in a strange way, it made the spell more durable. For those who were appalled that Americans had aimed a terrifyingly destructive new weapon at the entire population of a city, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was explained as something that was quite different from all the other bombs dropped by the good Allies. The event itself was treated as brand new, as an abrupt departure from ordinary devastations—as if it were not a technical extension of the fire-bombings of Tokyo, in which 80,000 were killed, and Dresden, in which 125,000 were killed; as if it were not a logical extension of the cruelty of the whole war.
Hiroshima was, despite all the earnest self-searching after the fact, the final affirmation of the ability of the best of civilizations—that of liberal, rational, enlightened Judeo-Christian society—to commit the worst of war’s acts. After Hiroshima, every atrocity short of nuclear death could be accepted as ordinary. And nuclear war itself could be envisioned for extraordinary situations. On August 6, 1970, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hiroshima, American planes, after dropping three million tons of bombs on Vietnam—more than had been dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II—were still flying over Vietnamese rice fields and destroying peasant villages. Israelis and Egyptians were still dropping bombs on each other. Russians and Americans were still increasing their stockpiles of atomic weapons, which now equaled about fifty tons of TNT for each inhabitant of the earth.
What Hiroshima showed was that, even if Hitler was at that moment ashes, even if the corpse of Benito Mussolini had dangled upside down in front of a Milan gas station, even if plans were being made to execute Japanese generals and admirals one by one, the only possible result that could justify the death of fifty million people had not been achieved: a change in the minds of men or in the institutions that set those minds. The basic premises of a world that had given birth to fascism—the notion of “superior” beings having the right of life and death over “inferior” beings, the idea that the victory of one nation over another in war is important enough to justify any unspeakable act—were affirmed in the Hiroshima bombing.
The debate itself over the bombing proved a point. Could any truly civilized nation debate gas chambers for Jews or slavery for blacks? Would it matter who won the debate? The concession that these were debatable was enough. And after Hiroshima, the use of atomic bombs was debatable, the extermination of villages and cities debatable, modern wars of annihilation debatable.
In this sense, Hitler won the Second World War in the same way the South won the Civil War: the signs and symbols were surrendered—the swastika in the one case, slavery in the other—but the evils they represented remained. The most extreme positions were yielded to enable a retreat to secondary positions, where the fundamental malevolence—nationalism and war for Hitler; racism for the Confederacy—could be kept alive in more acceptable form. Or, to put it another way, despite important differences in style, in rhetoric, in the degree of cruelty—the extermination of Jews in death camps versus the incineration of Japanese and German civilians—neither side represented a clear break from the idea that war itself is an acceptable means of solving disputes over political power.
The defensive arguments for the atomic bombings of Japan are therefore more important than mere historical facts; they anticipate the whole postwar rationale for preparing for nuclear war, and the justification for the most devastating non-nuclear wars. (In Korea, more than two million were killed in a “conventional” war.) The arguments illustrate a larger question: the extent to which the behavior and thinking of the United States, as one of the victors in World War II, epitomized certain qualities that were to bring about a national crisis in postwar America.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima turned into powder and ashes the bones and flesh of 100,000 to 150,000 (no one is yet sure) Japanese men, women, and children—in a few minutes. It left tens of thousands blinded, maimed, and poisoned by radiation, either to die soon after the explosion or to live on as its relics. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later killed between 35,000 and 75,000 (here, too, no one knows exactly).
Harry Truman took office in April, 1945—four months before Hiroshima—following the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was then told, by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, about the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb in New Mexico. In his Memoirs Truman justified the dropping of the bomb, and one of his points was that an advisory committee appointed by him had carefully considered the question and approved the dropping of the bombs on populated cities. This was the Interim Committee headed by Stimson; it included Secretary of State James Byrnes, three scientists, and three other civilian officials. “It was their recommendation,” Truman said, “that the bomb be used against the enemy as soon as it could be done. They recommended further that it should be used without specific warning and against a target that would clearly show its devastating strength. I had realized of course that an atomic bomb explosion would inflict damage and casualties beyond imagination. On the other hand, the scientific advisers of the committee reported: ‘… we see no acceptable alternative.’ ” Truman said that “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.”
The decision apparatus on the dropping of the atomic bomb was a perfect example of that dispersed responsibility so characteristic of modern bureaucracy, where an infinite chain of policy-makers, committees, advisers, and administrators make it impossible to determine who is accountable. By comparison, the sly double action of the Inquisition—the church holding the trial, the state carrying out the execution—was primitive. Truman created the impression that expert advisers gave him no choice; the experts—Stimson’s Interim Committee—claimed in turn that they depended on the advice of even greater experts, the four scientists on the Scientific Panel: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence.
The four scientists, it turned out later, did not know certain important facts: that the Japanese were negotiating for surrender through the Russians; that the invasion of Japan, which had been projected before the appearance of the bomb, was not scheduled until November; and that the Japanese were militarily close to total defeat. Oppenheimer, testifying after the war before the Atomic Energy Commission, said: “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in back of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Yet, the Scientific Panel told the Interim Committee: “We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”
Early in July Leo Szilard, who had helped persuade Roosevelt to start the atomic-bomb project, circulated a petition among his fellow atomic scientists, which sixty-seven signed, including Ralph Lapp, asking Truman to withhold dropping the bomb while other steps were taken to induce the Japanese to surrender. According to Compton, the Scientific Panel, at the request of Brigadier General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project, then took a secret poll among scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, which had helped make the bomb. Compton, in an article published three years later, wrote of the poll: “There were a few who preferred not to use the bomb at all, but 87 per cent voted for its military use, at least if after other means were tried this was found necessary to bring surrender.” But it was precisely these “other means” that were not brought forth as alternatives by the Scientific Panel. The exact figures on the poll given in Compton’s article show that only 15 per cent of the 150 scientists surveyed were for full use of the bomb as dictated by military strategy. Forty-six per cent were for demonstrating the bomb in Japan in such a way as to give the Japanese a chance to surrender “before full use of the weapons,” and 26 per cent were for a demonstration in the United States, with Japanese representatives present.
The key to Compton’s interpretation of the polls is in what he said several years after his 1948 article:
One of the young men who had been with us at Chicago and had transferred to Los Alamos came into my Chicago office in a state of emotional stress. He said he had heard of an effort to prevent the use of the bomb. Two years earlier I had pursuaded this young man, as he was graduating with a major in physics, to cast his lot with our project. The chances are, I had told him, that you will be able to contribute more toward winning the war in this position than if you should accept the call