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From the very beginning, long before the revisionists weighed in, Stimson himself was uncomfortable with his role as Public Defender of the Atom Bomb. In December 1946, after working up a draft of the Harper’s essay with Bundy, Stimson wrote his old friend and one-time legal assistant, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “I have rarely been connected with a paper about which I have so much doubt at the last moment.” Stimson confessed, “I think the full enumeration of the steps in the tragedy will excite horror among friends who theretofore thought me a kindly-minded Christian gentleman but who will, after reading this, feel I am cold-blooded and cruel and different from the man who labored for peace under Mr. Hoover.”
Frankfurter read the draft article, slept on it for two nights, and essentially told his old boss to brace up. It was important to combat “sloppy sentimentality,” he wrote. The article would silence “self-righteous critics.” Stimson, who disdained whiners, was duly chastened.
Still, Stimson was further unsettled when former acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew wrote him after the publication of the Harper’s article. Grew, the old Japan hand, reminded Stimson that, back in May 1945, the ex-ambassador to Tokyo had first urged Truman to offer the Japanese a deal: surrender in exchange for retaining the emperor. Stimson had been sympathetic to Grew’s suggestion, but decided that the timing was off, that to offer terms too early was to show weakness. Now Grew basically argued that Stimson (and even more so, Grew’s successor at the State Department, Jimmy Byrnes) had blown a chance to achieve peace before dropping the A-bomb. “The atom bomb might never have been used at all,” he wrote, and “the world would have been the gainer.”
For six months, Stimson did not answer Grew, then sent him an uncharacteristically dodgy reply. But in his memoir, published in 1948, Stimson cryptically foretold what the revisionists would later proclaim, that “history might find that the United States, by its delay in stating its position [that Japan could keep its emperor], had prolonged the war.”
The aerial view from a B-29 Superfortress of the mushroom cloud resulting from the atomic bomb detonation in Hiroshima, on Aug. 6, 1945. US Army Air Corps/PhotoQuest/Getty Images
In later years, two men who were close to Stimson—McGeorge Bundy and Jack McCloy—would say that they detected more than a few pangs of regret in their beloved colonel about the decision to drop the atomic bomb. But was Stimson’s guilt and anxiety justified?
The short answer is no. It is clear from the memoirs and records of the men who governed Japan, as well as the cable traffic between Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and Ambassador to Moscow Naotake Sato, that the Japanese government was not anywhere close to welcoming the terms proposed by Grew in May 1945. Out of the military’s long shadow, Togo might have entertained the offer, and the emperor and his chief advisors, principally Koichi Kido, were beginning to look for an alternative to Armageddon. But the Japanese military leaders, who by the Meiji constitution—as well as the threat of terror—actually controlled Japan, were adamant. They were determined to fight a final, all-out “decisive battle” to bleed the United States invaders until the Americans sued for peace. The military wanted to keep not just the emperor, but to avoid an Allied occupation, disarmament, and war crimes trials. Notwithstanding their otherworldly death wishes, these men were not utterly deluded. No army has ever tried to land on a shore defended by millions of people so willing to die. Had the United States been forced to invade, the bloodbath would have been unbearable to the U.S. people, even before the besieged Japanese finally succumbed.
A boy floats a candlelit paper lantern on the river in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome during 70th anniversary of the bombing in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 2015. Chris McGrath/Getty Images
The atomic bombs did save lives. Yet Stimson’s article is wrong in one notable way. In the end, Little Boy and Fat Man probably did not save the lives of U.S. and Allied soldiers for the simple reason that they would not have been put at risk. It is highly unlikely that the invasion of Kyushu, scheduled for Nov. 1, would have taken place under any circumstances. According to accepted military doctrine, an amphibious force, to achieve a successful landing, must enjoy a three-to-one manpower advantage over dug-in defenders onshore. As Asia-Pacific war historian Richard Frank has shown, by the beginning of August 1945, Magic and Ultra intercepts showed that the two-to-one or three-to-one advantage in troops initially enjoyed by U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s massing invasion force had shrunk to one-to-one or worse. Although MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander, stubbornly (or blithely) dismissed the intelligence indicating heavy Japanese reinforcements, Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of naval operations, was fast backing off his provisional approval of an invasion. Even Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, while committed to troops on the ground, was anxiously looking for workarounds, including the battlefield use of multiple nuclear weapons.
Instead of invading Japan, U.S. forces more likely would have starved the Japanese people. Gen. Carl Spaatz’s new plan to replace “burn jobs” with precision bombing was aimed at Japan’s railroad network carrying rice to the Kanto Plain around Tokyo, where much of the Japanese population lived. In August 1945, most Japanese were living off meager diets. By Christmastime, blockaded and strangled, the Japanese would have been starving to death by the millions, though the army, which had stockpiled food, would starve last. In the most probable scenarios, Japan would have plunged into chaos and civil war—with opportunistic pot-stirring by the Russians, who invaded Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands north of Japan in late August and entertained larger ambitions, including a zone of occupation in the Home Islands, until Truman pressured them to back off. As soon as the U.S. occupation began, MacArthur delivered thousands of tons of food to the badly malnourished Japanese.
Japanese soldiers lay down arms in front of Soviet officers as the Russian army invades and liberates Manchuria from Japan during World War II in August 1945.AFP via Getty Images
The atomic bombs not only saved many thousands and possibly millions of Japanese lives, but they also saved the lives of even more Asians beyond Japan. Under the unforgiving rule of the Imperial Japanese Army, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and Indonesians were dying at the rate of perhaps as many as 250,000 a month. Had the war dragged on, it is horrific to imagine the dystopia that would have engulfed vast areas from Manchuria to Borneo. At admittedly terrible cost, the atom bombs averted a far greater catastrophe. It is also likely that it took both atom bombs—as well as a Soviet invasion of Manchuria—to shake the Japanese military’s fanatical resolve and finally convert the emperor to the cause of peace, as well as his own self-preservation.
Possibly, one bomb was enough to persuade the emperor, but it took at least two to make the Japanese military realize that the threat of more bombs offered a face-saving excuse to surrender—a “gift from the gods.” It is even more certain that a demonstration of the atom bomb, if it was even practical, would have failed to impress the likes of Japanese War Minister Korechika Anami. Though he got a hint from the intercepted cable traffic, Stimson had no way of knowing the extent of Japanese intransigence. He may have imagined there were more “submerged liberals” than Togo and a handful of peace-minded bureaucrats. But history has proved him right that only a strong shock could make the Japanese surrender.
Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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Evan Thomas is the author of Road to Surrender and 10 other books, including Ike’s Bluff. He was the co-author, with Walter Isaacson, of The Wise Men.
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