Post War America 1945-1971. Howard Boone's Zinn

buddies who have fought through the battle of Iwo Jima. Some of them have been killed, others wounded. We’ve got to give these men the best weapons we can produce.” Tears came to his eyes. “If one of these men should be killed because we didn’t let them use the bombs, I would have failed them. I just could not make myself feel that I had done my part.” Others, though less emotional, felt just as deeply.

      Behind the polls, behind the panels, behind the committees, behind the advisers and the interpretations of advice, behind the decisionmakers, a persistent basic belief seemed to quash all doubt about using the bomb. This view is summed up by Compton’s young friend: “If one of these men should be killed,” the failure to drop the bomb would be damnable. Tears at the thought of even one American death. But what of the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of Japanese victims of the bomb?

      The dispersion of responsibility for evil, Hiroshima proved, is as insidious in a liberal, capitalist state as in a socialist state or a Fascist state. The proliferation of advisers, committees, and polls on the use of the atomic bomb allowed for enough participants so that the entire procedure might deserve the honor of being termed “democratic.” But not all the participants were equals; as the Scientific Panel’s ignorance of military matters demonstrates, not all had equal access to information, which is fundamental to real democracy. Further, the liberal state in modern times, like the socialist or Fascist state, is limited in its thinking by national borders; its “democracy” excludes, without a thought, those outside its boundaries. There was no sounding of Japanese opinion on the question of the bomb; indeed, the question sounds absurd in the self-oriented atmosphere created by the nation-state. It seems absurd not just because America and Japan were at war—it would seem just as absurd to suggest that the Greeks should be polled before making a policy decision on whether or not to recognize the Papadopoulos military junta—but because the national limits of democracy are ingrained in our thinking.

      Hiroshima showed us that the broad spread of participation in decisions, which presumably marks a “democratic” country like the United States, is also deceptive. Not only did some of the participants have access to information that others did not, some people in the configuration had immeasurably more power than others. Scientists who opposed the dropping of the bomb, like Szilard, who with Fermi had supervised the first controlled atomic chain reaction at the University of Chicago, did not have as powerful a voice as Groves, an army engineer who built the Pentagon and was in charge of building the bomb. The Szilard petition to the president never reached Truman; it was kept for two weeks by Groves. That Szilard’s statement and those of others against the immediate use of the bomb were held up by Groves and his staff did not become known until 1963, when the files of the Manhattan Project were opened.

      The petition was a forecast of the postwar atomic race:

      The development of atomic power will provide the nation with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for the purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

      If after this war, a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation. Its prevention is at present the solemn responsibility of the United States—singled out by virtue of her lead in the field of atomic power. …

      Hiroshima pulled all the elements of America’s decision-making process—including notions of right and wrong, nationalism, polling, secrecy, and absence of information—toward indiscriminate violence for national goals, without any conscious conspiracy or evil intent by individual leaders. As Groves said, after the war, it was not a matter of Truman’s making the decision to drop the bomb, but rather of his not altering a decision already made, of keeping a commitment hardened by the expenditure of money and men over years. Groves, who pictured Truman as “a little boy on a toboggan,” said of the president’s action: “As far as I was concerned, his decision was one of non-interference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans. … As time went on, and as we poured more and more money and effort into the project, the government became increasingly committed to the ultimate use of the bomb. …”

      It was not that Americans at this point in their history lacked humanitarian feelings. They did not. That is why they needed explanations that showed lives were saved by dropping the bomb. But because the humanitarianism was vague, while the urge to national power was sharp, the explanations needed only to be made by national leaders in order to be accepted without question or scrutiny. Thus Truman could talk in his Memoirs of General George C. Marshall telling him “it might cost half a million American lives to force the enemy’s surrender on his home grounds.” (Marshall’s opposition to using the bomb without warning was not known until the Manhattan Project papers were unlocked; they disclosed that at a meeting in Stimson’s office May 29, 1945, Marshall had urged that the Japanese be advised about the bomb’s targets so people could be removed and only military installations obliterated.) Similarly, Byrnes could say that he had passed on to Truman the estimate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “our invasion would cost us a million casualties.” The president, Byrnes said, then “expressed the opinion that, regrettable as it might be, so far as he could see, the only reasonable conclusion was to use the bomb.”

      That this was not “the only reasonable conclusion” is evident on the basis of only one additional fact, which Truman knew at the time he made the decision on the bomb. He knew that the first invasion of Japan would be on the island of Kyushu, that American casualties there were expected to be about 31,000, and that the Kyushu assault was not scheduled until November—allowing three months for the wobbling nation to surrender. Japan was already beginning to press for peace through her emissary in Moscow, as Truman and the American high command also knew through the interception of Japanese cables. There was, therefore, no immediate need to use the bomb to save lives. Hanson Baldwin summarized the situation as follows:

      The atomic bomb was dropped in August. Long before that month started our forces were securely based in Okinawa, the Marianas and Iwo Jima; Germany had been defeated; our fleet had been cruising off the Japanese coast with impunity bombarding Japan; even inter-island ferries had been attacked and sunk. Bombing, which started slowly in June, 1944, from China bases and from the Marianas in November, 1944, had been increased materially in 1945, and by August, 1945, more than 16,000 tons of bombs had ravaged Japanese cities. Food was short; mines and submarines and surface vessels and planes clamped an iron blockade around the main islands; raw materials were scarce. Blockade, bombing, and unsuccessful attempts at dispersion had reduced Japanese production capacity from 20 to 60 per cent. The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26.

      Such, then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

      Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.

      Confirmation of the argument against the Truman-Byrnes “only reasonable conclusion” thesis was supplied by an official government committee, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, established by Stimson in 1944 to study the results of the aerial attacks on Germany. After Japan surrendered, the survey committee interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders on many matters, including the effects of the atomic bombing. Its report concludes:

      Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

      Truman’s