Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War 9781400874439

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S FIVE DAY ST U G U A N I

S FIVE DAY ST IN AUGU How World War II Became a Nuclear War Michael D. Gordin with a new preface by the author

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press In the United Kingdom:University Press, Published by Princeton 6Princeton Street, Woodstock, University Press, 41Oxford William Street, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW 3Princeton, Market Place, New Jersey 08540 Woodstock, In the United Kingdom: All Rights Reserved Oxfordshire OX20 1SY Princeton University Press, All Rights Reserved printing, 3Second Market Place, and first paperback printing with a new preface by the author,Cataloging-in-Publication 2015 Woodstock, Library of Congress Oxfordshire OX20 1SY Data Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-16843-2 All Rights Reserved Gordin, Michael D. Five days in August : how Warthe II beThe Library of Congress has World cataloged cloth edition Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication came a nuclear war / Michael D. Gordin. as follows: Data p. cm. Gordin, Michael D. Includes bibliographical references and Five days in August : how World War II beindex. cameISBN-13: a nuclear978-0-691-12818-4 war / Michael D. Gordin. (alk. paper) p. cm. 0-691-12818-9 ISBN-10: Includes bibliographical references and 1. Hiroshima-shi (Japan)—History— index. Bombardment, 1945. 2. Nagasaki-shi ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12818-4 (alk. paper) (Japan)— History—Bombardment, 1945. ISBN-10: 0-691-12818-9 3. Atomic bomb—United States—History. 1. Hiroshima-shi (Japan)—History— 4. World War, 1939–1945—Japan. Bombardment, 1945. 2. Nagasaki-shi 5. Capitulations, Military—Japan—History— (Japan)— History—Bombardment, 1945. 20th century. I. Title. 3. Atomic bomb—United States—History. D767.25.H6G67 2007 4. World War, 1939–1945—Japan. 940.54'2521954—dc22 2006049337 5. Capitulations, Military—Japan—History— 20th century. I. Title. British Library Cataloging-inPublication Data is available D767.25.H6G67 2007 940.54'2521954—dc22 2006049337 This book has been composed in Aldus Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ British Library Cataloging-inPublication Data is available pup.princeton.edu This book composed Aldus Printed in has the been United States ofinAmerica Printed 10 9 on 8 acid-free 7 6 5paper. 4 3∞ 2 1 press.princeton.edu pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 99 88 7 76 65 45 34 23 2 1

For Katie

The world is what it is, that is, nothing much. Since yesterday, that is what everybody knows, thanks to the tremendous concert which the radio, newspaper, and information agencies have just started on this subject of the atomic bomb. We are informed, indeed, in the middle of piles of enthusiastic commentaries, that any city of average size can be totally razed by a bomb the size of a soccer ball. — Albert Camus, 8 August 1945 In recent years, in classes and special lectures, I’ve had many occasions to describe to younger people the [Manhattan] project, the [atomic] bomb, and its use. I’ve found that at the start a very wide gap separates us. The first thing most of my listeners learned about World War II is that we won it. That is, so to speak, the last thing I learned about it. The first thing they learned about the atomic bomb is that we dropped one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. That is the last thing I learned about the project. — Herbert F. York . . . for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so . . . — Hamlet, II.ii

Contents

List List of of Illustrations Illustrations xi xi Preface to the Paperback Edition Acknowledgments Acknowledgments xiii xiii Acknowledgments xvii Chronology xv Chronology xv Chronology xix Chapter Chapter 1: 1:

Endings Endings

Chapter Chapter 2: 2:

Shock Shock

Chapter Chapter 3: 3:

Special Special

39 39

Chapter Chapter 4: 4:

Miracle Miracle

59 59

Chapter Chapter 5: 5:

Papacy Papacy

85 85

Chapter Chapter 6: 6:

Revolution Revolution

107 107

Chapter Chapter 7: 7:

Beginnings Beginnings

124 124

Coda: Coda:

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55 16 16

On On the the Scholarly Scholarly Literature Literature Abbreviations Abbreviations Used Used in in Notes Notes Notes Notes

147 147

Index Index

195 195

141 141 145 145

Illustrations

Figure 1.1: Figure 1.2:

Western Pacific theater, summer 1945.

2

Map of major B-29 target cities in the Japanese Home Islands.

3

Figure 4.1:

Marines’ progress in Tinian.

67

Figure 4.2:

North Field as seen from the air, flying south from Saipan.

70

Figure 4.3:

North Field, facing southward.

71

Figure 4.4:

Cartoon of Tinian as Manhattan.

72

Street map of Tinian, 1945.

73

Figure 4.5:

L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S

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Preface to the Paperback Edition

We talk about nuclear weapons differently—differently from other weapons, differently from other topics military or civilian. Yet we talk differently in the same way. There has been a striking lack of variety in the rhetoric surrounding these devices in the seventy years since the atomic destruction, three days apart, of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during what people soon came to realize were ultimately the final days of the Second World War. The sameness calls for explanation, and astute observers have offered several for the unique status of nuclear weapons in contemporary cultures around the world: the awe-inspiring power of manipulating the atomic nucleus; the tremendous destruction these weapons can inflict; the overwhelming role they had played in structuring the global world order during the decades of Cold War; the “taboo” that some have identified in using them in conflict (rather, using them again in conflict). Each explanation captures a crucial aspect of how people discuss nuclear weapons, but each also has a temporal flatness, a constancy. We talk about nuclear weapons as a breed apart because this is what they are—distinctiveness is part of their essence, and they have always been this way. Contemporary rhetoric provides ubiquitous evidence of the unique status of nuclear weapons. Consider, for example, the registers of politicians’ and activists’ speech on two issues: how they talk about organizations (states or non-state actors, for example) acquiring these weapons; and how they talk about what to do with the arsenals of those weapons that currently exist. The first topic, nuclear proliferation, is intimately tied to nuclear weapons themselves—after all, a state cannot possess nuclear weapons without

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at some point having transitioned from not having them—yet it is difficult to find pundits describing the British (1952) or Soviet (1949) development of such weapons (let alone the American acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1945) as proliferation. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 (entering into force in 1970), in fact demarcates the five nuclear powers (those above, plus France and the People’s Republic of China, which tested their first weapons in 1960 and 1964, respectively) as distinct from everyone else. The others risk legal sanction or invasion if they embark on nuclear projects. Of course, nuclear weapons are dangerous, and it is reasonable that the international community be concerned about an increasing abundance of massive destructive potential around the world. I raise the question of proliferation because there is manifestly far less concern about rocketpropelled grenades, assault rifles, and handguns, each of which have killed a lot more people since 1945 than nuclear weapons. (By contrast, the present debate about drones indicates that such a conversation can certainly emerge with “conventional” weapons, although even in this case there is perhaps something about the futuristic aspect of these devices that marks them as qualitatively different.) The second topic has a similar structure. Over the past decade, various influential statesmen have begun to articulate a vision of a world without nuclear weapons. (The disarmament community has been imagining such a world since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but only recently has the conversation come to be represented as a practical one.) Early into his first term as president of the United States, Barack Obama firmly expressed his commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons in a speech in Prague. He is not alone; there are hundreds of other current and former decision makers in the apexes of power around the world rallying behind the slogan of “Global Zero.” There are many arguments for a serious political commitment to rid the planet of nuclear weapons, as well as strategic and security concerns pushing against it. I dwell on the direction of this discussion not to advocate one way or the other but merely to note that there is a conversation about global nuclear arsenals. We lack a similar intense push about explosive munitions that destroy cities and kill human beings but rely on solely chemical means. Nuclear weapons are a category apart. The central argument of this book is that this way of thinking about nuclear weapons has a history. There was a time, early in the development of these armaments, when you could find a variety of alternative ways of

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considering their implications among the relatively small set of individuals who knew their potential. Today, there is a sharp line between “conventional” and “unconventional” weapons, and no category of the latter is more privileged, more feared, than the nuclear. Before nuclear weapons had been developed and shown to actually explode with enormous destructive force, such a crisp boundary between nuclear weapons and every other kind of aerial bomb did not exist. That border is a historical creation, and it has a birth date: late in the summer of 1945. Nuclear weapons acquired their aura of being “special”—a designation that will come up many times in the pages to follow—because of the particular circumstances of their use in the final stages of a global conflagration, not because of a transhistorical essence that inheres to these ingeniously-engineered lumps of metal and plastic. This is a large story with large implications and a small cast of characters, most of them either Americans or foreign nationals working under the auspices of the United States military (many of them not physicists, although these scientists usually dominate histories such as this one). The restriction of the actors is not to posit that there were no other atomic projects, although of much smaller scale, under way among other belligerents during the war (there were, in Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan); rather, I confine the story largely to the Americans because the historical sources indicate very strongly that the particular valence that nuclear weapons now possess emerged out of this group of individuals and their contingent, local context. The task in the pages that follow, composed between 2004 and 2007 when the United States was again engaged in a technological war with civilian casualties halfway around the globe, is to demonstrate both how the special status of nuclear weapons was born, and then how it was extended elsewhere. I argue that not everyone engaged in the planning, construction, and use of nuclear weapons thought of the weapons as a priori “special.” Some of the participants, to be sure, deemed them to be cataclysmic, awe-inspiring, world-altering devices, not least because they transformed what people at the time knew about the world and how they could act upon it. The phenomenon of nuclear fission was discovered in a laboratory in Berlin at the tail end of 1938, and for about half of the time between that moment and the nuclear devastation of two Japanese cities, most informed physical scientists did not know that weaponizing uranium would be possible (or practicable). After December 1942, with the first engineered nuclear reactor in

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Chicago, they realized it could be, and for those physicists, chemists, and engineers who took the idea of a chain reaction and built it into a bomb, there was hardly anything more special than this device. Their point of view is important, but it is only one perspective among several about these weapons. The scientists, it bears recalling, were not responsible for deciding when or how nuclear weapons would be used. These were decisions made to some extent by politicians, but mostly—and this is crucial for the rest of the book—by military officers. The atomic bombs assumed the status they have in our culture not merely because they were atomic, but also because they were bombs. By following the mechanisms by which they were integrated into the military planning for ending the war (that is, forcing a surrender by the Japanese government), we arrive at a different understanding of where these devices came from and what they might mean to us today. I am by training and practice a historian of science, but this is a book primarily of diplomatic and military history, simply because the full history of the first nuclear war—of those five days in August when atomic bombs were an active part of aerial warfare—demands all those points of view. Fundamentally, this book describes the local emergence of the nuclearconventional boundary in the context of actually deploying the first two nuclear weapons in combat. The fact that the unique status that nuclear weapons possess today came into existence as a new way of thinking under particular circumstances—that it was the work of people and not of uranium’s properties alone—does not imply that the boundary is somehow unreal. Historical origins do not preclude real-world consequences, up to and including a sense of inevitability, of it-has-always-been-so. As noted above, many intelligent and well-informed individuals act today along lines dictated by the boundary, which means that the boundary makes a concrete difference in how we live in the world. That is a very pragmatic definition of reality, and it is one I subscribe to. As we do, at present, live in a global system structured by nuclear weapons, we would do well to understand how it came to be that way and not otherwise. Michael D. Gordin May 2015

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Acknowledgments

As a member of one of the last generations to come of age in the Cold War, I have found myself contemplating the atomic bomb more times than I like to remember. A consequence of the ubiquity of the atomic bomb in my thoughts and the thoughts of those around me is the large number of people I am fortunate enough to thank for their assistance. The topics raised in this book are still very difficult ones, and I am grateful for all those who shared their views, criticisms, and observations with me. My first debt of gratitude goes to those who provided me with the time and resources to make this study possible. The History Department at Princeton University granted me time to complete the research and write this book, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University generously supported me during that process. Special thanks are due to Diana Morse at the Society of Fellows, who made my stay there so enjoyable. A project of this sort would not have been possible without the assistance of numerous individuals in libraries ranging from Princeton to Cambridge to Washington, DC. Joel Burlingham, Don Simon, and their associates at Princeton’s Article Express office expended an inordinate amount of time and effort helping to assemble the diversity of primary and secondary sources employed throughout these pages; they have my deepest gratitude. The staff at the Seeley G. Mudd Library and Firestone Library at Princeton; the Widener Library, Houghton Library, and University Archives at Harvard; the Manuscripts Room at the Library of Congress; and the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, have provided invaluable assistance and access to materials at all

AC KNOWLEDGMENTS acknowledgments

xiii xvii

stages of the research and writing of this book. Their efforts are sincerely appreciated. Norman Ramsey, one of the major figures in these pages, was kind enough to meet with me in January 2001 to discuss his time with the Manhattan Project. His consideration and generosity with his time and memories played an important role in moving this project forward. Many friends and colleagues have discussed the topics raised in these pages in depth over the past two years, and some have read through the text of part or all of this book. I am very grateful to Elizabeth Baker, Bernard Bailyn, Angela Creager, Amy Finkelstein, Peter Galison, Sheldon Garon, David Holloway, Christina Jiménez, Scott Johnson, Matthew Jones, William Chester Jordan, David Kaiser, Michael Kimmage, Stephen Kotkin, Michael Mahoney, Sean Malloy, Ishani Maitra, Paul Miles, Robert S. Norris, Dan Rodgers, Sam Schweber, Bruno Strasser, and Alex Wellerstein for their suggestions and comments. Two leading scholars of the atomic-bomb decisions, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Barton J. Bernstein, read this manuscript for Princeton University Press and offered detailed and insightful comments. Barton Bernstein in particular has spent countless hours sharing his expertise on matters relating to the end of World War II, and I am especially grateful to him for his support and encouragement. I should note that neither Bernstein nor any of my other interlocutors agrees completely with the account in these pages. I thank them all for their criticisms, especially those that I considered heavily but still disagree with. I alone am responsible for the account that follows. Princeton University Press has been more than usually helpful in the process of bringing this book to publication, and the entire staff has my thanks. In particular, my editor, Brigitta von Rheinberg, has intervened repeatedly to make this a richer and more readable text. Her enthusiasm and acute historical sensibility have been invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank Katie Peterson, whom I came to know well only after I was already consumed by this project; I expect she will be enormously glad that the work is now complete. These pages have been shaped by her more than she knows.

xviii acknowledgments xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chronology

1945

12 April

Harry S. Truman assumes presidency of the United States

8 May 16 July

Germany surrenders unconditionally Trinity test

17 July–1 August

Potsdam Conference

26 July

Potsdam Declaration

6 August

Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima

8 August

Soviet Union declares war on Japan

9 August

Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki

10 August

Japan offers conditional surrender

15 August

Japan surrenders unconditionally

2 September

Occupation of Japan begins

C H chronology RONOLOGY xv xix

S FIVE DAY ST U G U A N I

Figure 1.1 Western Pacific theater, summer 1945. Source: Modified from Carl W. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1951), rear flap. Figure 1.2 (opposite page) Map of major B-29 target cities in the Japanese Home Islands (with the exception of Kokura, not depicted, which lies on the northern tip of the southern island of Kyushu). Reproduced from Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume 5: The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944 to August 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), frontispiece.

Chapter 1

Endings

The Second World War ended suddenly. On 6 August 1945, an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan; on 8 August, the Soviet Union declared war on the Japanese Empire and began early the following morning a staggeringly successful steamroller advance across Manchuria; and on 9 August, a second atomic bomb destroyed much of the Japanese city of Nagasaki. As the story is usually (and frequently) told, this triumvirate of shocks so stunned the Japanese imperial inner circle, and especially Emperor Hirohito, that he unprecedentedly intervened in war-planning deliberations and moved for conditional surrender on 10 August. (The momentous meeting took place on 9 August; the Nagasaki blast occurred in the middle of it.) Back in Washington, U.S. President Harry S. Truman and his cabinet considered the offer, and Secretary of State James Byrnes penned a response insisting that the Japanese surrender be “unconditional”—Allied war terms since the late President Franklin Roosevelt had enunciated them at the Casablanca Conference in 1943. On 14 August, the Japanese acceded, and the emperor broke his traditional silence and announced the surrender over the radio the following day. The first (and to date only) nuclear war was over.1 Sudden indeed. The end of the war clearly came suddenly for Japan. This is a book about how it was equally sudden for the Allies as well, and in particular for the Americans. Coming to grips with the suddenness of the war’s end forces a complete reassessment of how, when, and why the atomic bomb was dropped—the very issues that have engaged so many Americans for the last sixty years. For the generations who have grown up with the truism that “the bomb ended the war,” thinking in terms of suddenness

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may seem hard to swallow.2 Millions of Americans have been taught the history of the atomic bomb as if it were self-evident, from the beginning, that nuclear weapons would by their very nature compel the Japanese to surrender. Echoing this common perception, Manhattan Project veteran Edward Teller wrote that “Hiroshima changed the course of history.”3 We are so familiar with such announcements of the transformation of the world through the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and (although far less often invoked) Nagasaki that the claim seems to us natural, beyond question. We think of nuclear weapons as transformative because, quite simply, they are such, and always were. It was, supposedly, obvious to all concerned in summer 1945 that these weapons were “special,” “epoch-making,” and “revolutionary,” not just to the Japanese who suffered the consequences of atomic bombing, but also to the Americans involved in the decision to conduct it.4 Yet there is something glaringly amiss with this standard picture. No one in 1945 possessed the ability to foretell the future (not surprisingly). The principal American politicians, military figures, and scientists expressed much skepticism at the time over whether the bomb would in fact “work.” Even the definition of what it meant for the bomb to “work” changed dramatically over the course of a few days. At first, “work” meant to explode. After Hiroshima, “work” meant shortening the war by a few months (say, before the scheduled November invasion of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu). Only after 14 August did “work” mean “end the war.” The war was not over until the Japanese government decided that it was; the Allies could engage in various gambits to achieve this goal, but only the Japanese possessed the power to make any of those gambits “work.” It is by looking backward into World War II, and not forward into the Cold War, that we can really begin to evaluate what was unique to these weapons, and what belonged to a longer process of gradual escalation. Almost nobody before 14 August thought that two bombs would be sufficient: if the first bomb did not cause surrender, the American decision makers reasoned, then many would be required, at the very least a third bomb before the end of August, and likely several others before the scheduled invasion.5 In examining attitudes toward the bomb before the detonation over Hiroshima, and then after Nagasaki but before surrender—five days in August—the historical evidence shows that a sizable group of decision makers did not believe the bomb would have

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the power to end the war immediately. On the contrary, the sudden surrender of the Japanese caught Washington rather off-guard, unprepared for demobilization or the economic shocks of peace. A dramatic consequence such as surrender demands an extraordinary cause, and American scientists, politicians, and journalists found that cause in the first postwar days by retrospectively emphasizing the atomic bomb to the exclusion of all other factors. Only the nuclear was “special” enough.6 The use of the atomic bombs against Japanese cities in the final days of World War II still generates enormous interest and controversy, primarily because of concerns over the moral justification of these actions.7 As usually presented, the debate about whether the atomic bombings were justified conflates two separate issues: military justification and moral justification. As the story here unfolds, it will become very clear that the issue of military justification is moot. Because so many military planners and influential politicians considered the atomic bomb to be, at least in some degree, an “ordinary” weapon—certainly special, even unique, in some senses, but decidedly not in the senses we appreciate today—dropping one or several of them merited no more justification than the inception of firebombing campaigns, napalm, or other local decisions made largely in the field: that is, little to no justification. The issue of military justification of the atomic bombings simply did not appear as a live question for Truman or his advisers. Of course, the reason this topic generates vehemence from both critics and defenders of the atomic bombings stems directly from the other question: moral justification. Any assessment of morality in wartime, in terms of both the goals of the war and the means (strategies or weapons) used to achieve it, depends on political values, religious beliefs, moral judgments, and—crucially—context. World War II was the most brutal conflict the world has ever seen, swallowing in its maw approximately fifty-five million lives. The litany of clear-cut crimes against humanity even only in the Pacific theater, thus excluding the Holocaust and setting aside for the moment the status of the atomic bombings, is staggering: the rape of Nanjing, the torture and slaughter of prisoners of war, the Bataan death march, the forced prostitution of Korean “comfort women,” the aggressive firebombing of civilian populations, and so on. By the time the Americans began to consider the potential utility of the atomic bomb, they had already for years experienced increasing brutality, bloodshed, mayhem, and dehumanization, and experienced

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them routinely. This context should be central in any attempt to frame the question of the morality of atomic bombing, let alone in any answer. Without context, the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, were only combinations of fissionable material, electrical components, conventional explosives, and metal. All the social and physical infrastructure of political decisions, military calculations, long-distance bombers, and the late stages of a seemingly eternal war provided the tools for contemporaries to think about the atomic bombs. The bombs might be considered special or unique for a variety of intellectually valid reasons: the introduction of the mechanism of nuclear fission into warfare; the scale of the design of the bomb; radioactivity; American monopoly on the weapon; the fact that an equivalent destruction to an atomic bombing created through conventional raids, and the number of planes needed to cause it, was so much greater; and so on. In each instance, the line between a quantitatively different bomb (a bigger blast) and a qualitatively different bomb (a revolution in warfare) is a matter of judgment; it is a claim about when a change in degree turns into a change in kind. The American scientists, politicians, and soldiers who participated in the atomic bombings made assessments of the atomic bombs as unique and special weapons, but they did not make the same kinds of assessments we make today. To understand the differences, the history needs to be recast from an entirely different angle. To accomplish this, I reorient the story of the atomic bomb drops in time, in place, and in emphasis. A brief inspection of the chronology of relevant events demonstrates how skewed the common American understanding of the timeline has become. The story of the atomic bomb is usually told in three parts. The first part ranges from the discovery of uranium fission in December 1938 to the detonation of a plutonium implosion device at the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945. This is the story of the Manhattan Project, usually the preserve of historians of science, and it highlights the work of scientists and engineers in developing a functional atomic bomb.8 These scientists— and their epicenter of bomb-design operations, Los Alamos—typically vanish from view after Trinity, as if their work was now accomplished (it was not: they continued to make more bombs), and the story shifts to President Truman and the Potsdam Conference of the Big Three

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(Truman, Churchill/Atlee, and Stalin) that took place in late July 1945, immediately after the nuclear test. We are now in the province of diplomatic historians, and the story stresses Truman’s decision making about the atomic bomb and how the bomb fit or failed to fit into both the Allied end-of-war strategy for Japan and the emergent Cold War in Europe. After the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan’s armed forces, this story stops. This timeline compresses months of deliberations dating from before Truman assumed office in April 1945 and extending after the American delegation returned from Potsdam into a small period of time and a single “decision.” Immediately after Potsdam, the traditional story of the atomic bomb flashes to the Pacific theater of World War II for four days: 6–9 August 1945. In these days, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War. As soon as those three events happen, the story almost immediately moves to Tokyo and the Japanese cabinet’s deliberations about surrender. Four years of fighting and the months-long punishing firebombing campaign are eclipsed in a story that is largely about diplomacy before the bombs explode, and Japanese government deliberations afterwards. Almost without exception, the story ends on 15 August 1945, with the emperor’s announcement of surrender. This typical history not only enhances certain features of the historical record at the expense of others—minimizing both the brutality of warfighting in the Pacific and the attempts of the Japanese government to seek a negotiated surrender—but also sharply reduces the amount of already-scarce evidence useful for understanding the dramatic speed in which World War II ended. By placing the bulk of the account after most histories of the “Hiroshima decision” conclude, this book shifts the focus in time in unfamiliar ways. The reorientation in place is similarly broad. The story of the atomic bombs’ use reprises a canonical list of places: Los Alamos, Alamogordo, Washington, Potsdam, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. None of these places ever knowingly confronted a combat-ready atomic bomb. The only site where the atomic bomb was evident as a military weapon was the island of Tinian, nestled in the Marianas. The 509th Composite Group, which was assigned the task of delivering the atomic bombs, and the Los Alamos assembly team named Project Alberta were stationed here. Since Tinian was the only site where the military, scientific, and

ENDINGS

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diplomatic strands of the story of the atomic bomb converged, it demands very close attention. By focusing on how the soldiers and scientists there perceived the weapon they were charged with delivering, we can see the military features of the atomic bomb in relief, with its geopolitical implications, its moral valences, and its scientific aspects in the background. In particular, since Tinian was the home base for most of the B-29s involved in the extensive firebombing campaign against Japan that began in earnest in March 1945, the atomic bomb in situ partakes of the history of conventional firebombing on every level. Finally, nowhere more than on Tinian was the potential third atomic bombing a reality, since Project Alberta and the 509th remained in a state of readiness for assembling that additional bomb until the instruments of surrender were signed on 2 September—that is, over two weeks after surrender had supposedly already catapulted the bombs into the category of “unusable” weapons. The change of emphasis presented in the pages that follow may appear the most dramatic. The history as usually presented focuses on both what Truman intended to accomplish by authorizing the atomic bombings and what role those bombings played in ending the war. Consider, for a moment, what would have happened if Japan had not surrendered on 14 August. Would the atomic bomb’s role in the conflict seem the same to us today?9 It is impossible to answer such questions directly, since the war did in fact end on 14 August; yet, we can now, for the first time—by concentrating on the events and the almost ignored archival documents of the presurrender, postatomic period lasting from 6 to 14 August—tell the story of how the atomic bomb was thought about and treated before anyone could claim that the bomb had ended the war, simply because the war was not yet over. These changes of time, place, and emphasis reveal an utterly surprising history of the atomic bomb’s role in World War II. That history usually appears either as a breathless story peaking at Hiroshima or surrender, or as a romanticized tale of Great Men Making Epochal Decisions. Here the narrative is framed instead as military history: an account based on archival documents that looks at how the bomb was conceived of as a tactical weapon, not as a geopolitical strategic gambit. From this point of view, many in the field perceived the atomic bomb as a quantitatively different firebomb (it was much more explosive, more efficient, and required fewer B-29 bombers to deliver),

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but not as a qualitative change in warfare, however epochal Truman and his advisers at times considered it to be. Military men in particular considered the decision to drop the bomb as a given from the moment development shaded into a deliverable weapon. By December 1944— months before Roosevelt’s death in his fourth term of office—crews had already been assigned to deliver the bombs. The history of the atomic bomb is studded with special procedures of use, special committees, and special moral deliberations by the commander-in-chief. For some of the participants, particularly those close to the scientists, the bomb was indeed intrinsically “special” because the source of its explosive power—the fission of uranium or plutonium—was unprecedented. The bomb was, to these individuals, atomic. For those who emphasized the atomic bomb as a bomb, however, what mattered was whether it would destroy enemy personnel and infrastructure, period. Debates over other “special” aspects of the bomb—such as radiological aftereffects—were rather muted until after surrender had “demonstrated” that the bomb was Special, even Unique. A remarkable fact about this post-Hiroshima, presurrender period is how distant surrender seemed to those directly concerned with the actual dropping of these weapons. One can observe this most clearly in the preparations for a combat drop of a third bomb. Discussion of target and timing for the Third Shot—most likely Tokyo on 19 August— proceeded actively both before and after Nagasaki. Such preparations continued even between surrender and the beginning of the American Occupation of Japan on 2 September, a transitional period when Allied forces feared that a militarist coup might restart hostilities. The Third Shot was a reality in progress until unconditional surrender—seen as the two bombs’ success—began the rapid and mostly unconscious process of expunging it from historical memory. This military option of more atomic strikes, mentioned in numerous cables, briefings, shipping manifests, and diplomatic and scientific correspondence, dropped out of sight by the end of August 1945, and today most Americans believe the reason the United States dropped two bombs on Japan is that the government knew in advance that two would suffice. The days up to surrender prove this supposed military omniscience to be nonexistent. The world we live in today is, in many crucial respects relating to nuclear weapons, still best thought of as a “postsurrender” world. As the title of a monumental recent work on the history of modern Europe

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since 1945 elegantly puts it, the most important fact to understand about Europe today is that it is still “postwar”: World War II generated such a colossal transformation of the conditions of European existence that removing that fact from view even for an instant obscures the manifest realities of today.10 Similarly, the world today is still living “postwar” concerning our attitudes toward atomic bombs: many of the central categories and concepts we use to think about matters nuclear were formed in the immediate wake not of the bombings, but of Japanese surrender. We now live in an epoch that can be fairly characterized as the Atomic Age, a world in which nuclear weapons are unassailably “special.” Yet there is a history to how they came to be regarded this way; it was not always the case. An obvious way to see how uniqueness was conferred retrospectively is to consider perhaps the most unusual feature of atomic bombs, one which has set them apart from all other weapons: they have only been used in wrath once. Of course, no one could know in August 1945 that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be the last use of nuclear weapons, and the uniqueness of that singular moment in history only became apparent in the years without nuclear warfare that followed World War II. So what does this mean? One could interpret the onetime existence of a now-extinct perspective on nuclear weapons as more powerful in degree, if not distinct in kind, as an invitation to reopen the question of the utility of nuclear weapons. Political debates today about tactical nuclear weapons, bunkerbusting warheads, and resumption of nuclear testing would seem to assent to this reasoning. On the other hand, if the revulsion toward nuclear bombing had little originally to do with the “nuclearity” of the weapon, but simply involved the number of civilians killed in a short period of time, then the implications here raise questions about the tactic of city bombing in general, a call to return to pre–World War II norms of the contested morality of air warfare. Both are possible interpretations, and it is not for me to say which would be a more plausible or faithful extension of the concerns of the historical actors, or whether their concerns in the past should be in any way controlling factors for us now. We live with atomic bombs in their “postsurrender” form not just in terms of the debate over the moral justification of the atomic bombings, but in multiple other aspects of nuclear thinking. By this I mean

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more than the obvious “nuclear matters” such as the atomic war planning of Dr. Strangelove and the manner in which nuclear weapons were deployed in a balance of terror during the Cold War. In more ubiquitous and therefore striking ways—the escalation of nonnuclear conventional bombings, regional wars, the development of ever more destructive forms of nuclear warheads, the assigning or denial of war guilt or war responsibility—the attribution of transcendent powers to the nuclear weapon have shaped both the culture and the geopolitics of our present world, now over a decade and a half beyond the reach of the Cold War. Part of the reason the atomic bombings continue to generate so much fervent interest is that the postwar world, and the United States in particular, is still living out the consequences of how World War II ended. Since mushroom clouds marked part of that process of surrender, the importance of the special nuclear weapon has been unavoidable. It is time for an open and informed debate about the role of nuclear weapons in today’s military and today’s international system. If we live in a world concerned with the impact of nuclear proliferation, we should also reflect on why the spread of these weapons (and not, say, napalm or cluster bombs) is to be singled out for special attention. It is a question that merits serious consideration, and not the invocation of clichés. This book draws from several different strands of evidence and argument, partaking at various times to a greater or lesser degree from diplomatic history, history of science, military history, Soviet history, Japanese history, and American history. Instead of separating out all these different threads, I have deliberately interwoven them, hoping to give flesh to the skeleton of old assumptions about the end of World War II with the sinews of historical context. The following six chapters come in pairs, dividing the book, like Gaul, into three parts. The first set fractures and reshapes the question of “time”: why were the atomic bombs used when they were? To accomplish this, these two chapters chronicle the history of America’s end-of-war strategy, first following the demand for “unconditional surrender” and the evolution of a “shock strategy” to compel the Japanese government to accept surrender, and then showing how the atomic bomb came to be integrated into that strategy. The next two chapters scramble the traditional history’s sense of “place”: where were the bombs dropped from, and how did the narrative look from the vantage point of the field? The book thus follows

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the path of the U.S. military and the atomic material to the vitally important yet often ignored island of Tinian. The first chapter of this pair chronicles the integration of Tinian into America’s Pacific War up to the destruction of Hiroshima, and the second remains on the island from before Nagasaki until the demobilization of the Manhattan Project team in the Marianas in early September 1945. These four chapters together highlight the aspects of the atomic bomb that were perceived as “ordinary weapons” by certain politicians, military planners, and scientists. The apotheosis of the Atomic Bomb came afterwards. The final two chapters offer an account of how this unusual-yet-ordinary weapon was turned into an extraordinary one with the advent of Japanese surrender, first within the initial postwar year, and then into the height of the Cold War and the development of hydrogen weapons and a bipolar arms race. These chapters force a change in emphasis: how the bombs were thought of after the surrender of Japan elevated their role in the war from a tactical military weapon into a transformative force. I conclude with an investigation of the central assumptions of “nuclearism”: the belief that nuclear weapons are qualitatively different weapons and thus entail new strategic thinking, new international postures, and new moralities. No one can sanely deny that, at least during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union behaved as if they believed nuclear weapons were cataclysmic weapons that belonged in a different category from the ordinary tools of warfare. As long as politicians and generals treated these weapons as unique, they were indeed such, as they remain today. The Large Firebomb version that had been prevalent in military circles before surrender has all but vanished. It was surrender that selected the Awe-Inspiring Bomb as the proper mode of thinking about these weapons—this designation was not and is not an inevitable corollary of the hardware of the bomb itself. Atomic weapons haunt the political and military future of the world still, whether in the form of nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, nuclear pollution, or nuclear accident. These lingering reminders have stood for critics and defenders since the end of World War II as an allegory for Dr. Faustus (who traded his soul for knowledge), Dr. Frankenstein (who created his nemesis through science), or—in a perhaps less ominous version—as a genie released from a lamp by modern civilization (in its incarnation as the Manhattan Project). Each generation has

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grappled intensely and repeatedly with understanding the implications of nuclearism for its future, but the struggle has always been caught in terms fixed, as if in amber, by the speed and suddenness with which Word War II ended. To break free from the old parameters of discussion, to possibly find new ways of understanding the place of the nuclear in the contemporary world, we must plunge back into a world in which the nuclear did not mean what it now does. That is, we must return to the frantic and confused time that no one yet realized was the final summer of the Second World War.

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Chapter 2

Shock

The atomic bomb was not used, in the first instance, as many Americans assume it was—as a special, revolutionary weapon that demanded extensive deliberation in the halls of power qualitatively different from that required by other weapons. That does not mean it was used blindly. On the contrary, American decision makers integrated the atomic bomb into what one can call a “shock strategy.” In his 1947 article in Harper’s Magazine that quickly became the traditional (even “official”) interpretation of Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb, former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson explained the weapon within American end-of-war strategy: “I felt that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisers, they must be administered a tremendous shock which would carry convincing proof of our power to destroy the Empire.”1 With the benefit of hindsight, we, with Stimson, can see that this shock took form as the atomic bomb. Claims such as Stimson’s provide some of the strongest evidence that military officials and politicians in the United States in the summer of 1945 conceived of the nuclear weapons then being developed at Los Alamos as intrinsically “special” or “unique”; no ordinary weapons could “shock” the Japanese leadership. But Hamlet’s dictum that “nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” should warn us here: just because nuclear weapons could be billed as a shock weapon does not mean that they were always deemed to be such.2 In fact, the strategy of shock that Stimson had such high hopes for was not, so to speak, “born nuclear.” On the contrary, the idea of shocking the Japanese government with tremendous military force in order to generate unconditional surrender had been floating around the State and War Departments for

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months, with a variety of “shocks” proposed to fit the bill. So the idea went, the president would issue a warning, the shock would take place, and the president would then issue another demand for surrender: nothing about the atomic bomb necessary here. By the middle of summer 1945, however, a coincidence of timing made the atomic bomb, to the exclusion of all alternatives, the perfect complement to the strategy. When Emperor Hirohito singled out the atomic bomb in his announcement of surrender on 15 August, the process of establishing the bomb as truly “shocking” was essentially complete. The atomic bomb was not initially conceived of as a shock; thinking made it so. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945, less than a month after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office on 12 April and his vice president, Harry S. Truman, the former senator from Missouri, assumed the presidency. Truman was at first daunted by the scope of his task: the United States was in the late stages of a two-front war on both sides of the globe; the Grand Alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union was starting to fray; and, having been shut out of the inner circle by Roosevelt, Truman had virtually no foreign-policy experience. He thus became deeply reliant on Roosevelt’s advisers, especially former Supreme Court justice and South Carolina politician James F. Byrnes, whom Truman identified as a kindred spirit (Southern, self-made, a domestic politician at heart), who happened to have been in the inner sanctum of Roosevelt’s late foreign policy, particularly at Yalta.3 At the same moment, in April, the Kuniaki Koiso government in Japan fell, and Kantaro Suzuki was named premier of a new cabinet, further intensifying the Truman administration’s sense of uncertainty. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff tentatively planned for Japan’s surrender to come within twelve months of Germany’s, and the popular expectation—as expressed in the army’s newspaper, among other places—was that it would be at least one year if not longer before Japan complied.4 With the European front eliminated in early May, war planning in the Truman administration turned exclusively to the problem of how to compel Japan to accept the terms of unconditional surrender. At that date, the most effective way of striking the Japanese Home Islands, given the great distances of ocean that separated Japan from any Allied-held territory, was strategic bombing using the newly introduced B-29 bomber (such a common sight in Japanese skies they came to be known there as B-san). The preferred form of assault from the

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command outposts in the Marianas Islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian was incendiary firebombing of urban targets.5 One can only understand the atomic bombings directly in the context of the terrifically destructive firebombing campaign. As General Curtis E. LeMay, the architect of the strategy for the Army Air Forces (AAF) later put it in his memoirs: “Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9–10 [1945] than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”6 Even some scientists involved in the atomic bomb’s development felt that firebombing and nuclear bombing were not that different. Norman Ramsey, the physicist in charge of assembling both atomic bombs used in warfare, explained later that the atomic bomb was actually not that much of a change: Every week or so, 20,000 tons of explosives were being dropped on Japan in the course of the normal bombing; and particularly the extrapolation as to what the rate would be (and in fact was around July and August) was getting up to a magnitude which would be about the same size in a few days as an atomic bomb. So from the point of view of a good many people there, the atomic bomb was not considered to be nearly as potent a weapon as it subsequently proved to be.7

Strategic bombing became a substantially larger part of the American strategy against Japan than against Germany for a variety of reasons. First, there was little alternative: while the military conquered island after island, only bombing could bring the war to Tokyo itself. Second, the indecisiveness of strategic bombing in the European theater—there was, and still is, substantial debate about whether the extensive campaign of bombing German military bases, factories, and civilian targets like cities really shortened the war to any noticeable degree—forced Army Air Forces officers’ hands. Officials hoped that a clear success in the war might give them leverage to become an autonomous branch of the armed forces after the war, out from the army’s tutelage, and they focused on Japan to prove their case.8 Finally, one must consider the gradual downward creep of the American military’s moral standards of what constituted a “legitimate” objective to include every conceivable target, military or civilian. When the joint bombing offensives of the Second World War began in Europe in 1942, the AAF took the moral high road while the British

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Royal Air Force (RAF) took the low road. The American commanders refused to send bombers on what was then called “terror bombing” or “area bombing”: the targeting of civilian areas with no direct military value in the hopes of breaking enemy morale and support for the war. The RAF embraced this strategy and would fly large night-time raids against civilian targets. The American doctrine for what later came to be called “strategic bombing”—a loosely defined term that meant in its most general sense bombing that was not conducted in support of a specific tactical operation—was “precision”: fly in daytime over specific military targets and hope to minimize the inevitable civilian casualties that would result. For some American commanders, the objection was moral, but for most, area bombing was derided as simply an ineffective use of resources, and they persisted in looking for a “bottleneck” factory that would, when hit, cripple the German war machine. At least, that was American doctrine at the beginning of the war. As the war progressed, the development of radar and the opposition of formidable air defenses in Germany began to persuade the Americans that perhaps they should move toward a night-time strategy, although still with the hopes of minimizing civilian casualties. By spring 1945, the differences between American and British strategic bombing practices were almost unnoticeable, although the doctrines remained different on paper.9 The Pacific theater demonstrated how much had changed for the Americans. Control of bombers there was kept in the hands of the commanding general of the AAF, Henry “Hap” Arnold, in Washington, DC. The fragmentation of the command in the Pacific—General Douglas MacArthur for the army in the South Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz for the navy forces in the Central Pacific, and General Joseph Stilwell for American forces in China—left Arnold convinced that the only way a coherent bombing strategy could be formulated and executed was by devolving decision making about targets and tactics to local commanders.10 His immediate subordinate in the Marianas was General Carl Spaatz, a 1914 graduate from West Point. Spaatz learned to fly almost immediately afterwards, serving in the office of the limited American air command in France in World War I.11 Although the structure of command below Spaatz was quite fluid in the summer of 1945, in early August Curtis LeMay settled into the post as his chief of staff. The simplification of the chain of command allowed for tremendous shifts in doctrine and strategy to take place with minimal resistance from traditional

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field commanders, and the strong commitment of all three men to airpower and an eventual autonomous AAF permitted experimentation in tactics that would transform the air war against Japan. The results soon came to resemble a scorched-earth policy.12 Military planners had noted early on that Japanese cities—which were congested and largely built of wood—were acutely vulnerable to attacks from high-explosive bombing and especially incendiary devices. The earliest plans to attack urban Japan were drawn up in February 1943, almost two years before the Americans had the infrastructure and equipment to accomplish such an attack. In the meantime, chemists working on contracts for the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) developed new incendiary compounds that were later engineered into deliverable forms. The first American incendiary bomb, the M-47, was developed in 1940 and weighed just under seventy-three pounds. Even so it was twelve times as effective as a five-hundred-pound high explosive against combustible materials and 1.5 times as effective against fire resistant buildings. Improvements on these munitions proceeded apace, especially after General Arnold demanded new and better incendiaries in September 1941. The peak of this development was the jellied gasoline, or napalm, bomb, which was first tested in 1942 and first used in combat in the seizure of the island of Tinian in the Marianas in July 1944. The bomb weighed only 6.2 pounds and could be packed onto B-29s in tremendous quantities.13 At first, AAF bombers had a difficult time hitting their targets in Japan, even after the late 1944 move from Chinese airfields to the Marianas and the development of the B-29. Flying a B-29 at thirtythousand feet meant encountering the previously unknown jet stream above Japan, which dispersed bomber formations and made control of the planes exceedingly difficult. Flying any lower in daytime exposed the planes to Japanese fighter defenses. And dropping such light bombs as the new incendiaries from that height also proved disastrous to accuracy: the bombs drifted away from the residential areas and city centers that quickly became the main targets (both as a concession to area bombing tactics and because of the distributed features of Japanese war industries). Curtis LeMay, who took over from Haywood Hansell after the failure to hit substantial targets, originally flew the same style of mission at a slightly lower altitude with even less success.

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Even if destruction did not meet expectations, LeMay introduced several structural reforms that were prerequisites for the later transformation of firebombing. First, he increased bomb loads. Loads had averaged 5,400 pounds in mid-January 1945, 6,200 pounds in late January, and 6,700 pounds in February. At the same time, takeoff weights dropped (from 137,000 pounds in mid-January to 133,000 pounds in February), which minimized takeoff accidents. As pilots became more experienced and altitude was lowered (dramatically reducing fuel consumption), the B-29s could be loaded with more and more bombs.14 These innovations sparked LeMay’s interest. Largely on his own initiative—fearing that Arnold would countermand his orders as too risky if he knew about them in advance—LeMay reconfigured American tactics for firebombing, with horrific results. On the night of 9–10 March 1945, LeMay sent in 334 B-29s with some two thousand tons of firebombs; on average the planes were loaded with close to six tons as opposed to the usual three tons, an increase in weight obtained by flying the planes at low altitudes (between 4,900 and 9,200 feet) and stripping them of their defensive weaponry and ammunition. Transgressing traditional American bombing doctrine, the planes’ only defenses were to fly at night and hope for surprise. And surprise it was: sixteen square miles of central Tokyo were burnt, including 18 percent of the industrial area, 63 percent of commercial area, and the heart of residential Tokyo. A total of 267,171 buildings were destroyed, 1,008,005 people rendered homeless, 40,918 wounded, and 83,793 people killed outright.15 The heat was so intense that the updrafts from the flames “bounced our airplanes into the sky like ping-pong balls,” LeMay later claimed.16 The Tokyo attack in March remains the most devastating bombing raid in history, greater indeed than the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scale of firebombing in Japan grew vastly after the first successful raid on Tokyo. Although less tonnage was dropped on Japan than on Europe, 24 percent of the Japanese housing supply was eliminated, comparable to the 28 percent destroyed in Germany. Some 99.5 percent of civilian casualties resulted from these air raids in Japan (unsurprising considering the war ended before any ground combat in the Home Islands). Of those bombing deaths, 86 percent occurred in six heavily urbanized prefectures plus Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 102 square miles were burned out in five main cities. In urban areas, 42

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percent of Japan’s industrial zones were demolished, along with half of the telephone lines and national railway repair shops. The output of wheat flour dropped 50 percent. After the war, the Japanese government claimed that American bombers had destroyed 40 percent of Osaka and Nagoya, 50 percent of Tokyo, Kobe, and Yokohama, 90 percent of the prefectural capital of Aomori, and almost 100 percent of Hiroshima.17 In July 1945, 74 percent of the bombs dropped were incendiaries, which was just barely more than the March total of 72 percent. City bombing—as opposed to exclusively military targeting—comprised 77 percent of the entire American effort. At the end of July, thirty-one secondary cities had been hit, and 35.6 square miles destroyed or damaged, including 42 percent of the built-up area. The number of sorties had risen 14 percent, and 34 percent of bombs hit their primary targets. The bomb loads subsequently escalated: from 6.6 tons per aircraft in June to 7.4 in July (the highest monthly load of the war). As more and more of Japan was incinerated, air defenses crumbled to almost nil. The Americans lost only forty-four aircraft (0.8% of those sent on missions) in June, and twenty-two aircraft (0.3%) in July. The planes were flying lower as well, averaging 12,600 feet in July, down from 15,100 in June.18 All of these strikes were declared military or industrial in public press releases. After the public-relations debacle following the largely British air raid on Dresden on the night of 13–14 February 1945, the AAF always specified the military objective while omitting the fact that it might be located in the heart of a residential district.19 Although the Nazi-assisted Spanish Fascist bombing of civilians in Guernica and the Japanese bombing of Nanjing in the 1930s had elicited some of the most vociferous outcry against the Axis powers, no one was prosecuted as a war criminal for either event after the war. Bombing had been deliberately excluded from war-crime status at the end of World War I, an exclusion cemented by the Grand Alliance at the end of World War II. On 8 August 1945, in between the two atomic attacks, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France signed the London Agreement to prosecute war crimes, specifically excluding area bombing.20 Prosecuting the perpetrators of Coventry might call into question exactly what had taken place on the side of the Allies. It sparks no great wonder that LeMay and Ramsey did not find atomic bombing to be dramatically different from what had preceded it.

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The object of all this destruction was to compel the Japanese to accept Allied war terms, encapsulated in the authoritative-sounding but somewhat vague term “unconditional surrender.” This phrase was first announced on 24 January 1943 at a fifteen-minute meeting with reporters after the Casablanca Conference between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. At the conclusion of the press conference, Roosevelt announced that the Americans and the British “were determined to accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy.”21 Roosevelt surprised Churchill and much of his own staff and military with the enunciation of these terms, the language of which stemmed at least from the American Civil War (General Ulysses S. Grant was also known as “Unconditional Surrender” Grant). For Roosevelt, these surrender “terms” (more accurately the absence of terms, since unconditional surrender implied that no negotiation over terms would be accepted) remedied a variety of ills: the doctrine excluded the problems of legality that came with the Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I, such as the “stab in the back” arguments that had assisted Hitler’s rise; it assured the Soviet Union, in the absence of a second front in Europe, that the Americans and British would not seek a separate peace with Germany, and thus helped preserve the Grand Alliance; and it allowed Roosevelt to temporize about war aims to his domestic audience by merely citing the formula and deferring discussion of specifics like spheres of influence or reparations.22 The main object of the doctrine of unconditional surrender was Nazi Germany; Italy and Japan were added largely to round out the Axis. Later, unconditional surrender came to be seen as indispensable in the case of Japan, fitting neatly into common suppositions about Japan’s “suicide psychology.”23 The policy had its critics; as Sir Orme Sargent put it during the war: “Unconditional surrender est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la paix.”24 The leadership of the American armed forces, in particular, considered the policy to be good politics but short-sighted strategy. First, the generals did not believe that they needed a legal carte blanche for an effective occupation, the juridical intent of the policy; they could just as easily occupy a country effectively that had not surrendered unconditionally and disarm its military. In addition, since the rejection of negotiations precluded clarification of the treatment of civilians, soldiers, and political leaders of the defeated nation, uncertainty might prolong

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the war by encouraging populations to fight to the last. It is possible that, in the European war, Allied insistence on unconditional surrender dampened German anti-Nazi resistance and effectively extended the fighting.25 In general, conservatives in the U.S. executive and Congress, including many former isolationists, opposed the doctrine because it suggested a tremendous commitment to foreign postwar reconstruction and implied the social engineering of occupied territories (as in fact proved to be the case). This rationale was most notable with Roosevelt’s first secretary of state, Cordell Hull, but Stimson and Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal also felt uncomfortable with these terms.26 Domestic New Dealers, on the other hand, saw unconditional surrender as an opportunity for real global reform, and in interdepartmental meetings lower-level foreign service officers in the State Department strongly defended unconditional surrender.27 Meanwhile, planning for the surrender of Japan continued under the assumption that the United States would not waver from its demand for unconditional surrender. A great deal of this planning took place in the office of Brigadier General George A. Lincoln, chief of the Strategy and Policy Group, Operations Division of the War Department General Staff, and thus General George C. Marshall’s chief strategist.28 By the time Truman assumed office, the doctrine had become so embedded in public support of the war effort that it would have required extraordinary political effort to change it. Yet the Japanese government hoped that such a change might occur, and it worked in two different ways—aggressive and passive—to prompt the United States to modify unconditional surrender and come to the negotiating table. The aggressive strategy, pursued by the army and navy and insisted upon by radical junior officers—and to some extent, at least in early summer 1945, by Emperor Hirohito—was to force a final battle with the United States. At no point in these final months did the Japanese military believe that they would be able to defeat American forces completely and win the war; but they felt confident that they could inflict such catastrophic losses on invading armies that they would compel the United States to negotiate a conditional surrender. This hope for a “decisive battle” lay behind the intensive reliance on suicide tactics in the defense plans labeled “Ketsu Go,” and for the tremendous buildup of military forces on the southern Home Island of Kyushu.29 Rather than dreading the impending invasion of

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Kyushu (Operation Olympic), tentatively scheduled for 1 November 1945, a segment of Japanese militarists were counting on it. The War Department, as late as early August 1945 (that is, just before the atomic bombs were dropped), assumed that an invasion would be necessary in any case and continued to revise American troop demands upward.30 The American expectation was that casualties would be severe.31 Forces within the Japanese government that wanted an end to hostilities sooner rather than later—often dubbed by historians the “peace party,” although its composition and views were hardly coherent enough to merit this designation—pursued a parallel and largely independent path of approaching the Soviet Union (and, to a lesser degree, the Vatican) and asking for mediation with the Americans to guarantee a conditional surrender.32 The effort to obtain Soviet mediation has come in for severe criticism by historians as well as contemporary diplomats as highly illogical. Why would an Axis power, with a committed antiCommunist domestic and foreign policy, possibly consider Stalin to be a faithful—or even marginally reliable—mediator with the United States? The fact that Stalin in the end sat on these peace feelers and did not communicate them to Truman in a timely fashion only reinforces bewilderment at this move. While unsuccessful, mediation through the Soviets was not obviously foolhardy. Most saliently, the Japanese government had few powers they could turn to: they were officially at war with the United Kingdom and China, the only other powers with an interest in the region. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had been party to a mutual Neutrality Pact since 25 April 1941, an armed truce that was advantageous to both parties even before the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and the subsequent Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor on 7 December that same year. While the neutrality between the two powers had been shaky and the Soviets did not trust the Japanese enough to reduce the significant Red Army concentrations in East Asia and shift them westward, the existence of the pact provided a legitimate basis for continued requests for mediation; even after the Soviet Union abrogated the pact on 5 April 1945, a one-year grace period indicated that the shaky status quo might persist.33 The diplomatic context of the Neutrality Pact also meant that approaches for mediation could be concealed from hawks within the Japanese government and military who opposed any diplomatic solution to the war. In addition, it

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was thought that the Soviets could be bought off with Japanese colonial possessions and at the same time provide a valuable postwar check on American control of Japan in the postwar period.34 Finally, while the radical rightists in Japan rejected Communism, they were a great deal more attracted to the state and economic system of the Soviet Union than the Westernism represented by the United States; both sides could conceivably work together against the Americans.35 In the meantime, the United States was trying to persuade the Soviet Union to violate even the grace period of the now-abrogated Neutrality Pact and enter the war against Japan. Historians have often considered American attitudes toward Soviet entry into the Pacific War as related to the issue of the atomic bomb, but they have done so from mostly one angle: did the Americans believe that Soviet entry might force Japan to surrender before they could drop their first atomic weapon, and did they delay or attempt to prevent Soviet entry altogether so that they would have a chance to use the weapon, from a desire either to use the weapon on Japan for internal reasons, or to intimidate the Soviet Union into compliance in problem areas like Eastern Europe? This thesis of delay— usually considered the cornerstone of “A-bomb revisionism”—has been extensively debated in the historical literature reviewed in the coda, and I will not discuss it further here. Rather, the question for our purposes is not whether the United States desired or feared Soviet entry into the war against Japan, but what they thought Soviet intervention was for. The answer touches intimately on the strategy of shock. While American strategists initially conceived of Soviet entry as an integral part of a conventional military strategy, they came in the end to see it as a shock in its own right. Much as shock strategy was not “born nuclear,” neither the atomic bomb nor Soviet entry was “born shocking”—they became so. From Pearl Harbor on, the United States had attempted to convince the Soviet Union to engage Japan, or at least to permit the Americans to establish bomber bases in eastern Siberia.36 Occupied with the ruinous Nazi invasion in the West, Stalin demurred, insisting that the United States open a second front in Europe instead. With the war in Europe over as of 8 May 1945, the pressure on the Soviets to enter the Pacific War increased. Stalin indicated that he would enter the conflict three months after V-E day, to allow for transfers of troops and materiel.37 Why did the Allies want the Soviets in the war so badly? Originally,

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Soviet entry was desired to pin down Japanese bases in China and so to prevent reinforcements from returning to Japan before or during the invasion of Kyushu. After April 1945, the Allied blockade was sufficient to prevent mass transfer of reinforcements (which had already happened, in any event), and American planners understood that the Soviets would not be essential for an invasion. Instead, Stimson and Marshall still desired Soviet entry, but now (in June) in order to shock the Japanese into surrender by removing their only remaining nonaggressive neighbor.38 Without Soviet entry, the United States had to devise some mechanism, with assistance from Chinese Nationalists, to accept Japanese surrenders on the Asian mainland, if and when they came. Planning for this eventuality became especially crucial after Hiroshima but before Soviet entry.39 Stalin was no less eager to enter the Pacific War. While he desired to be explicitly invited into the conflict, he also knew that without Soviet participation before a surrender, the Soviet Union would be hard pressed to secure the territorial claims ceded to them under the secret Yalta accords. Accordingly, it made sense for the Soviet Union to enter the war as late as possible (to conserve effort and war-weary troops), but still early enough to make significant inroads before surrender. Although he might not have believed that an atomic bomb would generate a sudden surrender—a skepticism shared, as we shall see, by many American military and political leaders—he was not about to take any chances.40 On 16 July 1945—the day of the Trinity test but before Truman officially (and casually) informed Stalin of a new weapon—Stalin called Marshal A. M. Vasilevskii from Potsdam and told him to accelerate impending operations against Japan so they could begin on 1 August, a ten-day advance. Vasilevskii responded that this was impossible, but on 5 August, the day the Soviet delegation returned from Potsdam, Vasilevskii said he could invade on 9–10 August, about one or two days earlier than he had originally thought possible. The atomic attack on Hiroshima further intensified the pressure on Vasilevskii to accelerate the preparations for hostilities.41 Soviet foreign minister Molotov communicated to Japanese ambassador Sato at about 5 p.m. on 8 August that the Soviet Union had declared war on imperial Japan, and that this would be effective the next day. Sato, perhaps naively, believed that this gave him roughly twenty-four hours to communicate with Tokyo. He actually had an hour. Soviet forces crossed the border into Manchuria

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at midnight Transbaikal time, 6 p.m. Moscow time. Although the gradual removal of its best troops to reinforce the Home Islands and other crucial positions had substantially weakened the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria, it was still a formidable force. The speed with which the Red Army demolished these troops and spread across Japaneseoccupied mainland Asia marks one of the most striking military operations of the Second World War.42 The Soviet move certainly registered in Tokyo as an inflection point in the war, although it is still (and will likely forever remain) a matter of some uncertainty whether it was more or less significant than the atomic bombings in prompting the decision to surrender. The Japanese had for some time been expecting the Soviet Union to enter the war but had been unable to detect the remarkable Soviet buildup of forces that had been taking place since February 1945, and thus they were caught off guard, a failure that shook Hirohito’s confidence in the army’s intelligence apparatus, and more specifically in its ability to coordinate intelligence with strategic planning. The entry of the Soviet Union also intensified Emperor Hirohito’s fears of rebellion at home, especially from the repressed Marxist movement.43 Perhaps most saliently, the Soviet Union was the peace party’s best hope for mediation to soften unconditional surrender. Once the Soviet Union became a belligerent, the only option was to confront the Americans directly or to risk a final battle—and the possibility of Tokyo becoming a divided occupation city like Berlin. Soviet entry removed any options besides fighting or surrender.44 The entry of the Soviet Union had dramatic effects on the structure of the postwar world, many of which American war planners considered in advance as beneficial. Commentators today often ignore the outstanding fears of some in the United States government that the colonial powers in Europe (particularly the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands) would try to seize their colonial possessions back from the Japanese at the end of the war, perpetuating the territorial aggrandizement seen as generating the war in the first place. Even a severe anti-Communist like Secretary of State James Byrnes believed that if the Soviets could help prevent reoccupation of colonial territories by shocking the Japanese into surrender before colonial regimes could reactivate, then it might be the lesser of two evils.45 This colonial issue was pressing. After the war in Europe ended and Rangoon was recaptured on

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3 May 1945, the British command regrouped in order to accomplish two main goals: the invasion of Malaya (Operation Zipper) and the recapture of Singapore (Mailfist). The prospective D-Day for these operations was 9 September 1945, almost two months before the scheduled invasion of southern Kyushu.46 By summer, substantial bombing had begun to support the planned invasions, encompassing railroad repair shops at Kuala Lumpur and the Empire Dock at Singapore, which was 39 percent destroyed.47 As it happened, the end of the war with Japan—and in particular its manner, speed, and suddenness—spurred the postwar decolonization of the British Empire in Asia.48 The outstanding Allied objective remained the unconditional surrender of Japan. If the Japanese could not be persuaded to accept unconditional surrender, military means would continue to be used, but the goal was still to force a political recognition on the part of the Japanese government that it was defeated. This was the only approach possible if “unconditional surrender” remained fixed. After V-E Day, the undersecretary of state and his associated “Japan Crowd” within the State Department proposed modifying unconditional surrender by “clarifying” its terms to allow for the retention of Emperor Hirohito or the institution of the emperor under American occupation. Although these efforts were watered down, the idea was retained to provide a clarification to Japan in the form of a warning and then accompany it with some kind of “shock.” Conceived of in quite different terms, this resulted in the ambiguous clarification found in the Potsdam Declaration, and the shock would turn out to be the atomic bomb. The major figure in these plans for modification was Joseph C. Grew, undersecretary of state at the time that Truman assumed office. An appointment in the State Department under Roosevelt, especially as he began his fourth term, was not an enviable post. Functioning in practice, if not nominally, as his own secretary of state, Roosevelt crafted his foreign policy himself, and the inevitable strength of the War Department at this crucial moment tended to diminish the remaining power of State. Roosevelt’s nominal secretary, Edward Stettinius, was a General Motors man seen by many insiders in Washington as a powerless sop to big business. His main task was to negotiate the United Nations Charter at the San Francisco Conference in the first months of 1945, and so he was far from Washington. Stettinius left his mark on the department nonetheless. He created the State-War-Navy Coordinating

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Committee (SWNCC), which met at the secretary or undersecretary level almost every day, and elevated conservative foreign policy officials, like Grew, to high posts.49 Grew was in many ways an excellent choice to be the State Department’s active agent in Washington as the war in the Pacific took center stage. Like Roosevelt, Grew had graduated from Groton and Harvard. In his long career in the foreign service, he had served as ambassador to Japan since 1932, before which he had been ambassador to Turkey and undersecretary of state to President Calvin Coolidge. In May 1944, Grew was named head of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs (displacing the favorite of the “Old China Hands,” Stanley Hornbeck), and in November 1944 he was once again undersecretary of state. Grew’s arrival was the high point for the so-called Japan Hands, including Eugene Dooman, Robert Fearey, Joseph Ballantine, and a series of academics who had concentrated in Japanese studies before the war, such as George Blakeslee and Hugh Borton.50 The “Japan Crowd” was able to exercise a real influence on policy in the brief moment after Truman became president but before he appointed James Byrnes as his new secretary of state. The attempts to modify unconditional surrender were the apex of such efforts. The era of the Japan Hands ended when Byrnes appointed Dean Acheson, in with the “China Crowd,” to be Grew’s replacement as undersecretary on 11 August.51 By then, both atomic bombs had been used, the Soviet Union was in the war, and the Japanese government had made its first explicit moves toward surrender. After the war was over, Truman offered Grew the post of civilian consultant to General Douglas MacArthur for the occupation of Japan, a position Grew was more than happy to turn down as he faded into retirement.52 There is little doubt that Joseph Grew was the main figure advocating a relaxation of surrender terms to allow for the possibility of retaining the emperor. (After the war, Grew suggested that this idea would have provided a way to avoid the atomic bomb, which represents a feat of retrospective imagination; at no point before surrender did the atomic bomb enter Grew’s reasoning.)53 As Roosevelt had focused his attention on problems in Europe and on the maintenance of the Grand Alliance, much of the planning for postwar Japan had been delegated to the State Department, which was deeply aware of the problems that would be engendered by a so-called direct occupation of Japan (replacing the entire government and administering the transition directly through

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the military). Indirect occupation using extant Japanese bureaucrats was considered a way to avoid chaos and prevent the resentment that would inevitably follow from the Americans banning or prosecuting the emperor—assuming a ban of the institution was even feasible.54 Grew was thus invested in preserving some aspects of the old Japanese bureaucracy to simplify postsurrender planning, and he believed that the emperor would have to be retained anyway. The possibility of terms might also induce the Japanese to surrender before the scheduled invasion, and Grew expected a long war. In late June 1945, he wrote to Bennett Wolfe of the Associated Press: “I fear that V-J Day is still not ‘just around the corner.’ ”55 The idea for preserving the emperor—or at the very least leaving open the possibility of preserving his person or the institution—did not appear to Grew in the wake of victory in Europe. On the contrary, the usually timid diplomat raised this issue as early as January 1945, shortly after he assumed office: I discussed this matter fully with Admiral Nimitz as well as with his psychological warfare officers and we were in complete agreement that for the present we had better let the Emperor alone, as he might be found to be an important, if not an essential, asset, both in bringing Japan to unconditional surrender and in avoiding chaos and guerilla warfare after our eventual occupation of Tokyo. In other words, the presence of the Emperor may conceivably be the source of saving thousands of American lives. At least, the Emperor’s voice is the only voice which the Japanese people, and probably the Japanese military forces, are likely to obey.56

He continued to develop this theme as the year went on, as in a letter of 11 July: If the Japanese people should crack, surrender by the Japanese armed forces would not necessarily follow. Their continued resistance, particularly on the continent, would be entirely possible, and I believe that no order from any government in Tokyo would persuade them to lay down their arms. I think it is quite possible, however, that they would heed an Imperial Rescript to that effect, as to them such a document would be almost sacred, provided the Rescript were not issued under circumstances which could be construed as foreign duress.57

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For Grew, the United States needed the emperor to ensure stability in the transition, to prevent the war in mainland Asia from continuing, to save lives, and, lastly, because the Americans simply did not have the power to eliminate the Emperor against Japanese wishes: “If the Japanese themselves want to keep their emperorship we had better let them do it. . . . If we were to eliminate the emperorship I have little doubt that the Japanese themselves would take it right back again as soon as our back[s] were turned, and we cannot very well occupy Japan permanently.”58 The idea of offering “assurances” to the emperor that he would not necessarily be deposed if the Japanese surrendered unconditionally received support from many senior members of Truman’s cabinet, including Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, and Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy.59 Grew’s position seems a great deal clearer in retrospect than it did at the time. On occasion, Grew would declare that he wished to keep the emperorship, but that he did not see how Hirohito could avoid being tried as a war criminal for authorizing the declaration of war and the attack on Pearl Harbor: “I personally don’t see how Hirohito can very well remain as I should think he would have to take the responsibility of defeat, especially in a country where personal responsibility is an important factor in any situation.”60 The institution, on the other hand, might be cleansed of Shinto propaganda and retained to assist in the American occupation. Forrestal recorded in his diary that Grew believed he was misunderstood as to his goals in clarifying surrender: “He said he was in favor merely of deferring the decision on the question of the Japanese Emperor until we had effected a military occupation, at which time we could determine whether he was an asset or a liability.”61 Grew believed that letters he received from the public indicated that a speedy surrender might lead to popular support for his position on imperial assurances.62 Grew remained in favor of the term “unconditional surrender”: “From my own knowledge of Japanese matters I believe that any retreat from our insistence upon unconditional surrender would be interpreted by the Japanese as an indication that the American people lack the determination to carry the war all the way through until our announced objectives are achieved.” He insisted nevertheless that, “[w]hile our ‘terms’ are and will remain unconditional surrender, the ‘treatment’ to be accorded Japan under those terms may obviously be

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modified in the light of developments.”63 Henry Stimson, on the other hand, wanted to give “the Japanese a modification of the unconditional surrender formula and some hope to induce them to practically make an unconditional surrender without the use of those words.”64 The agreement that Grew felt was to some extent illusory: he wanted a conditional surrender to be called unconditional, and Stimson wanted an unconditional surrender to be called conditional. To a certain degree, some of Grew’s notions were being tested in the field in a completely unauthorized fashion. Captain Ellis M. Zacharias, a naval intelligence officer at the Office for War Information, in the twelfth of a series of broadcasts (aired on 12 July 1945) informed Japanese listeners that if surrender happened immediately, the Japanese would receive treatment consistent with the Atlantic Charter—which implied a retention of the emperor. There was tremendous outcry within military circles for this unauthorized unilateral fiddling with delicate foreign policy issues, although Grew personally agreed with Zacharias.65 In his defense, Zacharias pointed out after the war that the Soviet Union had modified unconditional surrender repeatedly in an ad hoc fashion during its advance across Eastern Europe, and that he felt he was acting well within the limits of the Hague Convention by removing a dangerous propaganda weapon from enemy use.66 Zacharias’s announcement, soon rescinded in another broadcast, highlighted the delicate issue of timing; as Grew noted: “[t]he question of timing was the nub of the whole matter.”67 If a clarification of unconditional surrender was determined to be a good idea, when should the Americans announce it, and in what form? The efficacy of the firebombing had made the Japanese government and people much harder to predict, Grew contended the day after V-E Day: “The difficulty in estimating what the Japanese are likely to do rests on the fact that they have never been subjected to continuous bombing, and we therefore have no yardstick to measure the impact of these things on their national consciousness.”68 The announcement had to be timed right, so that a “clarification” of what “unconditional surrender” meant would accompany some major triumph of the American military. In the middle of June, Grew suggested that the seizure of Okinawa—the battle for which had been ongoing since April—might provide such a shock, since capturing that island would reveal the inevitability of even more punishing strategic bombing and the eventual

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invasion of Japan.69 More immediate, and more controllable by the Americans, would be a terrifically destructive firebombing raid: The greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne. If some indication can now be given the Japanese that they themselves, when once thoroughly defeated and rendered impotent to wage war in the future, will be permitted to determine their own future political structure, they will be afforded a method of saving face without which surrender will be highly unlikely. It is believed that such a statement would have maximum effect if issued immediately following the great devastation of Tokyo which occurred two days ago. The psychological impact of such a statement at this particular moment would be very great.70

Truman, who initially stated that he found Grew’s arguments quite appealing, suggested Soviet entry as another shock that might serve well in synchrony with a clarification of surrender terms.71 Such a clarification of surrender terms did eventually happen, in the form of the Potsdam Declaration (or Proclamation), issued on 26 July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference of the Big Three, over the signature of all major Pacific belligerents (thus excluding Stalin, since the Soviet Union was still officially neutral). Grew later claimed credit for beginning the process of crafting an explicit warning to the Japanese that would invite them to surrender in the face of worse consequences.72 The drafts for the declaration, written by Grew as well as Stimson, included explicit guarantees for the emperor, but Byrnes (in accordance with Truman’s wishes) struck out those lines, so that the relevant clause, Article 12, read: “Subject to suitable guarantee against further acts of aggression, the Japanese people will be free to choose their own form of government.” Failure to comply would be met with “prompt and utter destruction.”73 This enunciation was vague in two senses: the status of the emperor was ambiguous; and there was no explicit warning about the atomic bomb. After the “shocks” hit, including either one or several atomic bombs and/or Soviet entry, the declaration could be interpreted as having warned of them in advance. It also gave the Americans the greatest possible leeway in evaluating the emperor question after the fact. At the same time, of course, it paid for that leeway by nullifying any benefits of a concession on the throne.

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Stimson and some of his colleagues believed that the atomic bomb or Soviet entry might induce the Japanese government to surrender, but only when accompanied by an explicit guarantee for the emperor. So why did the United States fail to offer such assurances in advance? The most obvious explanation, which bears a lot of weight, is the hostility of the American public to Hirohito and their desire to see him dethroned. Polls in July and August showed that roughly one-third of Americans wanted his immediate execution, one-fifth imprisonment or exile, one-sixth a trial, and only 3–4 percent wanted his employment by the Allies.74 In addition, Stalin—who was still wanted as a belligerent in the conflict—would probably have seen any concession as a move to a separate peace and threaten to rescind his fickle cooperation.75 Finally, Cordell Hull, the former secretary of state, informed Byrnes that there was a strong possibility that any explicit softening of terms would lead to greater recalcitrance of the Japanese, and it would be better to wait for Soviet entry and “the climax of allied bombing” before any modification took place.76 Grew disagreed, but he held little influence with Truman and was easily overruled. Given that the clarification of unconditional surrender was intended to be issued with a shock, the crucial question is why and how it turned out to be the atomic bomb—and not Soviet entry—that became that shock. This question is almost never asked because it seems self-evident that the atomic bomb—today seen as an intrinsically special weapon— would be a natural fit for the shock strategy. In fact, only a coincidence of timing linked the atomic bomb to the Potsdam Declaration; of the many possible shocks proposed, it proved the only one available that met the planned schedule for the end of the war. Okinawa was an ill fit: the campaign was still underway and the kamikaze attacks on ships and the very high American casualties suggested that it would likely not impress the Japanese much. Soviet intervention was uncertain before 15 August, and far from desirable from the point of view of Truman and his closest associates. So, once the decision was delayed to be discussed at the Potsdam Conference, and firebombing was running out of clear targets, the atomic bomb was the only workable option. The schedule seemed immutable: clarification–bomb–Soviets–invasion.77 Once the atomic bomb was slotted in place, the question of selling the atomic bomb as a shock different in quality from the “conventional” raids became a public-relations issue, but one that the Manhattan

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Project and the War Department were prepared to address. The eventual surrender of Japan after the atomic bombs, and the public admission by Hirohito and other members of the Japanese cabinet that the atomic bombs were central to their decision making, further reinforced the “shock” value of the atomic bomb, making it difficult to discern the contingent train of events outlined in this chapter. The American public tends to believe that Japan surrendered unconditionally, which was technically true—but only technically. The irony of Grew’s failure to modify unconditional surrender into surrender with the sole condition of keeping the emperor is, of course, that this is precisely what happened at the end of the Second World War, but after two atomic bombs had exploded and after the Soviets had intervened in Asia. Cordell Hull perhaps put it best: “As for our Oriental enemy, Japan surrendered three months later [than Germany] when she perceived that the principle of unconditional surrender could be applied conditionally.”78 Even some of the most pro-American, propeace narratives by Japanese statesmen published after the war insisted, invoking a literal reading of the Potsdam Declaration, that Japan did not actually surrender unconditionally—only its armed forces did so. Potsdam, these memoirists argue, was a revocation of the doctrine of unconditional surrender, and thus a partial victory in defeat for the Japanese.79 How did “unconditional surrender” come to include conditions? In the well-known sequence of events, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August, the Soviets declared war on 8 August, crossing the border an hour later on midnight on 9 August, the same day that the Bockscar dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. That second bomb detonated while across Japan in Tokyo the Big Six of the Japanese cabinet were meeting to discuss conditional surrender. On 10 August 1945, the Japanese broadcast a willingness to surrender to the United States “on the understanding that the Allied Proclamation would not comprise any demand which would prejudice the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”80 The Americans immediately issued an aerial cease-fire.81 The Japanese announcement came as somewhat of a surprise in Washington. Stimson was about to leave on a much-needed vacation—hardly the action of a man who expected the atomic bombs to end the war instantly—when the message was received. He rushed back to the White House. Stimson recommended that the United States accede to this demand not simply because

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he had advocated this at Potsdam, but because he felt that Hirohito was needed to ensure surrender of the dispersed Japanese armies, and that “something like this use of the Emperor must be made in order to save us from a score of bloody Iwo Jimas and Okinawas all over China and the New Netherlands.”82 With the help of some of Grew’s “Japan Crowd,” Secretary of State Byrnes drafted a response that required that the emperor remain subject to the future occupation leader, the supreme commander of the Allied Powers, and that “the ultimate form of government of Japan shall . . . be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The Byrnes note was sent to Japan on 11 August. Byrnes (and Truman) rejected the Japanese terms not necessarily because he disagreed with a conditional surrender (and thus ending the war immediately), but because he thought the United States and not Japan should get to set the terms, and he wanted freedom to restrain the emperor’s activity.83 The Japanese government had a difficult time making sense of Byrnes’s ambiguity; the note proved hard to translate and was so severely worded that it almost generated a militarist coup. A response took so long—it was not announced informally until 14 August and officially until 15 August—that rumors spread in the United States that Hirohito was about to abdicate in favor of a family member rather than accept American terms.84 Hirohito did not abdicate; in fact, he stayed on as emperor of Japan until his death in 1989, over forty years after the end of World War II, when most Americans wanted him dead or in prison. It is widely understood in popular American accounts of surrender today that Hirohito personally intervened in the surrender negotiations in Tokyo in response to the atomic bomb (and, to a lesser degree, Soviet intervention), and his recognition of American supremacy was cited as an important justification for retaining him as Japan’s official leader and exempting him from war-crimes prosecution.85 Hirohito may indeed have intervened in precisely the way suggested by postwar memoirists, but there is almost no contemporary evidence that he did so, and absolutely none that agrees that it happened in the way usually recounted. Even the best (some might say the only) source that was not recorded after the surrender was already a fait accompli (and hence liable to distortions in the face of war crimes trials), the diary of Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido, does not depict an emperor actively intervening to generate peace.86

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This image of a pacifist Hirohito, Japan’s symbolic monarch by an analogy to the British Crown, is entirely a postwar creation, a convenience of administration generated by MacArthur’s occupation of Japan.87 Sparing Hirohito, and especially exempting him from accountability for any aspect of the war, would lead to several consequences for Japan: it tainted the postwar monarchy with war guilt; and it has generated a misleading understanding of the role the monarchy played during the war, preventing an awakening of Japanese historical consciousness. Japanese conservative interpretations that deny any war responsibility have their origins in MacArthur’s retention of the emperor without trial.88 All of this stems directly from the postwar understanding that it was the atomic bomb that prompted surrender, and that it did so because Hirohito registered that the bomb was truly a “special” weapon. Hirohito’s exoneration thus played an important part in the sudden transformation of the atomic bomb into the climax of the war.

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Chapter 3

Special

The decision to incorporate the atomic bomb as an essential element of the strategy of shock was not so much a thought-out decision as the fortuitous consequence of the vagaries of timing in military and diplomatic affairs in early summer 1945. From the moment the atomic bomb was linked in decision makers’ minds to the Potsdam Declaration, they were forced into a series of logical consequences that bound them for the rest of the war. Once Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and his military advisers were committed to this strategy, any public demystification of the atomic bomb would diminish the chances that the Japanese government would consider its use as extraordinarily different from the already ruinous firebombing raids and take it as a cue to surrender. Prominent government science advisers like James Bryant Conant realized this and took center stage in government circles for accentuating the unique and revolutionary features of the weapon.1 The desire to generate this kind of “special” image for the atomic bomb was necessitated by one current of military strategy. Yet it also ran directly against an equally powerful current in military thinking: the tendency within normal military channels to treat weapons as tactical instruments to achieve heterogeneous goals. Just because Conant, Vannevar Bush, and Henry Stimson usually spoke of the atomic bomb as a weapon that transformed mankind’s relationship with the universe, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall or Army Air Forces Commanding General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold did not have to agree with them. Rhetorically they had to fall in line, but within planning circles they could, and did, speak in different tones. This chapter chronicles the tension between these two ways of

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looking at the atomic bomb: as world-shaking event or as tactical tool. Given the way events turned out, the first of these two perspectives has become the dominant one for thinking about nuclear weapons, and it was in fact a prominent aspect of the decision-making process that led to the authorization of the bombs’ use on Japan. Supporters of this view point to the peculiar apparatus Stimson created to deliberate over how the bomb should be used and how it would shape the uncertain world of late-war diplomacy, and to Stimson’s codename for the bomb: S-1, where “S” stood for “Special.” In this respect, Stimson partook of a long-established discourse about weapons development during the war. Nazi propagandists and Hitler himself often threatened to turn back the Allied onslaught in Europe by unleashing secret “wonder weapons”—which turned out be the V-1 and V-2 rockets—that by their very nature would supposedly stun the Allies into retreat.2 In Japan, the Kamikaze (“Divine Wind”) filled a similar function. Stimson’s S-1 designation fit neatly into this pattern. In addition, the existence of radioactive fallout after a nuclear explosion, a novel and horrifying effect of the atomic bomb, seems to clearly buttress Conant’s and Stimson’s views that the bomb was special indeed. Nonetheless, a substantial voice throughout the deliberations of the various committees and councils that authorized the usage of the atomic bomb on Japan treated it as an ordinary weapon. One strong indication of the “ordinary” aspects of the atomic bomb decision was the fact that it was scarcely a “decision” at all. Although popular historical consciousness tends to invest a great deal in the image of President Harry Truman wrestling with moral, military, and political issues when he authorized the atomic bomb’s use, the consensus of historians and participants—including Prime Minister Winston Churchill—supports the assessment of head of the Manhattan Project General Leslie Groves: “As far as I was concerned, his [Truman’s] decision was one of noninterference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.”3 Or, as one of the most in-depth historical analyses of the atomic decision put it in 1965: “In the end the decision was made because a decision not to use it could not be justified.”4 That is, dropping the atomic bomb was an established assumption from before Truman took office and was not seriously questioned until after the destruction of Hiroshima. As for radioactivity, as demonstrated below, the planners in the War Department hardly considered it. The scientists and officers in

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the Manhattan Project consistently underestimated radioactive fallout. The history of the decision to use the atomic bomb looks much like the history of the decision to introduce many other, more conventional, weapons into combat.5 Publicly, the Truman administration had to work to make the atomic bomb seem special; for their part, members of the military hierarchy had to work to “conventionalize” the atomic bomb as well. At its inception, the atomic bomb was billed as unique. As has been related many times, President Franklin Roosevelt undertook the decision to build the atomic bomb in a manner much more complicated than simply following received assumptions. Prompted by warnings from scientists, and particularly from his advisers Bush and Conant, that Nazi Germany was well on the way to developing an atomic weapon, Stimson was alerted to the possibilities of the weapon on 6 November 1941, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December propelled the United States into the Second World War. Roosevelt approved a project to explore the use of fissionable isotopes of radioactive elements to make an explosive device.6 (The Japanese had a miniscule atomic bomb project as well, unbeknownst to the Americans, who were not worried about Japan’s potential to develop a deliverable weapon during the course of the current conflict.)7 For reasons of wartime exigency and the difficulty of obtaining necessary materials on the massive scale demanded by any serious project to build a nuclear weapon, Bush and others recommended that the operation be transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers. Perhaps because the early stages of research into uranium’s fission in the United States had taken place at Columbia University in New York City, the Manhattan District of the corps assumed control of research and development under Major General Leslie R. Groves (noted for his management of the construction of the Pentagon Building) in what now was dubbed the “Manhattan Project.”8 The rest of this book requires familiarity with a few scientific details. Atomic bombs exploit the energy released in the fission of a nucleus of a heavy element—that is, the splitting of the positively charged core (or nucleus) of these atoms into two or more cores of lighter elements; the slight change in mass between the initial and final nuclei is converted into a tremendous amount of energy. This process occurs when the fissionable fuel (the heavy atoms) is bombarded with neutrons, and it can occur spontaneously when a certain mass or density of the necessary

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element is put together in one place: the “critical mass.” The discovery of the fission of uranium nuclei into two lighter nuclei in December 1938 in Berlin, usually credited to Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner (the latter of whom had been forced to flee Berlin shortly before the discovery due to Nazi racial laws), catapulted this element (the heaviest to occur naturally) from an important source of radioactivity to a vital military commodity, as it was the only known element to undergo fission. During the course of the Manhattan Project, chemist Glenn Seaborg discovered that irradiated uranium could transform into a heavier transuranic element, plutonium, that was even more highly fissionable than uranium. Thus a fission device could be powered by two fuels: the fissionable isotope of uranium, U-235 (the number refers to the total number of protons and neutrons together: the atomic mass); and plutonium (Pu239). U-235 comprises less than 1 percent of naturally occurring uranium (predominately composed of the heavier and more stable U-238) and has to be separated out in a laborious physical process. Plutonium, on the other hand, must be produced in reactors fueled by slightly enriched uranium and then separated out chemically. The Manhattan Project was divided into several principal facilities corresponding to the physics and chemistry of the bomb: reactor physics at the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) in Chicago; uranium isotope separation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; plutonium production and separation at Hanford, Washington; and bomb design and development in the laboratory directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The two fuels lead to two different bomb assemblies. These assemblies are described in many other sources, and their technical details need not detain us here. The major work of the Manhattan Project lay in producing enough fissile material for the two types of bombs, and in the bombs’ design. The original plan for both uranium and plutonium bombs was to use a so-called gun assembly, in which a critical mass is assembled by firing one segment of the fuel into a target made of the same material, thereby initiating the nuclear explosion. This model was dubbed the Thin Man by Los Alamos scientist Robert Serber in reference to the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name, which had recently been made into a major film.9 Because plutonium was more unstable and could prematurely detonate if assembled slowly, it had to be shot at a great speed, and thus the gun was accordingly long; so long, in fact, that it raised logistics problems with the bomb bays of the B-29

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bomber. Plutonium soon proved unsuitable for a gun model, since it tended to fission “spontaneously” before it arrived at the target and assembled a critical mass, causing the weapon to “fizzle.” A different arrangement, using shaped charges to implode or squeeze a sphere of plutonium into a critical mass, was developed at Los Alamos to solve this dilemma—an important necessary problem since plutonium was the easier nuclear fuel to generate, and potentially much more plentiful. Following the film noir angle, this device was dubbed the Fat Man after Sidney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon. Now that only uranium would be used in the gun, it was possible to shorten the length of the Thin Man to accommodate the shorter uranium firing velocity of 1000 ft/sec, and the Little Boy, which fit into a single bomb bay, was born.10 The atomic bomb, then, came in two variants: Little Boy (uranium), easy to engineer as an explosive device, but very difficult to separate the fuel for; and Fat Man (plutonium), easier to generate fuel for, but posing a significant problem of engineering in the implosion mechanism. The implosion device was still untested as of early July 1945. The deliberations over how, as opposed to whether, to use the bomb could not wait until the implosion design was confirmed. A Little Boy bomb was expected to be ready by late July or early August, and the military could not simply drop the bomb on a moment’s notice. On the contrary, delivery of the new weapon, as with any important aspect of grand strategy, needed to be planned months in advance. Since the Army Corps of Engineers directed the Manhattan Project, the relevant cabinet member in charge of the atomic bomb, and communicating its progress to the new president, was Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of war. A diplomat and politician, educated at Andover, Yale, and Harvard Law School, and a noted Wall Street lawyer, Stimson was the very definition of the establishment. So were his advisers: almost all of them were members of the exclusive Skull & Bones Secret Society at Yale, had attended Harvard Law, and worked either on Wall Street in New York or on State Street in Boston. His closest advisers on the atomic bomb project were Harvey Hollister Bundy, who had been his assistant secretary of state in 1931–1933 when Stimson was secretary of state in the Herbert Hoover administration; and George L. Harrison, head of New York Life. Stimson, born in September 1867, was seventy-seven when the atomic bomb entered its final stages in mid-1945; yet, even

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as dependent as he was on his assistants and his scientific advisers for the bureaucratic and technical details of S-1, his dictated diary provides one of the most vivid and revealing accounts of the Truman administration’s internal deliberations on the best way to use the atomic bomb.11 The decision making on S-1 was significantly completed long before Harry Truman arrived at final orders on the issue at Potsdam in late July. Most of the specific details of where and how to use the atomic bomb were worked out at two committees in the late spring and early summer: the Target and Interim committees. The Target Committee concerned the use of the atomic bomb most directly; the Interim Committee was asked to explore the question of postwar control of atomic energy but also provided some commentary on how to use the bomb. The narrative here will focus primarily on the questions of targeting as a military issue. Although the deliberations of the Interim Committee will be referred to later regarding attitudes toward the atomic bomb’s uniqueness, its deliberations were of a different order and have been treated well elsewhere.12 The issue of which targets were appropriate for the atomic bomb was at the core of discussions in the Target Committee and goes right to the heart of whether or not S-1 was an “ordinary” weapon. On its face, it was not, because the restrictions and special provisions for targeting and the delivery of the bomb were designed to accentuate its particular features and thus integrate it into the shock strategy that was emerging in the War Department. The committee had initially isolated seventeen targets for study: Tokyo Bay, Kawasaki, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kure, Yawata, Kokura, Shimosenka, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, and Sasebo. At the meeting of 10–11 May 1945, the focus was narrowed down to five: Kyoto and Hiroshima, labeled “AA” targets, or most highly desirable; Yokohama and Kokura Arsenal “A” targets; and Niigata, designated “B.” These cities were placed on a reserve list and saved from conventional firebombing by instructions to General MacArthur, General Arnold, and Admiral Nimitz on 20 June.13 There were several reasons to spare these cities from conventional bombing: Groves and his scientific counterparts wanted a “clean” background against which to judge the effects of the bomb; an undamaged target was more likely to fit into the “shock” strategy by showing the significance of this single weapon; and

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the fact the firebombing was so extensive by summer 1945 that Groves was worried that the atomic bomb would not look different enough from incendiaries if the two were mingled. This last reason demonstrates how blurry the line between conventional and nuclear bombing could appear, even for the man most closely associated with a partisan interpretation of the nuclear bomb as in a class by itself. Most important in these deliberations was how simply the “target” for an atomic bomb was understood as the city itself; only a city, which by definition included noncombatants, would be large enough to register the effects.14 Target selection was not systematic, as indicated by two cities—one on the list, and one not. Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, was Japan’s fourth largest city and was spared firebombing as long as it was on the atomic target list. Groves, in particular, wanted to see Kyoto as the primary target: it was large, untouched, psychologically very important for the Japanese people, and surrounded by mountains, which would focus the atomic blast and increase destructiveness. Despite Groves’s insistence on making Kyoto the target for the first Little Boy bombing, Stimson (at first alone and then later backed by Truman) repeatedly rejected his requests, considering the destruction of such a renowned city to be barbaric. This made the removal of Kyoto from the target list, a move that Truman’s endorsement made irrevocable at the Potsdam Conference in late July, the solitary instance of moral restraint dictating target choice on behalf of any belligerent in World War II.15 So while Kyoto was spared, Nagasaki was added onto the target list from which it had initially been excluded. Nagasaki made a poor target: it was irregularly shaped; it was bounded by mountains in a way which would absorb most of the blast, rather than focus it; and it had already been hit, albeit only slightly, in firebombing raids. Nevertheless, the necessity for multiple targets indicated that something had to be added to replace Kyoto, and Nagasaki was the unlucky choice.16 Stimson’s concern about the moral valences of the atomic bombing is almost unique in the course of the deliberations and indicates that he, unlike many of his interlocutors, really did consider S-1 as “special.” Stimson was insistent that the atomic bomb be dropped in a “precision” fashion, which meant visual daylight bombing, and not a night-time or radar run. As he explained in a memorandum to President Truman on 16 May 1945: “The reputation of the United States for fair play and humanitarianism is the world’s biggest asset for peace in the coming

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decades. I believe the same rule of sparing the civilian population should be applied as far as possible to the use of any new weapons.”17 Stimson had not expressed a similar concern about the magnitude of conventional bombing, which he knew did not spare civilian targets either in Europe or in Japan. But in the end, Stimson’s concern about the moral rectitude of the United States (or at the least the appearance of such rectitude) by sparing civilian populations from nuclear blast was not followed in practice. The Target Committee recommended that the bomb be detonated at an altitude to achieve maximum blast damage, and AAF generals conceived of the bombing within the scope of the campaign already underway. Neither position singled out civilians for special treatment. While these high-level discussions were taking place, the Manhattan Project was working at a furious pace: producing fuel at Hanford and Oak Ridge, and fabricating the weapons at Los Alamos. As of 1 July 1945, the major unresolved question was whether the implosion design necessary for a plutonium fission weapon would in fact work. (The Little Boy, with its simple gun mechanism, was assumed to be functional and was never tested; the explosion over Hiroshima was the first detonation of a uranium device.) In March 1945, Oppenheimer assembled Project Trinity, a group delegated to assemble a test device of the plutonium implosion mechanism, under the leadership of Harvard physicist Kenneth Bainbridge. Originally scheduled for 4 July 1945, the test was pushed back; it took place at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July.18 The test was a spectacular success, and the resulting mushroom cloud became one of the totemic images of the atomic age. It was at the Trinity test that many of the scientists involved began to speak of the weapon in cosmic or mythological terms. To take just one example, consider a line in Conant’s detailed hand-written account of the test: “My first impression remains the most vivid, a cosmic phenomenon like an eclipse.”19 Barely anyone present at the Trinity site, with the possible exception of Leslie Groves, thought of the atomic bomb as simply a large firebomb anymore. When news of the successful test reached Potsdam, Truman and Stimson were likewise entranced by the atomic bomb. What exactly did the Trinity test establish? On the most mundane level, the test determined that the implosion design worked. A plutonium Fat Man bomb was feasible. This finding had many ramifications.

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First, the more easily produced nuclear fuel—plutonium—could be effectively weaponized, and therefore many nuclear bombs could be delivered, freeing the Manhattan Project from the reliable but all-toodifficult to produce uranium gun device fueled by the products of the immense structures at Oak Ridge. As the schedule for delivery of the nuclear fuel for Fat Man bombs to the advance base on Tinian Island could now be established with greater accuracy, a timetable for delivery could be created. According to a schedule George Harrison acquired from Groves and then forwarded to Stimson in Potsdam on 23 July, the first Fat Man would be ready for delivery in the Pacific about 6 August. The second Fat Man (i.e., a third nuclear bomb) would be ready about 24 August according to the schedule, although in fact the bomb would have been ready about five days earlier. After the second Fat Man, the picture was rosier: “Additional ones ready at accelerating rate from possibly three in September to we hope seven or more in December.” Part of the reason for the optimism was the increase in production at Hanford and the consideration of a potential uranium implosion bomb or a composite design, which would have used the Oak Ridge material more efficiently than in Little Boy’s gun design.20 The schedule above reveals that Manhattan Project planners and their War Department interlocutors were planning to produce—and likely use—more than two bombs, substantially more.21 Yet the dominant understanding of the American use of atomic bombs in World War II maintains a “two-bomb” myth of use: the United States knew in advance that two bombs would be sufficient to induce surrender and so decided to use two and only two. The two-bomb myth garnered a great deal of support from the memoir literature generated by Manhattan Project decision makers, all of it written not just after Hiroshima, but substantially after surrender. Karl Compton, former president of MIT and a science adviser during the war, wrote a brief magazine article in 1946 designed to rebut growing criticism about the morality of the atomic bombings. To conclude his argument that the atomic bomb had been the best available alternative, he declared that those who thought the United States should have waited after Hiroshima before dropping a second on Nagasaki were simply wrong in their belief that this would have compelled the Japanese government to unconditional surrender: “And it was not one atomic bomb, or two, which brought surrender; it was the experience of what an atomic bomb will actually do

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to a community, plus the dread of many more, that was effective.”22 From this publication, the claim that the two bombs were necessary to instill a fear of an infinite supply became an important fixture of many traditionalist defenses of the atomic bombing. General Groves was perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the perpetuation of this belief. In his 1962 memoir, he claimed that he and Admiral W. R. Purnell had determined that, while the Japanese could dismiss one bomb as a fluke, they would see two as evidence of a series to come and would therefore surrender. Groves continued until his death to hold to the assertion that two bombs and only two were known in advance to be the minimum necessary.23 The two-bomb myth was expressed perhaps with the greatest fervor by those who felt most besieged by antinuclear criticism, such as Margaret Truman in her biography of her father, and Charles Sweeney, the pilot who captained the Nagasaki mission.24 The two-bomb myth represents a common tendency to collapse what was the case with what had to have been the case, and which thus was known in advance to have been so. We can now see that most actors assumed many bombs would be used against Japan. Churchill and Roosevelt had determined as early as 18 September 1944, in a meeting at Hyde Park, that “when a ‘bomb’ is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.”25 No document before surrender suggests that only two bombs should be used, and this should not be surprising because there was no reason to expect that one or two bombs would be enough, no matter how much individuals may have hoped so. Groves only gradually came to his postwar position that he knew early on the impact two bombs would have. On 19 July 1945, three days after the Trinity test, he wrote to Oppenheimer that, “[i]t is necessary to drop the first Little Boy and the first Fat Man and probably a second one in accordance with our original plans. It may be that as many as three of the latter in their best present form may have to be dropped to conform to planned strategical operations.”26 Even after surrender, Groves testified before the Senate in November 1945: “I have forgotten now whether it was after the Nagasaki bomb or after the Hiroshima bomb that I realized that this war was not going to last very much longer.”27 Groves had always believed that atomic bombs were powerful, but only after their actual explosion in the field did he consider them sufficient to end the war.

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The assumption that atomic bombs would be used—that many of them would be used, on a variety of cities deliberately saved from destructive firebombing—was by and large unquestioned throughout the deliberation process. The debate was not about whether to drop the bombs, but about how to do so. The debates over demonstrations, timing, and targets have been discussed in every major study of the atomic bomb. I focus here instead on the view, still prevalent, that Truman made a limited decision to use nuclear weapons at the Potsdam Conference, during 17 July–1 August 1945 (the meeting with Churchill, Clement Atlee, and Joseph Stalin, convened to discuss the occupation of Germany and the possibility of Soviet entry into the Pacific theater). Supposedly, at this meeting, Truman made a single “decision” to drop the atomic bomb, and the order was then communicated to commanders in the Pacific. As pointed out earlier, this version collapses the extended series of debates and discussions about the most effective employment of the limited number of expected nuclear bombs within the parameters of the shock strategy. (At the very least, bombers would have to be trained and readied to deliver the bomb upon authorization, which was a process that could not have been completed in a few days between Potsdam and the readiness of the Little Boy.)28 This widespread understanding of Truman’s actions also mischaracterizes the nature of the order that was sent to Guam and Tinian, in the Marianas, from where the bombs would be delivered. The “order” itself was signed by General Thomas T. Handy and sent to General Carl Spaatz of the army air forces in the Marianas on 25 July 1945. The text of what I will refer to as the “Handy order” reads, in full: 1. The 509 Composite Group, 20th Air Force will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. To carry military and civilian scientific personnel from the War Department to observe and record the effects of the explosion of the bomb, additional aircraft will accompany the airplane carrying the bomb. The observing planes will stay several miles distant from the point of impact of the bomb. 2. Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff. Further instructions will be issued concerning targets other than those listed above.

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3. Dissemination of any and all information concerning the use of the weapon against Japan is reserved to the Secretary of War and the President of the United States. No communiques on this subject or releases of information will be issued by Commanders in the field without specific prior authority. Any news stories will be sent to the War Department for special clearance. 4. The foregoing directive is issued to you by direction with the approval of the Secretary of War and of the Chief of Staff, USA. It is desired that you personally deliver one copy of this directive to General MacArthur and one copy to Admiral Nimitz for their information.29

The text of this order was finalized by Handy in Washington, DC, and then cabled to General Marshall, who was at Potsdam. Marshall then telephoned and repeated it back to Handy “in the form of a directive from the Secretary of War.”30 It is likely that Marshall was working on a prior understanding of what Stimson thought. It is even more likely that Marshall and Stimson determined the final form of this order without ever going over its wording with the commander-in-chief, Harry S. Truman. This brief order raises many points of interest. First, consider the second part of the order. This was not an order to bomb Hiroshima; and it was certainly not an order to bomb Nagasaki. It was, rather, an order to initiate the atomic bombing of Japan, subject only to the constraints of supply. Only one order doomed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.31 The implication throughout the Handy order was that the bombing would be multiple. This order introduced a new weapon into the American arsenal and then delegated the timing and tactical control of the weapon to the commanders in the field, a procedure later to be known as “predelegation.” Requiring an order to begin the bombing was in some sense a little unusual. Typically, when new weapons or tactics were developed—as with firebombing or napalm—they were released into combat through the channels of the armed forces without the need for commander-inchief deliberation and review. The warfighting capacity of the United States would have ground to a halt in World War II if Roosevelt or Truman had to evaluate every new weapons system innovation. Atomic bombing required an order because this weapon had relevance to the evolving Allied end-of-war strategy (in terms of timing) and thus

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merited civilian consideration. The yield was anticipated to be so substantial, especially after the Trinity test, that its use sparked intense concern. As Arthur H. Compton, the head of the Met Lab in Chicago, put it after the war: “If we could have made a bomb the equivalent of, say, 500 tons of TNT, it would have been available for military use without restriction.”32 In that case, the nuclear bomb would have been merely a large conventional weapon; but with forty times the strength, it required “special” approval. The line between quantitative and qualitative difference was blurry. Once Marshall and Stimson decided there had to be an order, there was considerable disagreement about what kind of order. Spaatz claimed after the war that Handy wanted to give him the order verbally, over the telephone. Spaatz recalled responding, presumably extrapolating from the destructiveness of firebombing raids to the present case: “Listen, Tom, if I’m going to kill 100,000 people, I’m not going to do it on verbal orders. I want a piece of paper.”33 Handy agreed and issued the above order. This exchange suggests that the bomb might have been dropped on verbal orders alone if not for Spaatz’s request. Handy later claimed that he had contacted Potsdam for approval from Marshall (and by implication Stimson and possibly Truman) on his own initiative and against the objections of Groves.34 Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been destroyed on the basis of conversations, not involving the president directly, if not for a series of independent and contingent personal decisions. What was the matter with the chain of command here? As a matter of fact, absolutely nothing. The Handy order makes no mention of the commander-in-chief by position or Truman by name in points 1, 2, or 4, all of which concern the actual employment of the bombs in combat and the authority for those decisions.35 The omission was normal: Truman had confidence in the workings of the military machinery, and once he had determined that the bomb should be dropped and certain targets were approved, it was standard operating procedure to trust the commander in the field, namely, Spaatz, to settle the particulars of timing and number of bombs.36 In his Memoirs and in interviews, Truman repeatedly stressed how the Handy order was in fact an expression of the intense control he had over the decision to drop the atomic bomb, while on face it represents nothing so much as his abdication of control over the process, down to the targets and the number of bombs.37

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As will become clear, Truman—a new president at a very difficult time, and one who was primarily comfortable with domestic politics—did not realize how far command had strayed from his grasp. The command structure for the use of the atomic bomb was, as military historians have often noted, highly irregular, which reflects some of the ambivalence of high officials toward the status of this weapon. Officially the chain in command was headed by Truman and Groves (and his civilian chief, Stimson); below them was Hap Arnold, commanding general of the AAF; below him was Spaatz; and below Spaatz was his chief of staff, Curtis LeMay. Groves’s biographer credits Groves with this unusual establishment of a major general above the entire air force, and it is clear that Groves had a great deal to do with it.38 In establishing this hierarchy—in the unlikely event that it was exclusively his doing—Groves stacked the deck so that everyone involved in the decision to use the atomic bomb had a vested interest in seeing those bombs used as quickly and as often as necessary (or possible).39 Nevertheless, even Groves was not immune from the tendency to decentralize command decision. As he wrote to Spaatz on 18 April 1945: “All local matters concerning the 509th [Composite Group, the delivery team] will be handled in normal channels.”40 Groves may have wanted to micromanage the strategic level, but he, like Truman, was happy to let tactics take their usual course. One issue should certainly, one would think, have forced decision makers and military planners to consider the atomic bomb as intrinsically “special”: radioactivity. Radiation and fallout—the long-term damage to the environment after nuclear explosions—are today the central categories with which one thinks about nuclear warfare.41 By 1959, no less of an insider than Karl Compton advanced a series of arguments for the unique nature of nuclear weapons: “Most important of these new aspects are the neutrons and gamma rays emitted from the bomb at the instant of explosion and the radioactive fission products which are the ‘ashes’ or ‘debris’ constituting what is left over of the material of the atomic bomb after its explosion.”42 That, however, was in 1959, after a decade of concerns about fallout that eventually led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963). As hard as it may be to imagine, this concern over radioactivity developed only after surrender; during the war, radioactivity was consistently underestimated or ignored. Radiation safety had been a marginal aspect of the Manhattan Project

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from the beginning, and if safety for American scientists and servicemen was not considered to be seriously jeopardized by radioactivity, even less consideration was given to the Japanese targets of the atomic bombs.43 Lingering radiation was not completely ignored. The Target Committee discussed radiological effects, but only for the pilots of the bombers that released the weapons. They determined that the bomber should be no closer than 2.5 miles from the point of detonation for radiation reasons (although in reality the planes would have to be farther away than that to escape the blast), and that postbombing reconnaissance planes should not fly through the resulting cloud. At the same time, Groves and the committee discussed the possibility of following an atomic attack immediately with a firebombing raid, using the argument that since the firefighting efforts of the Japanese would be occupied from the first bomb, the damage from the later raid would be intensified.44 This plan was rejected, but not primarily because of what seems now like a suicidal disregard for radiation; rather, Groves insisted on a single atomic bombing so that the effect of the blast could be evaluated on its own, for both shock and scientific reasons.45 The scientists likewise expected there to be few problems from residual radioactivity. As the official Manhattan Project assessment of those effects, dated 12 August 1945 (after both atomic bombings but before the end of the war), put it: No lingering toxic effects are expected in the area over which the Bomb has been used. The bomb is detonated in combat at such a height above the ground as to give the maximum blast effect against structures and to disseminate the radioactive products as a cloud. On account of the height of the explosion, practically all of the radioactive products are carried upward as a column of hot air and dispersed harmlessly over a wide area. . . . In the very unlikely and unanticipated case that these radioactive particles should be suddenly precipitated to the ground, the amount of radiation could be very high but would remain so for only a short period of time.46

The same nonchalance held true for the members of Los Alamos who had been deputed to Tinian to assemble the atomic bombs and ready them for delivery. Norman Ramsey, who was the head of this team, was very surprised after the Hiroshima bombing to hear Tokyo Rose—the Japanese American English-language propaganda broadcaster—report

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that survivors of the blast were falling sick and dying in large numbers from a mysterious disease. As he recalled after the war: In general, our reaction was not to believe the report, to suspect that it was propaganda. On the first atomic bomb, the principal mistake made in estimating the nature of the effects was on the question of people who would be killed and injured from radiation effect. . . . The region over which there would have been radiation injury caused was [anticipated to be] a much smaller one tha[n] the region of so-called 100 percent blast kill. Hence, in our thinking at Los Alamos and at Tinian, the obvious implication was that there would be no radiation damage to individuals from it: that is, any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first.47

Oppenheimer went on record almost immediately after the first reports of radioactivity to declare that “there is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground at Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly.”48 Even after the war, Oppenheimer would continue to maintain that radiation accounted for only a small fraction of the casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.49 Those reports from Tokyo Rose galvanized General Groves and his administrative apparatus, especially after reports of individuals dying from what was now dubbed “radiation sickness” hit the American press and stimulated some (albeit muted) criticism of the atomic bombs. When Groves contacted Oppenheimer about these reports, he recorded in his diary: “Oppie said ‘this is of course lunacy.’ . . . Oppie said further that [‘]based on the test in New Mexico there would be no appreciable activity on the ground and what little there was would decay very rapidly’ and gave permission to Gen Groves to quote him.”50 Yet, on 11 August, after the preliminary reports back from Nagasaki indicated that there might be some lingering radioactivity after all, Groves created a team from scientists on Tinian to be sent into Japan to study the issue when (and if ) the surrender came. He justified this a week before the occupation began: “Although we felt that Japanese casualties from radioactivity were unlikely it is most important, for the future of the atomic bomb work as well as for historical reasons, that we determine the facts.”51 Meanwhile, General Marshall on 12 August ordered MacArthur to take these scientific men into account as he planned the distribution of any occupation forces: “The [scientific] groups for

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki should enter those cities with the first American troops in order that these troops will not be subjected to any possible toxic effects although we have no reason to believe that such effects actually exist.”52 Nevertheless, many American servicemen who were the first to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered some degree of radiation poisoning.53 As of 5 September, after the first troops and scientists had already begun to examine the two target sites, Colonel William Consodine contacted Groves’s assistant Major J. A. Derry to ascertain the actual risk: “Japanese horror stories are getting a big play in the American press. This is particularly true of stories concerning radio-active burns resulting in death after several days. Much reference is also made to leukemia as a result of the explosion.”54 Once surrender was secured, Groves made sure that MacArthur and his press department restricted stories related to radioactivity, a ban that was enforced almost completely during the American Occupation.55 The American government could control what was said about radiation in Japan; the United States was another story. A common view from September 1945 painted a picture heard increasingly often: “It has slowly become evident, however, that the real horror of The Bomb is not blast but radioactivity.”56 Especially after the first postwar atomic tests at the Bikini Atoll, discussed in chapter 6, radioactive fallout became a prime concern. In his memoirs, Roosevelt’s and Truman’s chief of staff Admiral William Leahy declared that the reason he had opposed the atomic bomb’s use was that it killed through radiation, which was akin to poison gas.57 He had never expressed this view before surrender in any known document or at the beginning of the occupation; his opposition to the bomb, muted as it was, had to do with what would generate surrender fastest. Radiation was a concern of the future. The atomic bomb was not a “unique” weapon because it was radioactive; not yet. Far from there being an overweening, or even minor, concern about radioactivity enhancing the atomic bomb’s effects, there was a widespread view even after the Handy order that one or two bombs would not be enough to end the war. There is no known evidence from before the bombing of Hiroshima that anyone in the military or the government believed that only one bomb would be sufficient.58 Stimson’s undersecretary of war John J. McCloy recalled twenty-five years later “that when the bomb was used, before it was used and at the time it was used,

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we had no basic concept of the damage it would do.” They knew it would be large but were uncertain how large, mostly because the Hiroshima bomb was not tested.59 A curious exchange of letters reflects this uncertainty. On 2 August, Undersecretary of War Robert P. Patterson wrote to Stimson’s deputy George Harrison about “the effect of the Manhattan project on future procurement and production of weapons and supplies for the Army in carrying on the war against Japan.”60 While it may seem unimaginable to us, it took Harrison six days to respond, and he could only say that the detonation over Hiroshima would warrant “at least, a resurvey” of the munitions plan. “Whether the evidence when complete will justify any change in strategy or production I, of course, do not know.”61 Harrison had perhaps more information than almost anyone in Washington, DC, about the nature of the atomic bomb and of the relevant diplomatic moves underway, and his words were not those of a man who saw the end of the war in sight. Thus far, I have emphasized those who did not view the atomic bomb as a “special” weapon. Nevertheless, I do not wish to overstate the case. My purpose is not to show that nobody believed that the atomic bomb was unique, revolutionary, or required special attention; but that many important, well-informed individuals did not do so, or did not do so consistently or unequivocally, and insofar as they did consider the atomic bomb as “special,” they did not do so as we might today. To be clear, many scientists and planners did believe that the atomic bomb was qualitatively different. This is evident, for example, in the accounts of the 16 July Trinity test that were sent to Stimson and Truman at Potsdam.62 Stimson, in particular, repeatedly both before and after surrender stressed that the atomic bomb was revolutionary. At an Interim Committee meeting in late May 1945, Stimson “expressed the view, a view shared by General Marshall, that this project should not be considered simply in terms of military weapons, but as a new relationship of man to the universe. This discovery might be compared to the discoveries of the Copernican theory and the laws of gravity, but far more important than these in its effect on the lives of men.”63 Part of the reason for his attentiveness to the scientists’ narrative of S-1—couched even in scientists’ terms—was that he was well briefed by partisans like Bush and Conant, who adhered strongly to their views.64 Even Stimson noted in his memoirs that once the decision to drop the bomb was made, however, the entire issue of timing and so on was

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delegated to military planning to be militarily the most effective: “the timing and method of the use of the bomb were wholly subordinated to the objective of victory.”65 That is, after a decision was made to use the bombs at all, power devolved to the commanders in the field, and S-1 ceased to be quite so special. Such a subordination of long-term political or diplomatic considerations in favor of military priorities, even after victory was assured, was common in American grand strategy in World War II.66 Truman himself was not convinced that the war would end after Hiroshima, as indicated by his failure at Potsdam to contact his anti-inflation and reconversion offices from Germany and order them to prepare for the economic shocks that would result from a speedierthan-anticipated surrender.67 Instead, he relied on the military to conduct the war on the same timetable as before. Likewise, after Potsdam, Stimson was guided on the atomic bomb by no one so much as General Marshall; Bush and Conant faded to the background until after surrender. And Marshall was not necessarily convinced that centuries of hardwon military common sense had been altered by the fact that this particular bomb had a large bang, and that the cause of that bang was some very sophisticated physics. As he briefed Stimson to say at a press conference two days after Hiroshima (and, it would turn out, one day before Nagasaki): “I will say this at this time, that in my opinion and that of General Marshall and his associates, the bomb, from a military standpoint, is merely another weapon much more powerful than any of its predecessors, but that it is not an easy way out.”68 The next day, after Soviet entry into the war, Marshall insisted to Stimson that the army’s size would remain fixed.69 Only after the war did Marshall confess to Atomic Energy Commission chairman David Lilienthal that “we didn’t realize its value to give the Japanese such a shock that they could surrender without complete loss of face.”70 General Groves had anticipated that the military would try to revert to standard operating procedure once the atomic bomb had been delivered into their hands, and he took steps to prevent this eventuality. At its third meeting, the Target Committee was told that General Arnold and General Groves had decided that control over the atomic bomb would reside in Washington, an action that bewildered the representatives of the Army Air Forces who were present. As Groves recalled: “They had assumed that the atomic bomb would be handled like any other new weapon; that when it was ready for combat use it would be

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turned over to the commander in the field, and though he might be given a list of recommended targets, he would have complete freedom of action in every respect.”71 Groves was certain that he had nipped this danger in the bud. The irony is that, in the final event, the Army Air Forces controlled more from the field than Groves had ever dreamed possible.

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Chapter 4

Miracle

The story of the atomic bomb drops often features three sets of places. The first set, including Los Alamos, Washington, DC, and Potsdam, emphasizes the American development of the weapon and then the deliberations over its use by the Truman administration. The second set, consisting of Tokyo alone, concerns the negotiations among the Japanese Big Six with Emperor Hirohito that eventually produced a surrender. The third set, containing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, emphasizes the destruction on the ground after the bombs were detonated. This story, whether told by historians, politicians, journalists, peace activists, or others, has excluded a crucial fourth place: the island of Tinian, nestled in the Marianas Islands. The Army Air Forces base on Tinian served as home to the teams that assembled and dropped the atomic bombs on Japan and was the only site where people ever confronted a fully assembled, predetonation, deliverable atomic bomb. To understand what American soldiers and scientists thought about the atomic bomb before surrender, we must recognize that only at Tinian did scientists and soldiers interact with the device in full knowledge of its military, not diplomatic, features. A history of how the atomic bomb was used before surrender must therefore necessarily focus on Tinian. Tinian was more than merely a site for the assembly of nuclear weapons, or for the intense firebombing raids against Japanese cities. The conquest of Tinian by American forces provides a microcosm of island warfare in the Pacific, and the facts on the ground there could not but shape the final stages of the atomic bomb project (alongside the obvious influence of the firebombing campaign, also based from Tinian, on the atomic raids). Soldiers and military historians have labeled the

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invasion of Tinian “unique in the annals of World War II amphibious warfare,” “a demonstration of ingenuity . . . second to no other landing operation,” or, in the words of General Holland Smith of the marines: “If such a tactical superlative can be used to describe a military maneuver, where the result brilliantly consummated the planning and performance, Tinian was the perfect amphibious operation in the Pacific war.”1 Perhaps the most evocative account of the importance of Tinian came not from a soldier, but from Philip Morrison, a Los Alamos scientist who was part of the bomb assembly team, in his testimony to Congress in December 1945: Tinian is a miracle. Here, 6,000 miles from San Francisco, the United States armed forces have built the largest airport in the world. A great coral ridge was half-leveled to fill a rough plain, and to build 6 runways, each an excellent 10-lane highway, each almost 2 miles long. Beside these runways stood in long rows the great silvery airplanes. They were there not by the dozen but by the hundred. From the air this island, smaller than Manhattan, looked like a giant aircraft carrier, its deck loaded with bombers. . . . Once every 15 seconds another B-29 would become air-borne.2

Atomic bombs came from Tinian not just embedded in the legacy of Pacific island combat, but fully integrated into the transformation of a pastoral island into the centerpiece of B-29 firebombing infrastructure. The scale of that development, which will be tracked in some detail here, underscores the routine features of a firebombing campaign meant to continue indefinitely until a surrender was achieved. The colocation of the atomic bombs amid all this stresses those features of the atomic bomb that would be considered “ordinary” by the standards of summer 1945: a lengthy campaign of nuclear bombing was presupposed here. The history of Tinian from its colonization until the end of World War I was a history of neglect. The island offered, through both its situation and its climate, a variety of possibilities for development. It was not until the Japanese colonization of the islands that development on Tinian began in earnest, almost exclusively in agricultural directions. The most dramatic metamorphosis awaited the American conquest of the island from Japanese forces in July 1944. At that point, Tinian was transformed into the staggering military facility Morrison described. Understanding the dropping of the atomic bombs requires understanding Tinian

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because the Manhattan Project demanded exactly this kind of infrastructure to complete its mission. One could not simply load the bomb on a plane and drop it; one needed precisely the extensive military hardware built into the coral of Tinian to turn a few planes and some fissionable material into an operational atomic bomb. Describing how a sliver of coral in the Pacific became the prerequisite for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brings the day-to-day of the Pacific War right into the heart of the story of the atomic bomb. The legacy of Tinian is part of the legacy of the atomic bomb itself. The island of Tinian is 12.25 miles long and 6 miles wide at its widest point, is oriented roughly north-south, and is shaped approximately like a rhombus (with a 90-degree angle at the northern tip), occupying a total of 41 square miles. It is located about 3 miles south of Saipan, 125 miles north of Guam (the largest of the Marianas), and 1,450 miles southeast of Tokyo.3 Like the other fifteen islands of the Marianas, Tinian was discovered and claimed for Spain by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Catholic evangelization of the native Chamorros on the island at first went smoothly after it began in 1668, but meddling with local customs prompted a massacre of missionaries in 1670. The Spanish government retaliated, and by 1694 it had moved the natives of Tinian and Rota (a smaller island south of Tinian) to Guam, and all the natives on islands north of Saipan to that island. In 1698, the population of Saipan was resettled to Guam. In the first two centuries of Spanish rule the original population of the Marianas (40,000 to 73,000) was cut to 3,169. By 1790, ravaged by disease, the population dropped to 1,639, and in 1825 it reached only 600.4 The Spanish ruled all the Marianas until 1899, with the exception of Tinian (also called Buenavista), which was held for two months by the British. On 27 August 1742, with a crew suffering from scurvy and dreading confrontation with Spanish adversaries, Admiral Lord George Anson sighted the Marianas and ran up Spanish colors to deceive the garrison at Guam.5 According to Millechamp’s journal on Anson’s ship: “The island of Tinian had a most charming appearance, which was sufficient to have engaged the attention of people who were not so necessitated as we were; but to us it was a perfect paradise.”6 Such references to paradise litter eyewitness accounts of Tinian to the present day. After two months, Anson left, ceding the island back to the Spanish.

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In the nineteenth century, Tinian was essentially depopulated and served as a pork and beef pasture. By 1818, only one Spanish administrator remained to manage fifteen residents. In 1853 the Spanish considered the island so barren that they established a leper colony there, but two years later smallpox killed all twenty lepers and the other residents. Only two laborers escaped. In 1869 an Irishman named H. G. Johnston and his sister leased the land and worked it with 230 imported Carolinians to hunt meat and raise fruits and vegetables for trade with Guam and whaling vessels, a profitable venture that continued until he was lost at sea on a trading mission to China in 1878. The history of the Marianas changed dramatically in 1899 when the U.S. cruiser Charleston seized Guam during the Spanish-American War, prompting Spain to sell its remaining holdings to Germany that same year (including the Carolines and the Palaus) for about 4.5 million dollars. At the end of the Spanish period, there were only 95 people on Tinian. Germany and its Tinian-Gesellschaft only controlled the Marianas (except for American-held Guam) until the outbreak of the First World War, when Japan seized them.7 The depopulation and mismanagement of Tinian allowed the Japanese—equipped with a 1922 Class “C” mandate from the League of Nations for all the Marianas except Guam—to completely resettle a largely uninhabited island. As a result, the patterns of land usage on Tinian were more typical of Japanese colonial administration than in almost any other imperial possession. In 1926 Nanyo Kohatsu Kabushiki Kaisha leased the island to grow sugar cane, and roughly 80 percent of the arable land was sectioned off into standardized fields. This marked a significant transformation of the island from pastureland toward agriculture. In 1935, 43.9 percent of the population were agriculturalists. By 1944, the population was eighteen thousand, almost all Japanese (or Korean laborers). Tinian produced 50 percent more cane sugar than its neighbor Saipan, and the two mills erected in the southwest settlement of Tinian Town made it the center of the industry.8 In summer 1944 the next major inflection point in Marianas history arrived. In July the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army invaded Saipan, the second largest island in the chain, from the north, catching the Japanese military by surprise in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. In the infamous conclusion to the battle for the island, thousands of Japanese civilians (and Korean captive workers) fell to their deaths off the craggy

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cliffs of Saipan rather than face capture. This action reinforced American beliefs that the Japanese would fight to the death rather than surrender, generating gloomy scenarios of what the invasion of the Home Islands would look like. For the Americans, the invasion of Saipan was a pyrrhic military victory that represented a new, bloody low point in the course of a horrifying war. Back in Tokyo, the fall of the island began a chain of events that significantly disrupted domestic politics. Saipan was the first territory conquered by the Americans within the Japanese Absolute National Defense Sphere; that is, this was the first island taken that was understood to be an integral part of the Japanese Empire, rather than a mere colonial outpost. Within the Japanese cabinet, the seizure of this island finally eroded the confidence of the emperor and other elites in Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who had led the government into the conflict with the United States. The army’s weakness displayed by the fall of Saipan allowed Tojo’s opponents to mobilize against him and unseat him on 18 July 1944. The speed at which Japanese defenses crumbled prompted remaining politicians to begin serious attempts to end the war, leading eventually to the peace feelers of summer 1945.9 Even before Saipan had been secured, the marines had begun planning to take Tinian in a continuation of Operation Forager, the joint name for both campaigns. Unlike the taking of Saipan, there was no element of choice in the attack on Tinian. Had Saipan proven too formidable an operation, the Americans could always have disengaged and attacked another island elsewhere. Once Saipan fell, however, it was impossible to leave Tinian in Japanese hands: it lay less than four miles away, and airplanes, artillery, and troops on Tinian would present a constant threat to an American-held Saipan. To keep one, you had to seize the other. This problem also presented a great opportunity. Saipan may have been 3.5 miles away from Tinian, a Japanese garrison, but this also meant that Tinian lay 3.5 miles away from Saipan, an active U.S. military base. The novel strategic and tactical features allowed by this juxtaposition are what made Tinian so “perfect” an operation—ironically, because so many standard techniques had to be modified due to the peculiarity of logistics.10 Logistics for both islands were among the most complicated of the war and differed in crucial ways from those procedures already worked out for the Gilberts and the Marshalls. The plan required more of

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everything: ammunition, fuel, transport, provisions. (Plans were already underway to turn the Marianas into an advance forward base, so construction materials were added to the original tremendous scope.)11 The fact that the army had to transport all this material only a few miles made this operation a shore-to-shore campaign instead of a shipto-shore campaign, which vastly expanded the kinds of marine transport and landing vessels that could be used.12 Reconnaissance was also exceptional for the Tinian landing, because daily air sorties over the island and high-powered telescopes based on Saipan made it possible to know where virtually every artillery and infantry emplacement was before the battle began, information unobtainable for every other landing in the war.13 The short separation also left Tinian well within striking distance of long-range artillery from the southern shores of Saipan. Tinian was saturated with preparatory bombardment, which began as early as 11 June 1944 and continued for forty-three days, receiving 24,536 rounds before the landing, more than any other objective during the conflict.14 Bombardment also began from the sea on 13 June as the American forces cleared the sea lanes of Japanese submarines. A series of ships, including the ill-fated USS Indianapolis, managed to shell every airfield on the island, paying particular attention to the area around Tinian Town in the South, in order to draw attention away from the proposed landing beaches in the North. This bombardment managed to destroy 70 of the 107 planes in the Japanese Air Force on the ground in Tinian.15 All this was designed to prepare for what would be one of the riskiest landings in the Pacific. Tinian is a coral island, like the rest of the Marianas, so its coast is largely craggy coral with few beaches amenable to an amphibious landing. There were only three suitable landing locations. The first was in Sunharon Harbor, near Tinian Town on the southwest edge of Tinian. Since this was the widest and most appropriate for moving large numbers of troops, it was well defended. The second best option was the “Yellow Beach,” halfway up the east coast on Asiga Bay and only 125 yards wide. On the northwest of the island were two strips, dubbed the “White Beaches,” 1 and 2. After an extensive discussion within the American command over Yellow or White landings— Sunharon was eliminated as too well guarded—the White Beaches were chosen, largely because they were so close to Saipan that artillery support would be easy to provide. White 1 was 60 yards wide; White 2,

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more than twice that, but studded with coral barriers averaging 3.5 feet high, restricting the beach entrance for vehicles to 70 yards.16 Japanese defenses were limited in the northwest of the island. The Japanese military had failed to reinforce the Marianas to the degree necessary to withstand invasion because they had assumed that General MacArthur’s drive up the coast of New Guinea would outrun the marines’ central Pacific drive, and so they made a calculation to reinforce the Palaus first, postponing the Marianas until November.17 Nevertheless, the area was not without defenses. The senior navy officer was Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuda, who commanded the First Air Fleet, headquartered on Tinian, but he paid little attention to local operations and delegated essentially all control to Captain Geichi Oya—a total of 600 men and 800 construction personnel. Colonel Kiyoshi Ogata commanded the army, with 8,900 men when the Americans came, anchored by the 50th Infantry Regiment of about 3,800 men, and supplemented by a tank company, a motor transport platoon, and some additional soldiers. Oya was supposed to report to Ogata but in general acted independently, further hampering defenses. Ogata and Oya divided the island into three defense sectors: the southern and largest from Mt. Lasso to Tinian Town; the northern comprising the airstrips at Ushi point and Asiga Bay; and a largely undefended western sector, home to the White Beaches.18 D-Day for Tinian—dubbed “Jig-Day”—was set for 24 July 1944, H-Hour 7:30 a.m., with sunrise due at 5:57 a.m. It rained that day and continued to do so throughout the invasion, although the seas were calm enough on Jig-Day and for the next three that shipping of troops and supplies to the island progressed smoothly. On 28 July a typhoon moved in from the west, which forced the temporary suspension of unloading activities on the White Beaches.19 At 6:00 a.m. on Jig-Day, a Navy Demonstration Group assembled four miles off the coast of Tinian Town and began bombarding the town and lowering cargo nets and boats into the water, simulating an invasion of Sunharon Harbor. (The marines climbed unseen back into the boats.) By 10:00 a.m., the marines recovered the landing craft and began to move north to the White Beach to join the actual landing, already well underway. By the end of daylight on Jig-Day, 15,614 of the 40,000 troops planned for the invasion were already on shore, outnumbering the 9,162 Japanese defenders on the island (without accounting for Japanese casualties). Meanwhile,

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the efficiency of the unloading proceeded apace. During the course of the invasion, all American troops landed through White 1 or White 2, and the only real supply shortage, quickly resolved, was fuel. White 2 had been well seeded with mines and was not clear until after 1:30 p.m. on Jig-Day, which ended with total American casualties of 15 dead and 225 wounded.20 In a week, American troops moved steadily down the island (figure 4.1). Although the conquest of Tinian was exceptional in many ways— better logistics, communications, and reconnaissance than elsewhere in the Pacific—the combat reflected much that was typical of Pacific island combat. The outcome of the battle was largely decided by the end of the first day, yet fighting continued for about a week. The overwhelming force the Americans tended to put on the ground repaid the extensive planning for the operation. Interservice rivalry and a concern with keeping infrastructure intact for conversion to Allied use was also fairly typical. Tinian was also the first conquest after Saipan, that is, after the perimeter of the empire had been breached and the defeat of Japan in World War II was considered (on both sides) to be all but inevitable. Summer 1944 marked the beginning of the end of the war, an end that took a year to resolve itself, a year that centered in important respects around the Marianas. One feature of particular note concerned munitions. Napalm was first used in combat during the sweep of American forces down Tinian. P-47 Thunderbolts dropped 120 jettisonable tanks of incendiaries, 25 of which contained napalm, on sugar cane fields in order to burn the brush. Fourteen of the napalm mixture tanks were duds, but 8 of those were ignited by tracer bullets later. All in all the gasoline and powder mixture was not a staggering success in this first combat trial.21 In the end, it was from the airfields soon constructed on Tinian that the napalm-fueled firebombing raids on Japan were launched. After nine days of fighting, the island of Tinian was declared secure on 1 August, with total American casualties of 389 killed and 1,816 wounded, including individuals lost at sea on the Colorado and the Norman Scott on Jig-Day. Roughly 4,000 civilians were killed in the bombardments and the fighting; more than 5,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, and 252 were taken as prisoners of war.22 As of 1 January 1944, the Japanese census had counted 17,900 civilians on Tinian. As of 1 August only 2,468 had been accounted for, at which point all civil

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Figure 4.1 Marines’ progress in Tinian. The cross-hatched lines indicate the progress each day after Jig-Day. Reproduced from Carl W. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1951), frontispiece.

affairs shifted to General James L. Underhill, the island commander. Three days later his personnel had accounted for 8,491 civilians, and 13,000 by 10 August. Between 3,000 and 5,000 others had been evacuated to Japan after United States troops had invaded the Marshalls. Thankfully, many civilians surrendered, and the reports in a Japanese war diary that a Saipan-style mass suicide was afoot proved to be erroneously overzealous.23 The irony of declaring the island “secure” is that no objective was entirely secure as of the declared end of hostilities. Due to jungle conditions and the tenacity of Japanese servicemen, there was always substantial “mopping up” after the declared end of hostilities. Parts of one marine regiment were tied up for five months patrolling the southeast edge of the island, searching for soldiers yet unaccounted for, and 542 Japanese were killed after the official secure date; the marines took 163 casualties (38 dead, 125 wounded).24 On Tinian, just as with every major action of the Pacific War—including the surrender of Japan on 15 August 1945—surrender was a process, not an instantaneous event. The fog of war was real, and active warfare and occupation blurred into each other with unsettling regularity. The secure date may have been arbitrary, but it was not unnecessary. The U.S. military had grand plans for Tinian, and it was important to get them underway as soon as possible. At the moment of American invasion, the Japanese had completed substantial infrastructural developments on the island, including several airfields: one 4,700 feet long and shaped like a coffin, on the north of the island, and another shaped more regularly, 3,900 feet long; both were supplemented by a 5,000-foot strip roughly halfway down the west coast. The Japanese also had built over the course of their mandate thirty-five miles of roads connected through a very simple network, all about eighteen feet wide and surfaced with crushed coral. For sugar-cane transport, engineers had laid about forty miles of narrow-gauge railways.25 In the few months after conquest of the islands, new American infrastructure began to dwarf what had taken twenty-five years to build. Saipan went to the army, Tinian to the navy, and Guam was split between the two.26 In terms of construction, “navy” meant the Construction Battalions (CBs, or “Seabees”), and the goal was air power. After the invasion, construction plans for Tinian were changed and greatly expanded. The

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northern Japanese airstrip was extended by 1,000 feet at its west end and 650 feet at the east end, and widened to a uniform 300 feet. This formed the first part of North Field. The other Japanese strip was lengthened to 6,000 feet (completed in September 1944) and later named North Field, Strip No. 3. Strip No. 1 was completed nine days ahead of schedule, receiving its first plane on 22 December 1944; No. 2 was ready for its first long-range bomber on 27 February 1945. The two 8,500-foot strips were built at the same time, each 500 feet wide and combined containing 53,000 feet of taxiway, 220 hardstands, 2 service aprons, and 251 administration, repair, and maintenance buildings, all ready by April 1945. The Japanese field on the west was reconditioned after severe invasionrelated damage to serve as a 4,000-foot fighter strip.27 North Field became the point of origin for many of the firebombing raids and for both atomic missions. It was laid out N 92°E, and West Field N 80°E. North Field had four 8,500-foot runways, 8 taxiways (a total of eleven miles), 265 hardstands, 173 quonset huts, and 92 steel arch rib buildings. The strips were laid parallel 1,600 feet apart, connected by taxiways. The last 1,500 feet of runway spilled over the edge of the plateau and was erected on coral backfill. All the strips had to be leveled to the very low grade of 1.5 percent after military planners decided that the B-29s were to taxi under their own power, instead of being dragged by a tractor. The land moved to accomplish this construction feat was enormous: excavations totaled 2,109,800 cubic yards, and the fill was 4,789,400 cubic yards. At West Field the cut was 1,718,050 and fill 3,298,490 cubic yards.28 North Field at full operation in spring 1945 comprised more than twice the capacity of Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport when it opened in New York City in 1947, at the time the largest commercial airport in the world. North Field could handle 8 planes a minute, or 480 an hour. Seabees moved 12,000,000 cubic yards of coral, which comprises three Boulder Dams, or enough to surface a two-lane highway from New York to Cleveland. Just the asphalt surfacing of North Field was enough to pave a highway from Boston to Washington, DC.29 As Hap Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces, put it when visiting on 15 June 1945, exactly two months before Japanese surrender: “Tinian is just one large airport”30 (figures 4.2 and 4.3). The Seabees mobilized 450 trucks, 55 power shovels, 50 power graders, 125 giant carryalls, 150 tractors and bulldozers, 75 wagon

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Figure 4.2 North Field as seen from the air, flying south from Saipan; West Field is in the background center. Reproduced from Lawrence S. Smith, ed., History of the 9th Bombardment Group (VH): 1st, 5th, and 99th Squadrons, as a B-29 Superfortress Unit in World War II (Princeton: 9th Bombing Group Association, 1995), 21.

drills, 12 well-drilling rigs, and 120 air compressors. The corresponding gains in infrastructure were no less impressive: 942 separate structures around the airfields, including chapels, mess halls, and barracks; 1,400,000 gallons of water a day provided by 39 wells; 70 miles of coral roads, 20 feet wide, 15 miles of which were four-lane highways; a new harbor, reclaiming 30 acres of land from the ocean; 50 theaters, baseball fields, tennis courts, and 4 supervised beaches. Tinian contained camps for more than 12,000 Seabees, 13,000 other navy personnel, and 21,500 army personnel. Tinian’s first medical facility, a 100-bed hospital, was erected in September 1944, joined by a 600-bed navy hospital in December. The army obtained a similar 600-bed hospital in March 1945. A 1,000-bed hospital was created in June 1945 with reconversion of an old barracks. On V-J Day, construction was almost completed on a 4,000bed hospital on the South Plateau, prepared for the anticipated invasion of the Home Islands.31 American occupation introduced 50,000 troops to the island, giving it a military density of 1,282 per square mile as

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Figure 4.3 North Field, facing southward. The planes are B-29s. Reproduced from Smith, ed., History of the 9th Bombardment Group (VH), 164.

opposed to the 256 for the Japanese. Today residents on Tinian have U.S. citizenship status, and the island belongs to the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. Vegetation has reclaimed the military airfields.32 Tinian’s road network revealed a curious coincidence for the atomic bombings. Drawing on a topographical similarity to Manhattan Island, the Seabees planned the transportation network to resemble it. The main north-south thoroughfares were christened Broadway and Eighth Avenue, crossed by Wall Street, 42nd Street, 125th Street, etc. In spring 1945, the Manhattan Project’s delivery team and its Army Air Forces complement, the 509th Composite Group, were quartered in the “Morningside Heights” area of Tinian. The Manhattan Project, based on the fission experimentation that had begun in the United States at Columbia University, had returned full circle (figures 4.4 and 4.5). The advance division of the Manhattan Project on Tinian had two arms: one largely civilian, associated with the scientists and technicians who assembled the nuclear device; and one largely military, a branch of the Army Air Forces that bore responsibility for delivering the bombs to the designated targets. The civilian group, dubbed Project Alberta (or

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Figure 4.4 Cartoon of Tinian as Manhattan. Reproduced from Smith, ed., History of the 9th Bombardment Group (VH), frontispiece.

Project A), was created by the director of Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, in March 1945, at the same time he created Project Trinity (responsible for testing the plutonium implosion mechanism). Alberta began as a loose division with three functions: completion of design, procurement, and assembly; continuation of the air-drop testing program

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Figure 4.5 Street Map of Tinian, 1945. Reproduced from Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Enola Gay (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 159.

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begun at Wendover Field, Utah; and final assembly of a combat bomb.33 Before Alberta was established, the delivery program at Los Alamos subsisted under the command of Captain William S. Parsons of the U.S. Navy, head of the Los Alamos Ordnance Division, and physicist Norman F. Ramsey of the Delivery Group.34 Parsons and Ramsey are the two central figures in the story of the Manhattan Project on Tinian, yet they are rarely discussed extensively in typical histories of the period. William S. (“Deak”) Parsons worked at Los Alamos as second in command to Oppenheimer. His partial autonomy occasionally caused friction with scientists who were worried because Parsons was a military man and his presence reminded everyone that the endeavor on the Mesa, for all its scientific interest, was above all about producing a working weapon as soon as possible. Parsons found himself somewhat obscured by the shadow of Oppenheimer, a man he deeply admired. He came into his own as a confident leader when away from Los Alamos. He was, for example, responsible for the introduction of the radar proximity fuse—a crucial military innovation of World War II and one deployed on the atomic bombs—and was particularly good at accomplishing tasks within the sometimes calcified military command structure.35 Parsons was responsible for recruiting Norman Ramsey—later the recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the maser and atomic clocks—into the project. Earlier in the war, Ramsey had been involved with the development of radar, specifically with its introduction onto the bombers to be used in the European theater, where Parsons had met him. Ramsey had all the requisite qualifications: he was a nuclear physicist, he had extensive experience with the Army Air Forces because of his work with radar, and he was the son of an army ordnance officer who was familiar with the protocols necessary for completing practical tasks in the military. Parsons decided he wanted Ramsey and had to pull strings as high as Groves, Conant, and Bush to ensure that Ramsey was released from his other duties in time to head the Delivery Group.36 At the time of Ramsey’s enrollment, the location for the Delivery Group remained uncertain. By spring 1945, the war in Europe was in its last stages, so preparations for dropping the bomb focused exclusively on Japanese targets. This meant basing Project Alberta in the Marianas but left the choice of Guam, Saipan, or Tinian open. In the original

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planning stages, Guam was selected as the best site because it had the most extensive harbor facilities and was the center of military command in the Marianas. Only gradually did Tinian move to the forefront of deliberations; it did not begin as the obvious choice that General Groves later presented it as.37 The advantages were fairly clear: it was a small island with almost exclusive military occupancy, which assuaged Groves’s perpetual fears about secrecy; it was closer, albeit marginally, to Japan, which conserved fuel; it was the site of the largest B-29 airport in the world and thus had spare parts on hand in case there was a problem with the designated atomic bombers; and it had plenty of room for Commander Frederick L. Ashworth, who was deputed to Tinian as an advance party, to claim an encampment. He was joined by Colonel Elmer Kirkpatrick, who functioned as one of Groves’s deputies (along with General Thomas Farrell, who arrived in July) on Tinian, and was in direct contact with Major Jack Derry in Groves’s office in case any supply problems emerged.38 With the exception of some problems with packing lists, which inhibited the rapid unloading of materials, and delays that were created by shipping at first through Guam instead of directly to Tinian (soon corrected), Tinian proved an ideal choice for Alberta.39 Since this was a military operation at its core, command was retained by the leading officers, especially the so-called Tinian Joint Chiefs: Parsons, Farrell, and Rear Admiral W. R. Purnell. Construction of quarters for the operation began immediately upon selection of the base on Tinian by Ashworth, and that infrastructure befitted the impressive scale and speed of construction on Tinian: four air conditioned 20’ × 48’ steel arch rib huts, which the navy usually used for bomb sight repair (two for fusing, one for electrical detonator, and one for both the pit and the observation teams); three air conditioned 20’ × 70’ assembly buildings; five 40’ × 100’ steel arch rib warehouses; one building resembling an ordnance administration building; one building as a modification shop; three 10’ × 10’ × 5’ magazines; seven 20’ × 50’ × 10’ magazines; and two special loading pits with hydraulic lifts for loading the assembled bombs into aircraft. All this material and the associated tools were included in special “kits.” These kits were vital for shipping because they served as a catch-all that could be entered on a shipping manifest months in advance (“ship three kits”), but whose exact content could be determined later. This enabled Ramsey, aware of the technique from his

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military experience, to arrange for shipment of materials to the Pacific while still working out what would be necessary to build a weapon that no one had ever built before.40 In this instance, as in many others, the rigors of military procedure provided for exactly the margins of uncertainty that were necessary to allow the gamble of the Manhattan Project to come together. While all the practical details were being arranged within the military, Project Alberta, particularly the civilian scientists under Ramsey’s direct supervision, left for Tinian on 18 June 1945 and settled in for the long haul.41 The assumption by the military and political planners that there would be many bombs was instantiated on Tinian. Ramsey recalled that Oppenheimer had prepared him to expect something on the order of fifty bombs, and Ramsey told his crew to expect a six-month tour of duty, during which time they would occasionally rotate back to Los Alamos and be replaced by alternates.42 Ramsey planned his life accordingly: he and his wife, pregnant with their second child, did not buy health insurance because they assumed—incorrectly, it turned out— that the child would be born while the war was still on, and thus on the government’s dime. As he said later, this illustrated that “[w]e didn’t have much [of a] plan for the end of the war because we didn’t think it would end the war.”43 Ramsey’s men acted similarly. One man brought hop seed with him because he expected to have enough time to brew his own beer.44 As Robert Serber, a special consultant to Alberta—a title betraying little of his importance in the early stages of bomb design— wrote to his wife in late July, a routine had already congealed: The form of life out here is quickly taking shape. We get up about 6:00 am, and have breakfast at 7:00. Then everybody goes to work until 11:00. Lunch then, and lie around in the sun (if it’s out) till 1:00. Work till about 4:30, dinner about 5:00, kill time until 7:15 when there’s a movie or a show. The movies are preceded by 15 minutes of news and combat reports. After the movies to the officer’s club, for a drink or a beer, or a coke, and to bed by about 10:00.45

None of the scientists expected the war to end after one or two bombs. What was true of the scientists was even more true of the military personnel of the 509th Composite Group, the team responsible for dropping the bombs when they were “made ready.” As its name suggests, the 509th drew from diverse divisions of AAF personnel, activated by its

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commanding officer, Colonel Paul Tibbets, on 17 December 1944: HQ and the 393rd Bombardment Squadron (VH), the 390th Air Service Group (made up of the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron and the 1027th Material Squadron), the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron; the 1395th Military Policy Company (Aviation); and after 6 March 1945 the 1st Ordnance Squadron, Special (Aviation). Originally set at an authorized strength of 225 officers and 1,542 men, by May 1945 Tibbets found himself with a slight surplus and the total was increased by adding the 1st Technical Detachment, War Department Miscellaneous Group, comprising scientists and technicians, both military and civilian.46 Colonel Tibbets, who would eventually pilot the Enola Gay over Hiroshima on the first atomic bombing mission, was and remains almost universally admired by the members of the 509th. He graduated from flying school in 1938, and in 1942 he participated in the first B-17 raid on Nazi-occupied Europe. He was so accomplished a pilot that he was entrusted with flying General Dwight Eisenhower to Gibraltar on the night of the North African invasion. After his tour in Europe, Tibbets served as one of the central test pilots of the three-billion-dollar development that became the B-29 long-range bomber.47 He was selected for the highly classified job of training a team to drop an atomic weapon— a weapon whose nature could not be disclosed to the pilots he commanded until immediately before the first mission—at the last moment over a certain Colonel Montgomery, who was removed from the running for undetermined reasons.48 Tibbets assembled a team of experienced flyers and managed to prepare them quickly and with discipline under exceptional circumstances. Whenever he encountered problems, as he did in the case of modifying his B-29s to be stripped of armor so they could maneuver better at 30,000 feet, or in getting his crews shipped to Tinian, he was told to use the codename “Silverplate,” at which point the difficulties vanished.49 Almost no one below the highest levels of the AAF knew what the term meant, but they knew to give Silverplate bombers and pilots the highest priority. Tibbets’s command survived the war with only one casualty: a military police officer who mangled his hand trying to disarm an old shell.50 The training of the 509th was rigorous and efficient.51 As of December 1944, Tibbets considered his nine full B-29 crews to be 95 percent trained. (There were eventually fifteen planes with fifteen crews.)52 The minimum training was considered to be twenty missions and his crews

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already had seventy, and would have over two hundred by the time they were to be deployed.53 Tibbets affirmed in reports to Groves in January 1945 “that each plane in the Group would have to make a minimum of 3 missions per month in order to maintain reasonable morale and standards.”54 He met this expectation. The main base for the first stages of training was Wendover Field, Utah, chosen for its relative proximity to Los Alamos, its sparse population (secrecy again), and its B-29 facilities. Parsons was officially in command at Wendover (despite the oddity of a navy officer directing an AAF operation), but he spent little time there. Ramsey would observe training for a day or two each week in spring 1945, and Ashworth assumed the day-to-day duties.55 In December 1944, the 509th was sent to Batista Field, Cuba, for two months of training in extensive flights over water, as preparation for the flight from the Marianas to Japan. They avoided formation flights during these tests so the pilots would become accustomed to flying alone.56 The 509th was deployed to Tinian in stages, the first group arriving on 18 May, with more joining in the following days. On 29 May the majority of the group arrived by ship, supplemented by the 1st Ordnance Squadron in June.57 The most distinctive feature of the training of the 509th was the use of surrogate bombs, known as Pumpkins, to prepare the pilots for the maneuvers and to enable planners to develop accurate ballistics tables for the unusually shaped Fat Man implosion bomb. The generic Pumpkin contained about 5,500 pounds of high explosives to generate a blast effect (so that the aiming could be evaluated from photographs) and also contained a proximity fuse for an air-burst, much as the final atomic bombs would have. They were designed and manufactured through the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) so that their production would not conflict with the extremely tight schedule for Fat Man casing production.58 Originally designed for ballistics, the Pumpkins had collateral beneficial effects, as described by General Lauris Norstad: “While originally designed for training only this bomb should have very definite tactical uses. . . . It is desirable in the interest of security that the ostensible mission of the 509th Composite Group be to deliver Pumpkins in battle.”59 After arriving on Tinian, the 509th flew sixteen Pumpkin missions over Japan (a total of fifty-one sorties), both to give the pilots experience with missions against “the Empire” and to elevate morale (the crews did not know the nature of their mission and were

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dispirited by feeling marginal to the war effort while other crews based on Tinian flew regular firebombing missions).60 While the 509th was being trained, Project Alberta was occupied with testing the Little Boy uranium gun-assembly bomb. As noted above, this weapon was never fully tested before it detonated over Hiroshima—enriched uranium was too precious a product—and Alberta technicians had to make do with repeated tests of all its components. The first test (L1) was a dummy Little Boy fired in air by a radar fuse on 23 July 1945, and two more followed on the next two days. Given the simplicity of the gun mechanism, that was all the testing required. Parsons had spent the previous several months insisting on rigorous and repeated tests of all components both individually and together, something that Ramsey considered superfluous, only to have Parsons, with his experience of introducing new military technology in the field, overrule him—another instance of military procedures providing the necessary conditions for making the atomic bombs operational.61 The only remaining test before the detonation was to make sure that the reloading facilities on Iwo Jima—which consisted of a pit in which the Little Boy could be removed from the strike plane and reloaded onto an able one in case of mechanical difficulties with the original B-29—were ready. They were not completed until 29 July, and the transfer test took place on 31 July with two observation craft, flying in what would be their final formation. After the group returned successfully, this final Little Boy (L6) was dropped and detonated in air, naturally without the nuclear material, and the planes practiced their turning maneuvers. Testing was completed.62 Getting the uranium-235 to Tinian proved to be uneventful—but only barely. Merely three weeks out of the separation plant at Oak Ridge, the uranium had been crafted into final shapes (projectile and target rings) and was being shipped out to Tinian for final assembly.63 Parsons, as a navy man, insisted that the uranium projectile be sent by sea, as the most reliable form of transportation available, and so, on 26 July 1945, a thirteen-year-old heavy cruiser, the USS Indianapolis (9,950 tons, Captain Charles B. McVay) arrived unescorted at Tinian with its precious cargo.64 The target rings arrived in three separate parts in three otherwise empty C-54s during the night of 28–29 July, the last arriving by 2 a.m. Meanwhile, the Indianapolis, which had participated in the seizure of Tinian, left unescorted toward Leyte to train for the

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invasion of Japan. Since the waters around the Marianas had long been considered free of submarines, the ship was unprotected and without sonar and thus did not notice the presence in the region of Japanese submarine I-58, just before midnight on the 29th. A set of torpedoes hit the Indianapolis, igniting ammunition and fuel, blowing off the bow, and sinking the ship at 12:14 a.m. on 30 July. No one in the Philippines noticed that the Indianapolis had not arrived, and decoded Japanese military cables announcing the sinking of a cruiser were discounted as exaggerated Japanese propaganda. A Navy patrol plane spotted survivors on 2 August, but only 316 crewmen were rescued (from the 850 who had made it into the water to confront starvation and sharks, out of a total crew of 1,199). This was the last American warship to be sunk in the war, the last Japanese submarine kill, the last Imperial Japanese Navy victory, and the worst sea disaster in American history.65 Had the sinking happened on the way to Tinian, the Little Boy could not have been assembled and the first bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima would have been the only remaining bomb, the plutonium Fat Man. Given the course of events, the active Little Boy (L11) was prepared and ready for a 2 August delivery—anticipating five days of lead time between this bomb and the Fat Man, expected to be ready after 5 August. The weather failed to comply. Only on 5 August did the 509th receive word, soon confirmed by General Curtis LeMay’s staff, that the weather would be clear for a 6 August drop.66 Both technical and climatic considerations helped set the date of the first atomic mission. Immediate preparations for the launch began on 5 August, comprising standard equipment tests and a determination of the flight crews. The composition of the observation teams remained unsettled to the end. The two British representatives on Tinian, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, RAF, and William Penney, a scientist, expected to be allowed on the mission because of British involvement in the Manhattan Project, but they were deferred and only scheduled for the next flight.67 As set by the Target Committee’s rankings, Hiroshima was the primary target, Kokura the secondary, and Nagasaki the tertiary, and weather planes were dispatched to all three. In the event, weather conditions over the primary target were clear, and the planes took off for Hiroshima. Abe Spitzer, the radio operator on The Great Artiste, the instruments plane, recorded in his diary what he remembered of Tibbets’s

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final briefing, which included more information than ever before given on the secret weapon: The colonel began by saying that whatever any of us, including himself, had done before was small potatoes compared to what we were going to do now. Then he said the usual things, but he said them well, as if he meant them, about how proud he was to have been associated with us, about how high our morale had been, and how difficult it was not knowing what we were doing, thinking maybe we were wasting our time and that the “gimmick” was just somebody’s wild dream. He was personally honored and he was sure all of us were, to have been chosen to take part in this raid, which, he said—and all the other big-wigs nodded when he said it—would shorten the war by at least six months. And you got the feeling that he really thought this bomb was going to end the war, period.68

As can be seen in his tone, this seemed a bit far-fetched to the respectful but battle-jaded Spitzer. Before the mission, Groves had notified Parsons that he would be the “weaponeer”—his term for his representative on board the plane in charge of stewarding the bomb to target—for the first mission, and that Ashworth would alternate with him on all remaining missions.69 This was to be a repeated process. As interpreted by many commentators, the Hiroshima mission was the pivotal event at the dawn of the modern age, second only perhaps to the Trinity test of 16 July, and accordingly has been recounted in detail by many authors.70 Perhaps the most appropriate account for our purposes is the one compiled by Farrell when the planes returned, as it provides the closest surviving contemporary narrative to the mission as perceived at Tinian: Confirmed neither fighter [n]or flak attack and one tenth cloud cover with large open hole directly over target. Observing aircraft with fastax camera reports excellent record obtained. . . . SOUND—Not appreciably observed. FLASH—Not so blinding as TR[INITY] because of bright sunlight. First there was a ball of fire changing in a few seconds to purple clouds and flames boiling and swirling upward. Flash observed just after airplane rolled out of turn. All agreed light was intensely bright and white[.]

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CLOUD rose faster than TR reaching thirty thousand feet in three minutes. It was one-third greater [in] diameter. It mushroomed at the top, broke away from column and the column mushroomed again. Cloud was most turbulent. It went at least to forty thousand feet, flatt[en]ing across its top at this level. It was observed from combat airplane three hundred sixty-three nautical [miles] away with airplane at twenty-five thousand feet. Observation was then limited by haze and not curvature of the earth. BLAST. There were two distinct shocks felt in combat airplane similar in intensity to close flak bursts. Entire city except outermost ends of dock areas was covered with a dark grey dust layer which joined the cloud column. It was extremely turbulent with flashes of fire visible in the dust. Estimated diameter of this dust layer is at least three miles. One observer stated it looked as though whole town was being torn apart with columns of dust rising out of valleys approaching the town. Due to dust visual observation of structural damage could not be done. Judge [i.e., Parsons] and other observers felt this strike was tremendous and awesome even in comparison with TR. Its effects may [be] attributed by the Japanese to a huge meteor.71

In fact, a telegram from the Japanese Home Ministry, dated 7 August 1945 at 6 a.m., was intercepted by a Pacific monitor station of the Office of War Information: A small number of B-twenty-nines penetrated into Hiroshima city a little after eight am yesterday morning and dropped a small number of bombs. As a result a considerable number of homes were reduced to ashes and fires broke out in various parts of the city. To this new type of bomb are attached parachutes, and it appears as if these new bombs exploded in the air. Investigations are now being made with regard to the effectiveness of this bomb, which should not be regarded as slight. . . . The use of this new type of bomb by the enemy in the future can be expected.72

For his part, when Truman heard about the successful detonation over Hiroshima while on board the USS Augusta in the Atlantic Ocean, heading back from Potsdam on 6 August, he declared: “This is the greatest thing in history.”73 The Enola Gay and its two companion planes were greeted on Tinian with medals, press, and a large beer bash.74

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Surely this was the death of the assumption that many bombs were to be dropped on Japan; surely now the shock strategy would work; surely now the crews on Tinian—who of all Americans, scientific or military or civilian, had the most information about the destructive power of these new weapons—understood that no more missions would be necessary? No; the assumption of multiple bombs remained. Although accounts of what Paul Tibbets thought at the time differ widely, and his own recollected testimony varies, he claimed in one of his earliest accounts that “I thought it would take five atom bombs to jar the Japanese into quitting. So we had fifteen atomic bombers lined up on Tinian with fifteen trained crews ready to go.”75 Ashworth likewise later recalled: “We were getting lined up for full-scale production. We couldn’t gamble on two bombs doing the trick.”76 In his immediate postwar memoirs, Abe Spitzer wrote that it was not until after the conditional surrender offer (10 August) that he began to believe they had shortened the war, and he did not realize exactly what the bombs had done until he saw photographs of the atomic damage, and that was two weeks or so later.77 Ramsey felt the same way. Even in 2001 he recalled that he had not expected “that one bomb or two would finish the war.”78 This was in line with his earlier assumptions. On 12 April 1945, he wrote to Oppenheimer and Parsons suggesting that a corporation like DuPont should be brought in to make a large number of mass-produced “gadgets”— enough to guarantee that they would finish the war and be armed into the postwar period. After the war he claimed that he had expected up to fifty nuclear bombs to be used.79 Meanwhile, even before Hiroshima, Kirkpatrick had written to Groves to say that if more forward bases for atomic bombing were going to be needed—implicitly because the first few bombs would not be sufficient—he was available to set them up using his Tinian experience. “If it is definite that Tinian will be our only base,” he wrote, “I recommend my recall from here some time in late August or early September, unless you have in mind other duties for me in this area.”80 He felt the war would at least go on until September. On the other hand, Parsons wrote to his father on 8 August 1945 that he thought there was a definite possibility that this one bomb could end the war.81 He wrote that while hard at work assembling the second nuclear weapon. Washington proved to be no more sanguine than Tinian, despite all the hope invested in the shock strategy. Major General Clayton Bissell

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of Army G-2 wrote to Marshall on 12 August (that is, after two bombs) that “[a]tomic bombs will not have a decisive effect in the next 30 days.”82 Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote an impassioned letter to Truman on 7 August, after the news of Hiroshima had passed through, stating that he really hoped Truman would appoint Admiral Chester Nimitz instead of General Douglas MacArthur to head an invasion force into Japan.83 One of the architects of shock strategy and fully familiar with the specifics of the nuclear bomb, Forrestal did not think that the war was over or even close to over if he was worried about the command of an invasion set for November. A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, writing the day after Hiroshima had been bombed, was perhaps the most to the point: “[I]t remains to be seen whether production is up to the point where such bombs can be employed with a frequency in any way comparable to conventional bombs.”84 The lingering question was whether the Japanese government would or would not consider these weapons to be indeed comparable to conventional firebombs.

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Chapter 5

Papacy

The shock strategy was supposed to demonstrate to the Japanese government that the atomic bomb was no ordinary bomb, that it was a qualitatively different form of destruction and therefore merited consideration of a qualitatively different sort than had the punishing campaign of firebombing already underway for over five months. The Japanese government needed to be persuaded that the atomic bombs were special even if planners in Washington, DC, did not all believe it wholeheartedly themselves. If the Japanese cabinet were to count the destruction at Hiroshima (how severe, no one yet knew) as more significant, they needed to be educated about this weapon that the American government had been thinking about for months. This education, directed at the Japanese leadership, was planned well in advance: a radio announcement released on 6 August in the name of President Harry S. Truman explained the nature of atomic warfare and demanded unconditional surrender. Steaming across the Atlantic on his way home from Potsdam when the Little Boy hit Hiroshima, Truman could not make the announcement himself. The announcement was also not written by Truman, but produced from a draft written by a ghostwriter (reporter William L. Laurence on loan from the New York Times) and edited by Secretary of War Stimson, General Groves and a team of others massaging the speech so it hit the right notes.1 The first three paragraphs of the announcement introduced the Japanese, along with Americans and the rest of the world, to atomic weapons: Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power

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than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever used in the history of warfare. The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.2

These paragraphs have been quoted extensively in almost every account of the atomic bombing of Japan. Yet several features of them have largely escaped open comment. First, the announcement begins by “conventionalizing” the atomic bomb: a bomb was dropped, one more powerful than a large conventional bomb to be sure, but still somehow comparable to one. It was a bomb in the context of other bombs that had been dropped before and certainly would be dropped again. Not until the third paragraph did Truman actually mention that the weapon was “atomic.” For the purposes of even this announcement, crafted for months in draft after draft to emphasize how important, different, and special the atomic bomb was, the writers had to introduce it in a context everyone already understood. One had to begin with “normal” bombs, casting the weapon as a quantitatively different bomb that only subsequently was publicized as qualitatively different.3 The second point is buried in the second paragraph: these bombs are in mass production and will soon be even more powerful. The point is repeated later in the speech: “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications.”4 Truman announced to the world that he did not plan to drop one or two bombs, but many. This might appear like sound reasoning within the parameters of the “strategy of shock”: Truman needed to tell the Japanese government and people that Hiroshima was not an isolated incident, while he was actually bluffing about being able (and willing) to drop more of them. These passages

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have traditionally been read in this manner: as a bluff. Yet the plan had always been to drop several atomic bombs “as made ready,” and preparations to do so occupied Tinian, announcement or no. Citizens in the United States seized on Truman’s claims about the size and power of America’s atomic arsenal—even if the Japanese government had failed to respond with an unconditional surrender—and immediately began petitioning for demobilization of the armed forces. Why should the United States maintain seven million men prepared for invasion if they had “special” bombs like these? The War Department did not see matters in this light and kept up the draft and the preparations for a landing on the Home Islands, combined with a public relations effort to keep demands for demobilization at bay.5 This quest for postatomic armies began remarkably quickly and indicates that the American public, at least, took the administration’s rhetoric about the qualitatively different nature of the atomic bomb at face value. Even after the Soviet entry into the war and the bombing of Nagasaki, Stimson worried in his diary about the way the shock strategy was being interpreted by the American public, that the rhetoric may have been too successful. As far as he was concerned, on the ninth of August, the war was still on: It seems as if everybody in the country was getting impatient to get his or her particular soldier out of the Army and to upset the carefully arranged system of points for retirement which we had arranged, with the approval of the Army itself. The success of the first atomic bomb and the news of the Russians’ entry into the war which came yesterday has rather doubled this crusade. . . . The effect on the morale of the Army is very ticklish. . . . The bomb and the entrance of the Russians into the war will certainly have an effect on hastening the victory. But just how much that effect is on how long and how many men we will have to keep to accomplish that victory, it is impossible yet to determine.6

Generals Curtis LeMay and Carl Spaatz were not helping snuff out this problem. In reports to the press, they exultantly claimed that, had such a weapon been ready earlier, there would have been no need for a D-Day landing in Europe. General Marshall was furious with them for speaking out of turn and causing morale problems, and he ordered them to stop.7 The pressure to demobilize was not simply from families that understandably wanted their loved ones back home and believed that the

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administration had already told them that the war was all but over, but also from industry. The nation had been at war so long that often forgotten are the primary peacetime memories of most Americans: crushing economic depression. The Great Depression had lingered until the mobilization for the war effort had finally dragged the remnants of the economy from bust to boom, and industrialists and consumers alike feared the “economic shock which would come with a sudden end of the war.” As was pointed out in the press on 9 August, all the programs for a gradual reconversion out of the war “have been based on the prospect that the Japanese war would not end until late this year or early next year. . . . The end of the Japanese war this month, next month or the month after is going to bring dislocations.”8 This was a nation with eleven million men and women in the armed services and eight million people working in direct war industries. Pressure to release men gradually from the services into selected industries had been constant since July, as Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal noted in his diary.9 Congress, out of session until 8 October, considered reconvening on the unlikely chance that surrender happened before then.10 Clearly, despite the lip service to the atomic bomb (or even Soviet entry) generating a sudden end to the war, the Truman administration was terribly unprepared for such an eventuality. Back on Tinian, after the euphoria of the technically flawless Hiroshima mission and the celebrations had worn off, work proceeded apace on the assembly of the next atomic bomb. No news came from Japan or Washington about a surrender in response to this mission. Indeed, as was realized immediately after the bombing, although apparently not before, it was almost certain that it would take some time for information about the atomic bomb to reach Tokyo from Hiroshima, given the devastation at that city and the terrible state of communications within Japan due to firebombing. On 6 August, General Farrell, Groves’s representative on Tinian, was authorized to begin a self-proclaimed “propaganda campaign” by crafting and dropping a Japanese-language pamphlet that described the atomic bomb and urged the evacuation of cities and the petitioning of the emperor to surrender unconditionally. Much like the Truman announcement, this leaflet stressed that there would be many such bombs.11 Both the diplomatic (Magic) and military (Ultra) decrypts of Japanese communications received by the United States proved inconclusive on a Japanese

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reaction, and we know now that Japanese military leaders considered, quite reasonably, that Truman’s announcement was propaganda intended to trick the Japanese into a surrender, and they dispatched scientists to Hiroshima on 8 August to make radiation measurements and assess the plausibility of the American claims.12 The Japanese government was the only entity capable of ending this war, and, for now, their war was not over. The war was certainly not over for the men at this forward base, and no one in the 509th Composite Group or Project Alberta was talking of demobilization. They had the materials for another bomb on site, this time a Fat Man, with a plutonium implosion assembly such as had been tested to great effect at Alamogordo. I shall describe the preparation and dropping of this second bomb in great detail for a number of reasons.13 First, the method by which orders were altered and at times contravened by individuals in the field on this mission highlights in the most vivid fashion how much Tinian operated independently from the plans made by either Groves or any other member of the hierarchy in the United States. As a result, the Fat Man drop illustrates how an “ordinary” weapon—for the atomic bomb had become a part of the strategic bombing arsenal as of 6 August—was deployed in the field: with tremendous leeway to operational and tactical commanders. Furthermore, the Nagasaki bomb, as opposed to the Little Boy that detonated over Hiroshima, best reveals what a third atomic bomb mission would have looked like. The third bomb would have been a Fat Man, and it would have been delivered in a war that had already “gone nuclear.” The Nagasaki bomb drew more attention from Los Alamos because the implosion mechanism had been tested only once (at Trinity) and had never been combat tested. The mechanism was much more complex than the Little Boy gun assembly, and so, as one Manhattan Project scientist commented after the war, “it was Nagasaki, not Hiroshima, that Los Alamos was all about.”14 Both of these features differentiate it from the Hiroshima mission, for the Little Boy became obsolete from the moment it detonated, and the shock of seeing a mushroom cloud over a city for the first time had passed. What happened at the forward base at Tinian, codenamed “Papacy” in the cable traffic, provides valuable information about how a prolonged Pacific War involving continuing use of nuclear weapons looked before surrender changed the terms of the discourse.

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The fundamental condition of life for the Tinian atomic bomb assembly and delivery teams was that they were still at war. The Handy order from Potsdam was still operative, and thus orders were to prepare and deliver this bomb when ready. That was what everyone planned to do. The question of when to deliver it was another matter. While it is by now clear that the planners in Washington and Los Alamos (not to mention Tinian) had never planned to drop only one or two bombs, the issue of the spacing between those drops was not a matter that had been extensively discussed. According to Groves’s diary, the original plan had been to drop the second bomb five days after the first one: close enough to establish that there was in fact a mass production of these weapons, but far enough apart so that the Japanese government and people had time to ponder the implications of this weapon.15 In the end it was dropped three, not five, days after Hiroshima. This issue of the close spacing between the two bombs has sparked long debate over whether or not this second bomb was “necessary” to end the war, a claim much more widely debated than the explosion of the first bomb over Hiroshima.16 The decision was taken rather on the spur of the moment. As Ramsey reported to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos after the Japanese surrender: Our original schedule called for take off on the morning of 11 August local time (10 August Washington time). However, on the evening of 7 August we concluded that we could safely advance the date to 10 August. When we proposed this to Tibbets he said it was too bad we could not advance the date still another day since good weather was forecast for 9 August with at least five days of bad weather forecast to follow. We agreed to try with the understanding we might miss our schedule since we were unwilling to speed any operation which might conceivably affect either safety or reliability.17

This decision was the first instance of the wishes and orders of planners in Washington being contravened. It would not be the last. Ramsey’s worries about whether he could actually make the tight schedule proposed by Tibbets were serious ones, for scheduling on the assembly of the Fat Man was incredibly tight. Insufficient casing and detonation units for safety testing had only arrived on Tinian by the end of July, and the first test Fat Man filled with high explosives (HE) for implosion for an aerial drop was tested at Wendover Field on 4 August. The

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first such test on Tinian was on 8 August, only one day before delivery on the target in Japan, in the final dress rehearsal test flight.18 Other Fat Men tests had been proceeding while the Little Boy was being assembled on a parallel track. The first Fat Man test on Tinian (unit F13) took place on 1 August, using cast plaster blocks, electronic fusing, and eight electric detonators, designed to emit puffs of smoke upon “detonation,” and all the subsidiary components worked well. A second almost identical unit, F18, was loaded on a B-29 for a test drop on 3 August but had to be unloaded and modified. The problem was that tests on the adequacy of venting for a sealed unit had been performed at Wendover, but the results were not forwarded to Ramsey and his team. As a result, they had to set the barometric switches so they could obtain the data for themselves, and they only tested the unit on 5 August.19 The defects of communication between the various laboratories of the Manhattan Project were a ubiquitous concern on Tinian, only accentuated by the rushed schedule for the second bomb. Ramsey had already complained through official channels on 1 August that “[t]he slowness of communications with Site Y [Los Alamos] is one of the most unsatisfactory features of our present organization.”20 Breaking protocol, which demanded that technical requests and communications be made through Groves’s office, Norman Ramsey penned a handwritten letter to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos after the Hiroshima mission but before the Fat Man drop. This letter was sent back to the States secretly in the pocket of Francis Birch, the head of the Little Boy assembly team, who left for Los Alamos on 8 August. Since there was no plan for a second Little Boy until mid-November, it was felt that he could best help the project by returning and debriefing Los Alamos scientists in person.21 Ramsey’s letter to Oppenheimer stressed the importance of extended and free communications over the long term: Can you come to visit us some time? Also, I’d like to get back for a very short visit between units sometime. One thing I am very worried about and am very anxious to avoid is the divergence in viewpoint which almost always arises between two labs when they are separated in space and when communications are difficult. I hope that we can avoid having our personnel think that suggestions from your place are impractical and your personnel think that ours are foolishly conservative when we don’t adopt some of your recommendations.22

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Even after the first bomb was detonated, Ramsey still clearly believed that he would be on Tinian for a while (over many “units”), and that there would be time to arrange visits back and forth with the mainland. The concern he had for divergence of laboratories over time was a concern that was measured in months, not days or weeks. Likewise, any visit by Oppenheimer would not have been probable on any time scale less than a few weeks away. Apparently, Ramsey’s concerns were not addressed and he sent another private letter to Oppenheimer, this time after surrender (the letter is undated but certainly after 19 August), in which he worried about what would happen should drops resume: If it should become necessary to continue our operations, it is in my opinion essential that communications between here and Y be drastically improved, preferably with direct uncensored transmission of messages being authorized. . . . As a result of these poor communications and of the cessation of hostilities stopping the rotation of personnel, the divergence in point of view between here and Y, which I had feared, has arisen.23

From the perspective of at least one Project Alberta member—and its central member at that—the assembly and dropping of bombs was assumed before the second mission to last long after the Fat Man had been assembled and dropped, and was considered still possible (although not likely) after Nagasaki had already been destroyed. These concerns all took place against the frantic background of assembling the second atomic bomb as fast as possible. Involving most Alberta teams—the HE Team, the Pit Team, the Firing System Team, and the Fusing Team all participated—assembling the Fat Man was significantly more complicated than the Little Boy process. During the assembly of unit F13, the assembly hut became so crowded that Parsons had to order all nonessential personnel out.24 When he did, there was other excitement. As Harlow Russ, a member of Project A, has reported, while the assembly of the final Fat Man was underway, scientists who had left the hut observed what might or might not have been a Japanese boat with frogmen saboteurs designed to disrupt the bomb assembly. As far as Russ (or I) have been able to determine, this incident was never reported.25 At the very least, it indicates the high level of tension as the assembly of the implosion bomb was rushed to completion. The bomb was completed and loaded onto the strike plane, the

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Bockscar, early in the morning on 9 August, and the same three-plane formation was set to take off and deliver the bomb. Thus began what physicist Luis Alvarez, who flew on the instruments plane (The Great Artiste) on both missions, deemed “as abominably run a raid as any in the history of strategic warfare.”26 To put matters bluntly, just about everything that could have gone wrong on the second atomic mission did—with the exception of actually delivering a functioning bomb. The commander on this flight was Major Charles Sweeney, and this was his first combat command.27 The selection of Sweeney by Tibbets was apparently a controversial choice among members of the 509th, and Tibbets, after Sweeney’s death in July 2004, expressed strong regret for it. He noted that it was impossible to tell in advance how a soldier would react in combat conditions, and he considered Sweeney not to have performed up to the high standards of the 509th.28 The pressure on Sweeney was intensified by the fact that the Hiroshima mission was one of the most tactically flawless missions in the history of strategic warfare. Although the second mission had been moved up because of predicted bad weather, the weather was far from clear on the morning of 9 August. To make matters worse, there was a problem with the fuel transfer pump on the Bockscar, the designated strike plane. It had been loaded with 7,250 gallons of fuel, but the failure of the pump meant that 640 gallons were not accessible. Since the weather window was very tight, there was no time to load the extremely heavy Fat Man into another B-29. In ordinary circumstances, flying with over 91 percent of one’s fuel reserves would have been more than sufficient to deliver the bomb to the primary target—Kokura Arsenal (today’s Kitakyushu) on the island of Kyushu—and return to Tinian.29 Circumstances turned out to be far from ordinary. The next problem was with the rendezvous of the strike plane with the other two planes—one for scientific instruments to measure pressure and blast, and a photographic plane—off an island south of Kyushu. Shortly after the Bockscar arrived, a second B-29 joined them, but not the third. Orders were to wait for fifteen minutes and then move on, but it was only really vital that the instruments plane, not the camera plane, be present. Sweeney waited almost an hour, consuming precious fuel. As it turned out, the instruments plane, which was indispensable to the mission, was the one that had arrived, but Sweeney had

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not reported this to Commander Frederick Ashworth, who served as weaponeer on this flight and thus was in charge of the aspects of the mission related to the bomb. When Ashworth found this out, he insisted that the plane move on to target with only one accompanying plane. This conflict has sparked some of the strongest criticism of Sweeney among veterans of the 509th. As Ashworth claimed recently: “The only reason for the stay so long [at rendezvous] was to try to get all three planes together and make the mission perfect.”30 The primary target, Kokura, presented another problem. The city was covered with clouds, and the Bockscar made three passes before aborting and moving on to the secondary target, Nagasaki. (It is worth noting another contravention of orders: each plane was meant to have a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary target. This mission had no tertiary target.)31 Because fuel was getting so low, Sweeney flew the plane, at his own discretion, over Kyushu, which increased the risk of anti-aircraft fire or downing of the plane over enemy territory. This was a tactical decision made by a commander in the field, but it violated protocol again—a violation demanded by the fact that the fuel was running out, itself due to an earlier protocol violation. In addition, the crew broke radio silence when approaching Nagasaki to inform Okinawa that the plane might have to ditch in the ocean after the raid and might need rescue.32 What happened next determined the fate of the Fat Man, the crew, and the people of Nagasaki. Given the disorder and improvised nature of so much of this mission, the only accounts we have were assembled after the fact by interrogation of the principals and correlating their stories. One such version, which accords with most of the others in the relevant particulars, was reported by Ramsey to Oppenheimer: We were scheduled to receive a strike report at 1030 am 9 August, but all we heard until 1230 was the very worried query from the fastax [camera] ship, “Did the strike plane abort?” Finally we received the message from Ashworth that the secondary target [Nagasaki] had been bombed largely by radar and that at least technically the unit functioned even better than Hiroshima although there was some doubt as to the location of the bomb. We learned later that the strike plane had its first trouble in making its rendezvous with the fastax plane. Although it was supposed to wait not over fifteen minutes at the rendezvous point at

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the coast of Japan it kept seeing approaching B-29’s on another mission each one of which it would think initially was the fastax plane. In this way the strike plane actually lost 50 minutes. It then made three attempts to bomb the primary target, but on each occasion a cloud interfered. This took another fifty minutes. As its fuel was then getting low it then went to Nagasaki, making a necessary shortcut which carried it over enemy territory most of the way instead of over the usual water route. It was then clear that there was enough gas for only one run and not enough gas to carry the unit on to Okinawa (Iwo [Jima] was closed in with bad weather). It was therefore decided to drop either by radar or visually. A radar run was made in the course of which the bombardier got one visual check. The bomb was released + hit apparently approximately over the Mitsubishi steel works. . . . Although only 44% of the city was destroyed by the official record this is due to the unfavorable shape of the city and not to the location of the bomb detonation.33

Especially important in this account is the near drop of the Fat Man by radar. This was in explicit violation of the direct order from Handy (and thus from Stimson, Groves, and, by implication, Truman) that the bomb be dropped “visually.” As Ramsey indicated, the plane would not be able to make it to any base if it did not drop the bomb, so Ashworth assumed the responsibility to violate orders if necessary and drop the bomb by radar. As he reported to Kirkpatrick after landing on Okinawa: “Gasoline consumption at high altitude, cruising, failure to rendezvous, and time over primary target forced decision to drop rather than attempt questionable chance of reaching Okinawa with unit.”34 There seems little doubt that Ashworth made the only decision that was possible under the circumstances, for the crew in fact had no options left. Yet, the reason they had no options left was that so many tactical directives had been violated that the only way to save the mission and the crew was to violate even more directives on local authorization.35 The bombing of Nagasaki was the near total extension of Truman’s initial delegation of the atomic bomb to ordinary military channels. This was simply what one did in the field in a combat situation with “normal” bombs, and the second atomic mission was in that sense normal. So much attention has been devoted to the atomic missions that one might assume that the atomic bombs were the last bombs dropped in

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World War II. This is false, and spectacularly so. Numbers of conventional missions flown and tonnage of incendiaries and high-explosive bombs dropped continued their upward climb, giving the lie to the contention that war planners assumed that the Hiroshima mission would end the war.36 On 7 August, the day after the destruction of Hiroshima, 179 B-29s were airborne on a mission to the empire, followed by 420 more (including 2 planes from the 509th on Pumpkin raids) on the next day, 109 on the day after that, and 114 on 10 August. These raids were also staggeringly successful, burning 21 percent of Yawata and 73.3 percent of Fukuyama on 8 August, and losing fewer and fewer B-29s as the anti-aircraft capacity of the Japanese was whittled down to nothing. The conventional bombing numbers with respect to tonnage carried, areas destroyed, and successful missions completed were only half of the peak July numbers, but that was only because the bombing ended halfway through the month because of surrender on 15 August. The average daily rates, factoring in the frequently cloudy weather, were almost identical.37 On 10 August, something happened that induced a temporary pause in the firebombing campaign: as a result of a meeting of the Big Six with the emperor on 9 August, during the middle of which the Nagasaki bomb was detonated, Japan offered to surrender conditionally, provided the prerogatives of the emperor were preserved, prompting the Byrnes note and the surrender negotiations discussed in chapter 2. This happened despite the fact that there is no mention in either diplomatic or military decrypts of the reaction in Japanese diplomatic or military channels specifically to the Nagasaki attack.38 Nevertheless, the Japanese move was not completely unexpected. As Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson wrote to presidential counselor Judge Samuel I. Rosenman on 9 August, the day Nagasaki was bombed: “[O]ur armed forces and industry must be prepared for either an unconditional surrender of Japan within the immediate future, or a long, bitter, last ditch struggle to abolish Japanese military power.”39 As it turned out, neither option happened, and Washington and Tokyo were locked in a limbo between all-out war and unconditional surrender. To facilitate the process of negotiation, Stimson and Arnold imposed a cease-fire with respect to B-29 raids. For a few days, at least, the Japanese government would be allowed to ponder the meaning of the enigmatic Byrnes note, which ambiguously offered the leadership the possibility of retaining the emperor after an unconditional surrender.

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For the infrastructure of the Manhattan Project and its outpost on Tinian, however, this did not indicate that the war was over. As of 5 August, the next proposed shipment of plutonium to fuel a second Fat Man was scheduled for 14 August, only a few days away.40 Project Alberta really had to work at full pace to meet such a demanding schedule, cease-fire or no. The first thing to ascertain was whether the material for the bomb would arrive as expected. On 9 August Kirkpatrick cabled Major Derry with a sense of urgency: “[I]nformation on date next 49 [plutonium] sphere will leave Y [Los Alamos] is badly needed in planning future program here.” The schedule of preparations as of 9 August was: 10 August—a holiday for the analysis of films from the Nagasaki mission; 11–12 August—assembly of a first test unit; 13–14 August—drop the first test unit and assemble a second; 15–16 August— drop the second and assemble a third; 17 August—drop the third unit and begin preparations for a final rehearsal drop on 21 August.41 This pacing is reminiscent of the urgency that preceded the first Fat Man drop. In actuality, the pace was even more intense, because the highexplosive (HE) blocks for the second Fat Man had arrived badly damaged and would not be able to be used for another active unit, requiring new ones to be delivered from Los Alamos. At the same time, the entire supply of detonator chimneys had been used upon the island, and Project Alberta technicians rapidly began machining more.42 Seemingly unbeknownst to Alberta members or the leadership of the 509th Composite Group, they were also possibly on the verge of moving to a different forward base. On 10 August, the day after Nagasaki, Curtis LeMay ordered the construction on Okinawa of infrastructure, including hardstands, for Silverplate B-29s to be ready for 15 September in case of further nuclear operations.43 None of these activities—on or off Tinian—resembles the conduct of an operation that was simply winding down its operations, confident that surrender would “take” in the wake of atomic destruction. The officers on Tinian spent the days after Nagasaki in two ways. Most of their energies were devoted to preparing a Third Shot as soon as the active material would be delivered from the plants at Hanford and could be fashioned into a sphere at Los Alamos and sent to the Pacific. However, the leadership, particularly General Carl Spaatz, who had earlier let the Manhattan Project run largely according to its own lights, also began to request that the targets and tactics of the 509th

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missions be modified from the original Handy order of 25 July. As Spaatz cabled General Lauris Norstad at the Pentagon on 10 August: “Strongly recommend that next Centerboard [i.e., atomic strike] target be Tokio [sic]. More destruction probably would be obtained from choosing a clean target but it is believed that the psychological effect on the government officials still remaining in Tokio is more important at this time than destruction.”44 Even from within the Manhattan Project’s hierarchy on Tinian, Colonel Kirkpatrick, who well understood the earlier need for undamaged targets to show the full destructive potential of the atomic bomb, in line with the shock strategy, seconded Spaatz: Because of great potency targets should where practicable be at least three miles on a side. Targets with partially burned out areas having large remaining population and some industry offer great possibilities for psychological effects. We consider the “scare radius” to be at least ten miles. It is recommended that the War Department should no longer require visual bombing but leave decision to the field command. We consider remaining approved targets with the exception of Kokura as inadequate or imporperly [sic] shaped areas. We do not want to waste any of [the] effects. It is recommended that the list be revised to include several large cities. It is expresselly [sic] recommended that the region of Tokyo be included as a target[.]45

New targets were being suggested all the time. As late as 14 August, General Nathan F. Twining suggested in order of priority: Sapporo, Hakodate, Oyabu, Yokosuka, Osaka, and Nagoya.46 It should be pointed out that some of these targets were outside of B-29 range from Tinian and would have to be launched from other forward bases, such as the one LeMay was assembling on Okinawa. Targets were a matter that had been left open in the Handy order for revision at a later time. But Parsons and Ramsey also wanted to modify the procedures by which the Third Shot would be conducted, drawing lessons from the botched Kokura raid of 9 August. Cables from Tinian pointed out that the failure of all three planes to rendezvous “probably caused failure to bomb the primary target and definitely jeopardized the entire mission.”47 Kirkpatrick and Parsons suggested instead that instruments be loaded onto the strike plane and that the plane be allowed to fly alone, thus averting Japanese suspicions that were bound to be raised by the three-plane formation that had already flown the Hiroshima

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mission and would have flown on the Nagasaki mission had it completed its mission as assigned. Radar dropping was explicitly requested. More than merely presenting suggestions for the improvement of the missions, these queries to Washington to change targets and tactics would represent the complete relaxation of all control that had been imposed on the forward base at Tinian from back in the United States—if they had been approved.48 Those few additional checks that separated atomic bombing from conventional bombing would be undone. As it happened, the eventual Japanese surrender on 14 August, announced by the emperor personally on 15 August, obviated the need for Groves and his advisors to decide on these questions, but the fact that they were raised indicates, once again, that the teams on Tinian did not believe the war was moments away from ending: they saw continued atomic bombing as possible until the conclusion of the war and accordingly called for a more extensive “normalization” of procedures. If the Japanese surrender had not imminently elevated the atomic bombs to indisputably “special” status, a relaxation of operational restrictions might have sealed these weapons, at least operationally, as “routine.” The same uncertainty about the conclusion of the war was true for the stateside Manhattan Project, no matter how much Groves retrospectively maintained that he knew immediately after Nagasaki that the war was over. Colonel Franklin T. Matthias, who was in charge of the plutonium production facility in Hanford, Washington, noted in his diary on 11 and 12 August that he was continuing production despite rumors of surrender. Los Alamos scientists, for their part, fashioned another set of hemispheres for the implosion mechanism, ready to leave for Tinian in short order.49 Matthias assured Groves on the telephone at some point on the same two days that Hanford would be able to maintain its schedules as previously noted and perhaps be able to “beat it by a day or two at some points.”50 Groves was merely dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s. He had already reassured General Marshall on 10 August that the project was still on track for more deliveries: The next bomb of the implosion type had been scheduled to be ready for delivery on the target on the first good weather after 24 August 1945. We have gained 4 days in manufacture and expect to ship from New Mexico on 12 or 13 August the final components. Providing there are no unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the

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theatre or after arrival in the theatre, the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.51

The surprise of this memorandum is what Marshall penned beneath Groves’s note: “It is not to be released on Japan without express authority from the President.”52 The Third Shot was canceled directly by Truman (yet, as we shall see, only provisionally)—and so suddenly that Ramsey later censured Oppenheimer for failing to inform him that the shipment was not impending.53 Groves would later claim that he had stopped the shipment on his own initiative.54 Not only is this implausible on its face—a major general would hardly countermand a direct order from Chief of Staff Marshall, an order authorized by both the secretary of war and the president—but it is contradicted by multiple pieces of internal correspondence. Groves was betting that Truman and Marshall would change their mind. As he wrote to Farrell on 11 August, the day after the stop order: “I saw General Marshall this morning and it was decided that no further shipments of material should be made to the Theater until the question of the Japanese surrender was decided. We are, of course, accumulating supplies here so that they can be shipped promptly in the event there is no change in the situation.”55 Even as late as 13 August, Groves wrote General Handy: “I am ready to start shipment. I will arrange for planes so that they can depart from New Mexico on Thursday if the decision is to send the materials. This will change date in theatre from (subject to first good weather) the 20th or 21st.”56 Groves informed Oppenheimer of the cancellation on 11 August at 1:30 p.m. Oppenheimer, much like Groves, took it in stride, as recorded in Groves’s diary: “Oppie advised that he has taken the view that until there is an official announcement that the war is over[,] it is on.”57 The order to stop did not originate from Marshall either. After Nagasaki but before surrender, Lieutenant General John E. Hull, Marshall’s assistant chief of staff for planning and operations, telephoned Colonel Lyle E. Seeman, an assistant to Groves, to see about the availability of atomic bombs. In what amounted to the first serious questioning of the shock strategy, the transcript records Hull saying: “Anyhow, within the next ten days the Japanese will make up their minds one way or the other so the psychological effect is lost so far as the next

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one is concerned in my opinion, pertaining to capitulation. Should we not lay off a while, and then group them one, two, three?”58 As Groves’s deputy Nichols pointed out in his memoir after the war, military men usually hate to piecemeal away their resources and would prefer to save up any important munitions and use them for an invasion.59 Groves had considered the possibility of the tactical use of atomic bombs (i.e., using the bombs in direct support of ground operations) during an Interim Committee meeting of 31 May 1945, when he rejected it because one would not be able to learn from each bomb drop to improve the device, and because the “effect would not be sufficiently distinct from our regular Air Force bombing program.”60 Marshall, on the other hand, was cautiously in favor of suspending individual atomic missions to allow for tactical usage of the bombs in support of the planned November invasion of southern Kyushu. Two different witnesses recalled Marshall after the war thinking out loud about using nine bombs to support the beach landings: two for each of the three invading armies to clear the beachheads, and then one additional bomb to destroy Japanese reserves at each site.61 The notion of sending American troops through mushroom clouds on the beaches of Japan sounds unbelievable now; given the limited knowledge of radioactivity in U.S. government circles at this time, the proposal was certainly credible. Marshall sent Hull on 13 August to demand schedules for future bombs from Groves, and Groves scrambled to obtain the correct dates.62 Marshall was not about to suspend any and all resources for defeating Japan until surrender was secured. The instructions to countermand the Handy order came from the president—the only person with authority to issue such a change of orders.63 Why did Truman come to this decision, one that seems at odds with his later often-expressed insistence that he had no second thoughts about authorizing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Truman’s diary of Friday, 10 August, is silent on the issue of the stop order, but two other diaries give us important insights.64 Navy Secretary James Forrestal noted in his account of the cabinet meeting that day: The Secretary of War made the suggestion that we should now cease sending our bombers over Japan; he cited the growing feeling of apprehension and misgiving as to the effect of the atomic bomb even in our own country. . . . The president observed that we would keep up the

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war at its present intensity until the Japanese agreed to these terms, with the limitation however that there would be no further dropping of atomic bombs.65

The stop order was a concession to the progress of negotiations and the worry that public opinion might turn against the atomic bomb. Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace’s diary offered a more dramatic recollection: “Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’ ”66 These moral qualms have been made much of over the years, and they almost certainly existed at this stage in the nuclear era. Often passing unremarked, however, are two features. First, Truman seemed captivated by his own government’s construction of the bomb as a unique weapon: he may have felt revulsion at killing noncombatants with a nuclear device, but he kept the firebombing going nonetheless. Killing kids seemed to matter only if an atomic bomb did it. The second point is the short duration of Truman’s qualms. On 14 August, M. J. Balfour of the British Foreign Office sent a dispatch back to London on the issue of atomic bombing: “The President remarked sadly that he now had no alternative but to order an atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo.”67 This move would undoubtedly have been a popular one; unconditional surrender made it unnecessary.68 Nevertheless, when the order to suspend atomic bombing was given, on 10 August, the war was far from finished in the minds of Americans in Washington and even more so in distant Tinian. The war was still being conducted with tremendous savagery on the ground, even if not in the air; in just one example, on 12 August, Japanese soldiers executed eight prisoners of war in Fukuoka.69 Anticipating that the war would continue for the next several weeks, and fearing further atrocities, James Byrnes wrote Truman on 10 August suggesting that a warning against “acts of violence against Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees in [Japanese] hands” be issued, similar to one that was addressed to the German government one month before it surrendered.70 After a brief respite following the Japanese offer of conditional surrender, to give the leaders in Tokyo time to consider the Byrnes note on unconditional surrender, Marshall ordered General Douglas MacArthur and General Spaatz on 13 August, “concerning very heavy bomber

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activities, the President directs that we go ahead with everything we’ve got.”71 General Arnold, who had been considering how to make the best show of the importance of the AAF in the war and thus put in a bid for its future autonomy from the army, wanted a big aerial finish, and on 14 August he ordered one thousand planes in the air. Combining forces from the Marianas and Okinawa, 449 B-29s left the Marianas for a daylight strike on Japan, and 372 more were airborne at night. Seven planes from the 509th, performing Pumpkin raids in preparation for the anticipated Third Shot, brought the number of bombers up to 828. With 186 fighter escorts, the total reached 1,014 planes, the largest bombing raid of the war. No planes were lost.72 Twelve million pounds of demolition and incendiary bombs were loosed on four military targets and two cities (Kumagaya and Isezaki), destroying half of the first and a sixth of the second. Three of the largest attacks that day happened after Japanese radio had announced that Japan had accepted American surrender terms.73 The war, officially, was over: Emperor Hirohito announced on 15 August that Japan had surrendered unconditionally. Norman Ramsey, on Tinian, was elated, and cabled back to Groves to arrange for sending the Project Alberta men home on 20 August using the Green Hornets of the 509th Composite Group.74 Ramsey was in a rush, now that the war was over, to return to Los Alamos, debrief his superiors, and then get back to civilian life. (As it turned out, when they finally did return in September, Alberta members were frowned upon by their colleagues in New Mexico for being so eager to leave; Oppenheimer had convinced many to stay on at Los Alamos for some weeks to assist in demobilization efforts.)75 Groves would have none of Ramsey’s desire to get stateside; as far as he was concerned, the war was still on until American troops were on Japanese soil and had secured the occupation. He cabled Ramsey back on 18 August and told him to stay put until the occupation was complete, which gave Ramsey the impression, given the schedule of occupation of the Home Islands, that they might still be on Tinian in October.76 Alberta member Luis Alvarez later recalled a spectacular series of tropical leisure activities he and his fellow scientists engaged in while “[w]aiting on Tinian for the war to end.”77 What Ramsey did not grasp at the time was that the war was not actually over when the emperor announced surrender. Almost everyone now believes that the surrender date of V-J Day, 15 August 1945, was a

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pointlike event, and that when it was announced, World War II was no more. As a matter of fact, fighting—along with the continued mobilization of the Manhattan Project—continued for some weeks. On 15 August, Kirkpatrick cabled back to home base about Tinian’s remaining stock of Fat Man bombs: “Although F101, 102 and 103 are completely ready they will not be dropped due to surrender agreement. We also now assume you are not sending an active sphere for F32.”78 His demand for a further core of active material was seconded as late as 22 August in a cable: “Assuming that if additional Fat Man units are required a major factor will be the speed of use.”79 Additional Fat Man units? Today, knowing that the occupation began exceptionally smoothly and that war with Japan did not resume after 15 August, these cables seem nonsensical. Yet there was a real risk of a militarist coup in Japan in late August, and on 26 August attempts to send kamikaze troops against incoming American occupation forces were narrowly foiled by Japanese commanders.80 If the war were to resume, the atomic bombs might be needed again; the Third Shot was not yet history. Meanwhile, the Soviet-Japanese War, which had begun at midnight on 9 August, Transbaikal time, was still underway, despite repeated characterizations by historians of this war as lasting only one week (8–15 August).81 Amid the confusion of the days after the emperor’s unprecedented announcement, the Soviets made hay in Manchuria. They clamped down on Japanese movement and disrupted their communications, which made it difficult for many units to receive their surrender orders. The emperor sent out members of his family to forward positions to communicate the order to surrender personally.82 Secretary of War Stimson in his diary somewhat bizarrely treated the surrender as if it were a single, instant event: “The Emperor at once sent his orders out to his various armies, and the armies in general obeyed them quickly and with very little dissent.”83 Apparently no one informed Stalin of this peaceful course of events. The Soviets pushed on, not concluding a cease-fire agreement until 19 August. Even after that, they continued to seize territory. The Kurile Islands, a source of bitter acrimony in Russo-Japanese relations to this day, were not seized until 5 September, well after the instruments of surrender were signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September.84 As a result of these activities, the Soviets even demanded an occupation zone of Japan (preferably the northern half of the northernmost Home Island of

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Hokkaido) in parallel to their zone in Germany, a sector of Tokyo, and Soviet authority over the Kuriles. Truman flatly refused occupation zones but ceded the Kuriles.85 The point of explicating these postsurrender but preoccupation operations, both atomic and Soviet, is to demonstrate that the flattening out of historical events into simple categories—“the war,” “the occupation,” and so on—is an activity best performed with hindsight. To participants at the time, the boundaries between these various historical epochs were a lot blurrier. Surrender should not be understood as a single instant, but as a process, one that took time and was fraught with uncertainty. Under such a position of uncertainty, the American war planners and the soldiers in the field acted according to procedures informed by the best (albeit murky) information they had. Certainty only came weeks after history now declares it did. Recognizing the surrender as a process is not to deny that it was accomplished with a speed and efficiency that all previous experience, especially that in the European theater, would seem to have rendered unlikely. The quick end to the war saved Southeast Asia. The Japanese colonial possessions in this region had been essentially cut off from supplies due to the Allied blockade, and rice-deficient areas had depleted their food stocks. If the war had continued, Japan would have been unable to feed these regions, and mass starvation would have inevitably ensued. The famine that had struck what would later become North Vietnam had already claimed possibly two million lives, and the lives of thousands of Allied POWs in Indonesia and Indochina hung in the balance between starvation and execution.86 The transfer of power and cessation of (most) hostilities without mutiny of Japanese troops (either in the Home Islands or on the Asian mainland) or supply disasters was a significant achievement that continued to absorb huge efforts from the Allied military. In Japan, immediately after surrender, Prime Minister Suzuki stepped down and was replaced by Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, an uncle-in-law of the emperor and an army officer—selected to pacify military upstarts and to quell popular rebellion. A typhoon blew up on 22 August and prevented the 26 August American advance party from landing on the Home Islands, and the 146 communications and engineering personnel only alit at Atsugi air base two days later. The Americans arrived in force on 30 August at Atsugi and the naval base of

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Yokosuka. For the next several days, every four minutes another transport plane deposited new occupiers.87 A new epoch in Japanese history had begun—but it had begun not instantaneously, but after a process of vacillation and confusion, of the fog of end of war. And what of Tinian? Despite their expectations, Ramsey and his men never had to assemble a Third Shot, and Tibbets and his men did not have to deliver it. The same day the advance party was supposed to land in Tokyo, Farrell and Parsons received their orders to demobilize Project Alberta—twelve days after the war was supposed to have concluded and over two weeks after the Nagasaki mission. Project Alberta material was divided into three categories: materials that were needed for the future activities of the Manhattan Project back in the United States, which were to be shipped back by water; materials that did not reveal the size, nature, or detailed characteristics of the atomic bomb, and which could be used by the AAF, to be deposited into normal supply channels; and materials that did reveal such information, to be sunk deep in the Pacific Ocean. By 7 September, this work was accomplished— including the sinking of one unused Little Boy casing and the shipment of another back to Albuquerque for display in a classified museum— and Project Alberta decamped for the United States.88 The military history of the atomic bombs in World War II was over: they had been conceived, tested, assembled, and delivered on two targets in Japan. Before a Third Shot could have been released, the war was nominally over, and the Manhattan Project abandoned its forward base three weeks later. The process of surrender was over; the process of mythologizing the atomic bomb and making it Special had only just begun.

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Chapter 6

Revolution

The atomic bombings were terribly destructive. By focusing so closely on the contemporary American understanding of events on Tinian and in Washington, DC, I have allowed this devastation to drop from view. It is important to bring it back. Although no one outside Japan knew directly before the surrender of Japan exactly what had happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the scale of the firestorm, the medical consequences of the blast, the radiation sickness—they found out shortly afterward, once the smoke had cleared so that reconnaissance flights could take photographs, and then more directly when American soldiers could enter the city upon occupation. For the Americans, who had consistently undervalued the extent and the variety of destruction of these weapons, the ruin, in a matter of minutes, of large, populous cities presented a sobering sight. Damage accounts by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) and others, including Japanese first-person accounts, paint a somber and sad picture (although, one should add, not necessarily sadder than the destruction of cities through “conventional warfare”).1 As appalling as the Japanese casualty numbers were, often left out of these accounts were the additional deaths of non-Japanese: between 6,500 and 10,000 Koreans conscripted into labor in Hiroshima; 1,000 second-generation Japanese Americans trapped in the city since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941; several hundred Chinese; and small numbers of Southeast Asian students, British and Dutch POWs, and European priests. About two dozen Caucasian Americans, some of them prisoners of war, somehow escaped the blasts, only to be beaten to death by enraged survivors.2 The devastation cast its pall across various nations,

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but only locally. Even a Japanese American doctor, in the United States at the times of the bombings but who later worked with the surviving children of Nagasaki, recalled that he had treated the initial announcements of the nuclear bombings casually.3 He felt chastened by his indifference afterwards, but his insouciance was hardly rare. A warrant to believe the atomic bombings uniquely different before the surrender of Japan lay largely in the realm of public relations associated with the shock strategy. On 9 August 1945, the day that sectors of Nagasaki were leveled by the second nuclear bomb, and three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, the Japanese government filed a formal protest through the Swiss government on the atomic bomb as “a new crime against the whole of humanity and civilization.”4 This event is usually referred to nowadays only obliquely, often amid accusations of hypocrisy that the imperial Japanese government and military, guilty of so many war crimes, would manufacture such accusations. Setting that issue aside for the next chapter, one feature of this protest stands out: the fact that it was made at all. For whatever reason, leaders in the Japanese government claimed to consider this bombing to be egregiously different from the bombings that had been hitting Japan—often with much greater destruction and casualties—since March. The atomic bomb was coming to be seen as a category by itself. Surprising here is that this claim was made so early. It would not be until Emperor Hirohito actually announced surrender, on 15 August, that claims of the atomic bomb as a unique event in the history of warfare, and of mankind, were seriously enunciated. Just as the Japanese government was the only entity capable of deciding when World War II was over, it was also the main entity to decide when to deem the atomic bomb as “special.” Before the surrender, many saw the atomic bomb as a very special weapon indeed, but only when it was special enough to be temporally and causally linked to surrender did such claims of “special” status come to dominate the entire story. The military narrative of the bomb as “just another weapon” faded away. Alongside it, the Third Shot dropped out of history. In the official Manhattan Project press releases, to take just one example, the timeline of events of mid-August listed the Nagasaki bombing and Japanese surrender. Then nothing, until Truman called for legislation for domestic control of the atom on 3 October.5 The uncertainty that had made the Third Shot a real probability was effaced from memory.

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This chapter chronicles how that happened, and how in different places (like the Soviet Union), the understanding of the bomb’s role in surrender could be interpreted quite differently. No single individual was responsible for endowing nuclear weapons with the transcendent, epoch-making status they achieved after surrender, but the best point of origin for any account of its emergence is a journalist: William Leonard Laurence of the New York Times, later dubbed by his critics the “mythmaker-in-chief ” of the atomic age.6 Laurence was born in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century as Leid Wolf Siew (pronounced “Zee”). According to an oral history account he gave long after World War II, he had lost his Jewish faith while still young and participated as a revolutionary in the first Russian Revolution of 1905. Fleeing arrest and prosecution, he came to the United States, settled in Boston, and changed his name. Everything about the name was conceived in symbolic terms: William for Shakespeare; Leonard for Leonardo da Vinci; Laurence for the street he lived on (Lawrence) in Roxbury, outside Boston, although with a “u” for its original “w” in reference to the Laura of Friedrich Schiller’s poetry.7 He obtained a scholarship to study at Harvard University, where he was two years ahead of James Bryant Conant (later president of Harvard and wartime advisor to Stimson, Roosevelt, and Truman on the atomic bomb).8 Almost by accident, through miscommunication and help from a friend, he managed to obtain a job on the New York Times as a science reporter. His youthful interest in science as a secular force that would replace what he saw as the antiquated vestiges of religion in the modern world was revived, and he published as early as 1940 some of the first American newspaper reports on the discovery of fission (late December 1938) that mentioned the possibility of using the energy released as an explosive.9 This early familiarity with fission brought him closer to the heart of the race to build an atomic bomb than he had ever dreamed. At some point in the establishment of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves realized that press releases would be needed, at the very least to explain away the strange and highly classified behavior at various project sites spread across the United States—and in particular the Trinity test. Groves originally wanted to borrow Jack Lockhart from the Office of Censorship, but Lockhart could not be spared and suggested that Groves obtain someone with a better background in science reporting.

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He recommended Laurence, who was no longer allowed to write articles on fission because of a wartime lock on information, designed to restrict German knowledge of American activities.10 Laurence was only too happy to participate—worried as he was from the discovery of uranium’s behavior that Hitler’s scientists might develop such a device—and the New York Times was more than pleased to release him, hoping to capitalize later on any success he might have in whichever classified project was taking him (which they did once the atomic bomb was announced).11 Laurence was the right man to assist the United States government’s effort to end the war by making “a deliberate effort to make it [the atomic bomb] more dramatic than it was,” in Alberta leader Norman Ramsey’s words.12 Laurence, who wrote the first draft of what would eventually become Truman’s announcement of the atomic bomb on 6 August 1945 (subsequently toned down from its superlative exuberance and tightened by Groves, Stimson, and others), genuinely believed that the detonation of the first atomic bomb was the beginning of a new age: “In fact, I can’t conceive, with the exclusion of a religious man who will say that it was the birth of Christ, of anything in the entire history of man as important and as great a turning point as that moment at 5:30 mountain time July 16th, 1945, in the desert of New Mexico.”13 Statements like this, recalled after the fact and echoed in his widely read memoir, Dawn over Zero, about the atomic bomb, helped popularize the scientists’ narrative of the new weapon.14 Groves picked Laurence out of necessity and convenience, but the choice proved to be a fortuitous one, since Laurence had his own agenda about how science was going to transform the world in its image, making everyone truly modern. The atomic bomb—science’s most sensational contribution to a war billed as rooting out antiquated and pernicious ideologies—proved an excellent vehicle for his own project. At times, that project reached the level of megalomania. He recalled his feelings while flying in the instruments plane on the second atomic bombing mission over Kokura, during the failed passes to hit the primary target: And here I am. I am destiny. I know. They don’t know. But I know that this was their last night on earth. I felt that the likelihood was that Kukura [sic] would be completely wiped off the face of the earth. I was

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thinking: there’s a feeling of a human being, a mere mortal, a newspaperman by profession, suddenly has the knowledge which has been given to him, a sense—you might say—of divinity.15

At the same time, Laurence—ignorant of the exact process of decision making that had led to the dropping of the bomb—contributed to the widespread view that there was a separate decision by Truman to drop each atomic bomb, and that the individuals on Tinian did not know whether they would use a second one: “Anyway after two days— of waiting—the bomb was dropped early Monday morning; we waited Tuesday and Wednesday—we didn’t know and I didn’t know whether or not there was ever going to be a second atomic bomb.”16 This, of course, is preposterous: it ignores the advance of the second bombing from five days to three days after the initial strike; it belies the content of the Handy order; and it trivializes the amount of time and effort involved in actually assembling an atomic bomb for delivery. Nevertheless, because Laurence had inside access, his version of events carried special weight with the public. As an employee of the project, Laurence was privileged with this scoop, and he was criticized afterwards by several peers for not disclosing his conflict of interest.17 He flew on The Great Artiste, the instruments plane, on the Nagasaki mission, and his description of that event garnered him one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. As Laurence’s voice was the first one heard on the atomic bomb—through his articles and through his edited words from the mouths of Truman, Stimson, and others in press releases from the Manhattan Project—his sentiments were echoed by many other journalists and pundits and amplified by repetition.18 Laurence’s vision of the atomic bomb spread and intensified. Laurence’s veneration of science and the scientists who assembled the atomic bomb dovetailed with a concurrent elevation of the prestige of nuclear physics in the popular imagination as a result of the surrender of Japan without an invasion. Scientists, not military planners, became the spokesmen for the atomic bomb. Since scientists were the individuals most likely to consider the bomb qualitatively different because of its revolutionary mechanism of obtaining explosive energy— the atomic in “atomic bomb”—the alternative military view (emphasizing the fact that this was, nonetheless, a bomb), dropped away, and with it the planned third atomic strike.

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Most physicists associated with the Manhattan Project had considered the atomic bomb to be “special” from the moment the idea was born with the discovery of fission.19 After surrender, under restrictions on speaking with the press openly about aspects of their work on the atomic bomb, comments about the uniqueness of the atomic bomb abounded. Many of the statements issued by both scientists and journalists had their point of origin in the official history of the development of the atomic bomb, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, known universally as the Smyth Report after its author, Princeton physicist Henry D. Smyth. Given the intense classification of reports on the atomic bomb, only material that had been cleared as of 15 August 1945—meaning reports by Laurence and Smyth (the latter released on 12 August, and thus a few days before surrender, but after two atomic bombings)—was precleared as sources for future reporting on the development and use of the weapons. The Smyth Report thus became another important source declaring that fission bombs would be sufficient to win the war for whoever obtained them first—a claim that drastically undervalued the contributions of millions of individuals toward a complete war effort.20 Philip Morrison, a member of Project Alberta, echoed the common view in his testimony before Congress in December 1945: “The atomic bomb is not merely a new weapon: it is a revolution in war.”21 Of course, these statements about the importance of the atomic bomb in the ending of the war—as well as in changing the nature of warfare itself and perhaps in making major war impossible in the future—also served a psychological function of justifying the scientists’ involvement in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The same psychological balm contributed to the publicizing of the Franck Report, an attempt by scientists at the Manhattan Project’s Met Lab in Chicago to get the military to demonstrate the atomic bomb to the Japanese before using it on civilian populations.22 The history of what came to be known as the “scientists’ movement” for atomic arms control in the late 1940s and beyond is so often recounted that the gradualness of its emergence escapes attention.23 According to common perception—including that of members of the movement—there was a seamless transition from the Franck Report to the Baruch Plan for early atomic arms control, to the widespread acceptance of the cause among scientists.24 In fact, most scientists involved in the development of the atomic bomb did not oppose its use on Japan,

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either before the fact—when they were not seriously consulted—or afterwards. To an extent many did object at the time to the course of atomic events, but most saliently (and immediately) to the proposed May-Johnson Bill that would have continued military control of atomic energy after the war. Effective lobbying by scientists was largely responsible for killing that proposal and promoting civilian oversight and control as embodied in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Even the assumption that atomic bombs were revolutionary seemed questionable immediately after the war, although not for long. Oppenheimer, for example, who would become the most visible scientific spokesman on atomic issues, in an influential essay wavered on what exactly made the atomic bomb “special”: “But the truly radical character of atomic weapons lies . . . [not] in the fact that they exploit an energy qualitatively different in origin from all earlier sources. It lies in their vastly greater powers of destruction, in the vastly reduced effort needed for such destruction.”25 That is, with nuclear weapons, increases in quantity (of blast) shaded into changes in quality (revolutions in warfare). A bright line was hard to distinguish. Reasonable equivocations like Oppenheimer’s were rare in the first weeks after surrender, even among those who had expressed skepticism about the power of nuclear weapons before their use, and they became almost impossible to find as the year wore on. Public knowledge and fears about the atomic bomb were almost entirely channeled in these first postwar days and weeks into tremendous, almost apocalyptic fears of nuclear annihilation—all at a time when the only atomic bomb on earth was the plutonium Fat Man that was not used for a third atomic strike on Japan. Almost immediately after surrender, the American media began to build a very simple narrative about how “the bomb ended the war,” a marked change from the extensive writing over the course of 1945 about the variety of possible endings of the war: modification of unconditional surrender, Soviet entry into the war, intensified blockade and firebombing. The fact that all of these proposed inducements to Japanese surrender actually took place as well as the atomic bombings faded almost immediately after surrender.26 It is striking that the attention of the press (and, subsequently, the public) focused so rapidly on the atomic bomb. Knowledge of the atomic bombing of Japan reached unprecedented levels: 98 percent of Americans appeared to have heard of the atomic bomb after the end of

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the war, at a time when 20 percent of Americans claimed to have little or no access to news sources. From a public opinion standpoint, this is phenomenal, representing an essentially unheard-of saturation of the news market (although exactly what these Americans knew about the weapon remains open to question).27 Public opinion was generally supportive of the bombing. When the American Institute of Public Opinion (AIPO) asked on 15 September 1945, “Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing that the atomic bomb was developed?,” 69 percent responded favorably compared to 17 percent unfavorably. These were high approval figures, although the numbers had already slipped from the 85 percent approval rating for the use of the bombs on Japan from 26 August.28 In December 1945, Fortune magazine published a survey in which only 4.5 percent of respondents felt that the atomic bomb should not have been used at all, and 53.5 percent felt the decision to use the bombs—interpreted as a decision to use two bombs—was correct as it stood. As evidence that a Third Shot would have been popular, an additional 22.7 percent felt “We should have quickly used many more of them before Japan had a chance to surrender.”29 To understand these figures, one must recall that over 80 percent of respondents felt that the war would last at least two months longer, 15.1 percent thought it would last one more year than it did, and 17.6 percent thought it would last even longer than that.30 One might think that anything credited with ending a war like that would achieve such popularity, “special” or not. In fact, that assumption is false. When the AIPO asked in the same poll of 26 August 1945, “Would you favor or oppose using poison gas against the Japanese if doing so would reduce the number of American soldiers who are killed and wounded?,” 40 percent favored using gas and 49 percent were opposed.31 While these numbers indicated a significant increase in support for poison gas, these were still weapons that half the population considered to be beyond the pale of legitimate warfare—and in this they were unlike nuclear weapons, although the two categories would later be grouped together as “unconventional weapons.” The first major crack in this widespread public support for the atomic bombing came from American and foreign Christian groups, who came out against these weapons even before the surrender of Japan. The most prominent calls for cessation of atomic bombing came from the Vatican, part of the Catholic Church’s long-standing objection to the targeting

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of noncombatants on the grounds of Just War theory. Although the Catholic objection applied to conventional and atomic bombing alike, Hiroshima elicited new objections with a particular vehemence. Protestant churches, on the other hand, condemned nuclear warfare as a specific atrocity, marking nuclear weapons as in a category by themselves. In both these instances, although to a much greater degree in the latter, the early religious objection to the development and use of the atomic bomb—for a time the only loud and sustained opposition—relied to some degree on a notion of nuclear weapons as “special.”32 The same was true of early antinuclear activism by groups outside the scientists’ and religious movements. For the most part, the early opposition to the atomic bomb came from traditional pacifists, who folded the atomic bomb into the problem of warfare in general, or from socialist and isolationist groups who considered modern international war to be a mistake whatever the weapons used.33 Quickly after surrender, however, the atomic bomb was elevated in importance above the rest of warfare by other groups, particularly a new breed of quasiutopian advocates who believed that the atomic bomb was so destructive that it rendered the newly created United Nations Organization irrelevant, and exponentially intensified the importance of a world government to prevent a global apocalypse.34 Soon afterwards, the qualitatively different status of the atomic bomb in the popular perception began to mobilize individuals who were not opposed to war per se, but simply to atomic war. Objections to Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, when they slowly started to emerge in mid-1946, began to use this rhetoric of “uniqueness” to infer a moral taint for the United States in being the unique power to use this unique weapon.35 American remorse over the use of the atomic bomb took some time to gestate; when it boiled over, it couched itself entirely in the language of the transformation of the world under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. As catalyst for this reaction came writer John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published as four articles in the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, and released as a best-selling book that expanded its readership substantially. (It is still in print and widely read.) More than any other single author, Hersey generated the intense emphasis on radioactivity as the legacy of the atomic bombs, and he managed to persuade many readers with his exclusive focus on the victims of the atomic bombing at its first use that this weapon posed qualitatively

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different moral issues.36 Syndicated columnists echoed and then expanded on themes posed by Hersey and the concatenation of religious, scientific, and world-government groups to transform the atomic bomb into a modern dilemma unlike anything the world had ever faced before.37 By 1947, one finds books published on the issue of atomic vulnerability, and how to harden American cities against a nuclear attack.38 This was two years before the Soviet Union acquired its own nuclear capability (although precious few bombs), and at a time when the U.S. stockpile of bombs, as discussed in the next chapter, numbered below ten. Atomic bombs were seen as so unique and special that whether or not they posed an imminent practical threat—the crucial question concerning conventional weapons—was not even called into question. There were naysayers who spoke against the dominant currents of popular opinion, but they were the same individuals who seemed to select their opinions on purpose to generate notoriety for their “provocative” nature. General Curtis LeMay, for example, would later point to the emerging hostility to nuclear weapons on moral grounds as illogical: “The assumption seems to be that it is much more wicked to kill people with a nuclear bomb, than to kill people by busting their heads with rocks.”39 (Others, echoing LeMay, pointed to the firebombing of Japanese cities as a way of eliminating or at least mitigating any moral responsibility that would attach to their involvement in the development and use of nuclear weapons.)40 In an unusual counterpoint, Gertrude Stein, in her last piece of writing before her death in 1946, declared that she “had not been able to take any interest in it [the atomic bomb],” thereby maintaining knowing superiority over more conventional thinkers.41 Such voices were few and far between; most Americans felt deeply that the atomic bomb self-evidently was special precisely because it had ended a brutal and bloody war with great suddenness. This assumption placed the Soviet Union in a difficult position. Joseph Stalin’s military had no atomic bomb, and it now had to face a nuclear-armed United States in a rapidly escalating Cold War. The American press echoed the conventional wisdom of scientists that the Soviet Union would be able to acquire its own atomic bomb within five years (which in fact was accomplished in August 1949).42 In the meantime, however, if nuclear weapons were as revolutionary and warwinning as the Americans were now claiming, the Soviet Union was in quite a fix. At the same time, some features of the American perception

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of the revolutionary character of nuclear weapons would make less sense to a Soviet populace that did not have access to Laurence’s exuberant rhetoric. The channels of information on the bombs were quite different in the Soviet Union. Stalin was informed about the atomic bomb, officially, at the Potsdam Conference, the late date explained by the persistent American and British policy to curtail the openness of the Grand Alliance at its nuclear borders.43 At Potsdam, Truman, without his translator, walked up to Stalin and informed him casually of a new weapon that the United States had developed, without mentioning that it was an atomic bomb. According to reports of third parties—none of whom was near enough to hear all of the few words exchanged and who relied largely on facial expressions to gauge Stalin’s reaction—Stalin responded with a blasé remark about hoping that the Americans would soon use it. The assumption has often been that Stalin did not realize the magnitude of what he heard, or conversely that he craftily concealed his tremendous panic under a calm exterior. The truth seems to be somewhere in between. Stalin and the Soviet leadership were fairly well informed through espionage networks about the progress of the Manhattan Project and were aware in early July of the scheduled Trinity test.44 That test, along with the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seemed to have triggered Stalin’s interest more than any announcement by Truman, for those events indicated unambiguously that such a bomb was feasible. As American envoy to Moscow Averell Harriman reported back from Moscow on 9 August 1945—after both atomic bombings and Soviet entry into the conflict—Stalin believed it likely that the Japanese would surrender in response to the atomic bombs because it would give the leadership the excuse they had been looking for. He added, in an aside, that “Soviet scientists had also been working on the problem but had not been able to solve it.”45 Soon enough, they did.46 Stalin’s reaction to news of the atomic bomb, whether he was shocked by its existence or completely aware of all particulars from spy reports, would have been the same: give no reaction until more thought had been expended on how to proceed. Interestingly, after sixty years of research and some additional evidence, we are not necessarily any closer to understanding the interior reactions of this enigmatic figure. According to his appointment log at the Kremlin, Stalin refused to see anyone on 6 August, the day of the Hiroshima bombing, which paralleled his

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reaction to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, indicating severe shock and depression.47 On 8 August, two days after the first atomic bomb was detonated over its target, the atomic bomb was incorporated into the next five-year plan for the Soviet economy, representing a serious intensification of effort at a time when the Soviet Union was about to enter the war and victory still seemed distant (although not uncertain given the fullness of time).48 Based on his personal experience in Moscow during the late stages of the war, correspondent Alexander Werth was convinced that the leadership was struck by the atomic bombings; it provided a ubiquitous topic of conversation, and Soviet citizens seemed to be very shaken by it.49 One would not know this from official channels. The Soviet press played down the bomb: Pravda only mentioned it on 7 August, quoting an extract of Truman’s speech announcing its existence, and did not mention the bombing of Nagasaki at all. Of course, by the time Nagasaki was destroyed, the Soviet Union not only had declared war but had its troops moving rapidly across Manchuria, and the Red Army’s astonishing victories claimed all the newsprint—an emphasis that was also to some extent true in the American press, which treated Soviet advances and Nagasaki as of essentially equal importance.50 Soviet officials reacted publicly in similar fashion. The premier of the Polish government in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who was in Moscow in August 1945, recalled in 1956 that no one in the Soviet government was overly worried about the detonation, despite the fact that he himself was tremendously impressed. He asked no less a foreign-policy personage than Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov at a dinner the night after the announcement what to make of the American weapon, and Molotov responded: “This is American propaganda. From a military point of view it has no important meaning whatsoever.”51 Stalin likewise commented as late as September 1946: “I do not consider the atomic bomb as serious a force as some politicians are inclined to do. Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves, but they cannot decide the fate of wars since atomic bombs are quite insufficient for that.”52 Indeed, a Soviet delegation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the early days of the American occupation of Japan noted that although the blast was significant, the force had been very much exaggerated by the Americans.53 So, in public at least, Soviet officials believed that the atomic bomb had precious little to do with the end of the war. So what did convince

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the Japanese to surrender? The only answer one finds in official Soviet sources was unequivocal: Soviet entry into hostilities persuaded the Japanese to surrender.54 (Downplaying of the atomic bomb in favor of their own nation’s contribution to the end of the war was not a peculiarity of the Soviets; the British, especially Winston Churchill in his history of the war, believed that the blockade coordinated by their navy bore the lion’s share of convincing the Japanese that the war was hopeless and they should surrender unconditionally.)55 As for the atomic bombings themselves, later Soviet interpreters throughout the Cold War argued that they were militarily unnecessary to defeat Japan and had been used largely to intimidate the Soviet Union—an account heavily derived from the interpretations of P.M.S. Blackett and later Gar Alperovitz.56 The Soviet effort to minimize the importance of the atomic bomb can be attributed to several causes: in part, the view that conventional superiority ended the war was simply sincere; in part, it represented whistling in the dark; and, finally, it represented the real military need to bolster morale for the immense Soviet Army that now had to face a Western bloc armed with a nuclear arsenal the Soviets could not (yet) counter in kind.57 The official Soviet attitude toward nuclear weapons as merely a counterpart in kind to conventional weapons was also reflected in Soviet actions and doctrine after the American atomic monopoly was broken, appearing to indicate that the Soviets thought of even their own nuclear weapons as being like conventional weapons.58 The account here suggests why: the Soviets were not subjected to the same mantra of nuclear “specialness” as the Americans because they were not presented with the same concatenation of circumstances and thus believed that conventional superiority was what ended World War II. The Soviet case—at least until the development of hydrogen bombs made mutual annihilation a real possibility—offers a parallel world in which Laurence’s vision of the atomic bomb was not primary. In contrast, consider what happened to the American armed forces as they adjusted to the idea of the existence of nuclear weapons. Military officers, as has been shown repeatedly in these pages, tended to consider atomic bombs initially within the context of firebombing and thus as something to be analyzed through the usual categories of strategic bombing. When the absolute secrecy over the Manhattan Project was lifted on 6 August 1945, the military as a whole to some degree

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replicated this reaction on a larger scale. It should come as no surprise that the various armed forces had been planning for the end of the war for several years when they were surprised by the atomic bomb’s existence and, shortly afterward, by the Japanese surrender. The atomic bomb arrived on the scene so late that it was difficult to integrate with various branches’ plans for postwar positioning.59 In general, most military planners reacted to the atomic bomb in the terms of an evolving strategy of technical modernization into which they seamlessly folded this new weapon. Partly, this casual appropriation of the bomb stemmed from the underlying perception of the atomic bomb as an “ordinary” weapon of war, and partly it was a consequence of the sheer quantity of revolutionary innovations over the course of World War II (such as radar or long-range bombers) that are usually flattened out against the background of the mushroom cloud.60 The one segment of the U.S. Armed Forces that did not sanguinely approach the issues raised by the advent of the atomic bomb was the Army Air Forces, which had generally felt marginalized since its creation as a subset of the army and believed that it had earned its autonomy for its efforts in World War II. The atomic bomb soon became a tool in this fight for independence from and equivalence to the army. Like the other forces, the AAF had been planning for peace since autumn 1943, and autonomy was the first item on the agenda. Since the atomic bomb was so highly classified, the project of achieving autonomy originally took no account of the existence of the weapon or the fact that the only suitable delivery device after 15 August 1945 seemed to be the B-29—and thus the AAF. AAF Commanding General Henry (“Hap”) Arnold and others rapidly appropriated the atomic bomb as an argument for autonomy, and any claims for the weapon as revolutionizing warfare only fed the preexisting plan. Arnold’s postwar report to the secretary of war made this plain in the form of hyperbole: “The influence of atomic energy on Air Power can be stated very simply. It has made Air Power all-important.”61 On 18 September 1947, the United States Air Force was created as a separate and equal branch of the armed forces. Claims of the atomic bomb’s uniqueness played crucially into the alignment of the American military more generally as well, most significantly as a factor in widespread “demobilization fever” in the first postwar year. As discussed earlier, plans for demobilization had been

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in the works since August 1943 and were, necessarily, gradual. Both George Marshall and Henry Stimson knew that if demobilization happened in a seemingly ad hoc or arbitrary basis, it would cause a tremendous morale problem for the end of the war. Immediately after Soviet forces engaged in the Pacific war on 9 August, Stimson was deeply concerned about the impact the atomic bomb and the fighting in Manchuria would have on demands for demobilization, and he communicated his worries to Truman.62 After surrender, the demands for releasing soldiers from the army only intensified. The numbers themselves tell a stark story. In June 1945, the United States had more than 12 million men and women under arms. A year later, that number was 3 million; a year after that, in June 1947, the total of all forces numbered at 1.5 million, 12.5 percent of the end-of-war peak.63 (Yet, even with all these quite real reductions, the United States Armed Forces remained larger after the war than before. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the United States Army and Navy combined numbered 300,000; the number never again went so low.)64 Demobilization fever was allowed to take over the military largely out of fear that if troop numbers were not drastically reduced, there would be a popular political backlash and foreign commitments in general would be rejected.65 Isolationism was a persistent threat for decision makers, mirroring their fears of a return of the Great Depression upon peacetime reconversion. In both cases, Truman and his cabinet thought through the only analogy they had for what the postwar world would look like: the United States before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a nation mired in economic torpor and beset with a fear of foreign “entanglements.” Stimson after the war was most insistent that the postwar pattern of domestic hostility to American presence abroad, which he along with Franklin Roosevelt had considered partially responsible for the rise of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, not return.66 Here, too, the vision of the atomic bomb as a special, transcendent weapon proved to be a real help. Demobilization was a pressure that had to be accommodated, and the presence of the atomic bomb as a potential equalizer to the Soviet Union’s overwhelming conventional military superiority in Europe allowed military planners to sit easier with the removal of so many military options in the face of popular pressure. The relative cheapness and tremendous public prestige of atomic warfare—a prestige born of and enhanced by the way World War II ended—allowed the

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United States Armed Forces to face necessity stoically and rely ever more heavily on a nuclear deterrent.67 That deterrent, as will be discussed in the next chapter, was largely illusory: the United States simply did not have enough nuclear weapons to justify the reliance placed on them. At the same time, some of the luster of the postwar “specialness” began to wear off. A somewhat counterintuitive way to approach American attitudes toward the power of the bomb is the reaction to the Bikini tests (Operation Crossroads) in July 1946. Realizing that the AAF, and thus the army, was stealing the atomic thunder, the navy pushed for a series of tests in 1946 to assert the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and thus not the army—over the nuclear arsenal.68 These tests of two Nagasaki-style Fat Man bombs were designed to study the effect of nuclear weapons on navies, further emphasizing interdepartmental responsibility for the atomic age. But the blasts, while impressive in many terms, failed to live up to the hype generated before the event. As none other than Laurence, atomic booster par excellence, reported after the event: [The average citizen] had expected one bomb to sink the entire Bikini fleet, kill all the animals aboard, make a hole in the bottom of the ocean and create tidal waves that would be felt for thousands of miles. He had even been told that every one participating in the test would die. Since none of these happened, he is only too eager to conclude that the atomic bomb is, after all, just another weapon.69

The degree of the disappointment only reveals how much the atomic bomb had been built up as a momentous revolution. No test could have lived up to those expectations, or have been anything other than underwhelming. Laurence’s worry that the Bikini tests would make the atomic bomb into ordinary fare was not realized. The tests, although for the most part gratuitous and an expenditure of almost a third of the atomic arsenal (which numbered only seven bombs in summer 1946) to yield information about a bomb that had already been used in combat effectively in Nagasaki, did have the ominous effect of raising public awareness of radioactivity, adding the word “fallout” to the English language after the irradiation of American soldiers and Marshall islanders.70 The cognizance of radiation as a threat from the bomb, further enhanced by the publication of Hersey’s Hiroshima later that summer, reactivated the

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uniqueness of atomic warfare in the popular imagination. At the same time, the Bikini tests catalyzed military officers to start to think about how nuclear weapons might be used (or held in abeyance as a deterrent) in plans for a future war against the Soviet Union.71 In the new-born realm of nuclear strategy, the special status of atomic weapons was the axiom from which the rest of the arguments flowed.

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Chapter 7

Beginnings

The transformation of nuclear weapons from tactical ordnance delivered from Tinian conventionally and repeatedly into their contemporary role as stand-ins for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse turns out to be more than a historical curiosity. Both the process by which this elevation of atomic bombs took place and its final result began to structure multiple features of the Cold War. Unlike many of the guiding precepts of Cold War diplomacy that now lie discarded, “nuclearism”— the attitude toward strategy, tactics, and politics that builds on the notion of nuclear bombs as “absolute weapons”—has outlived its SovietAmerican incubation period and retained a dominating force in the contemporary world. The image formed in those days of late August 1945, shaped by William Laurence and proselytized by scientists, journalists, and politicians, is still very much with us. The point is not whether nuclearism has shaped how individuals the world over view these weapons, but how it has done so. In both the United States and Japan, in particular, the sudden end of World War II inscribed nuclear weapons as the symbols of our modern age and as the key to unlocking both past and future. That this was not inevitably built into the hardware of the weapons does not make its power any less real. In this final chapter, some of the legacies of this way of thinking about atomic warfare will be traced out. In exploring three specific areas—the creation out of nowhere of the discipline of nuclear strategy, the development of thermonuclear weapons and the ensuing arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the abiding failure of segments of the Japanese polity to acknowledge responsibility for atrocities committed in the Second World War—one finds the

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fingerprints of the concept of nuclear weapons as “special.” Because these bombs, and only these bombs, carry a unique aura of inviolability, they have deeply shaped considerations of the morality of nuclear warfare as well; each of the three areas just mentioned, in fact, is upon inspection to some degree concerned with the moral valences of atomic warfare. Given the preceding account of how atomic weapons came to acquire their aura, certain dilemmas and paradoxes of the nuclear age can be seen in a fresh light. It is the manifest goal of this chapter, and this book, to so illuminate them. The first instance of this lasting legacy can be seen at the very core of the arms race that characterized the half-century of the Cold War. The discourse and doctrines of nuclear strategy remain some of the most distinctive aspects of the imagined nuclear universe. As embodied in figures like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the doctrines of how to calculate and plan for a global nuclear war were both easy to parody and in deadly earnest about the implications of living on a planet occupied by two atomic antagonists. Of course, it stands to reason that if both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed thousands of nuclear missiles that could reach each other’s cities and destroy them in a matter of hours, the older ways of thinking about long wars of attrition might no longer apply. What is surprising about the period just after the surrender of Japan—that is, as the images of an atomic planet became fused with William Laurence’s narrative of destiny—is that the characteristic strategic planning around nuclear weapons, with its megatons and its “sacrifice cities,” appeared almost fully formed at the moment of creation. In the first postwar months, when there was exactly one nuclear power (the United States), which possessed no missiles, and only one nuclear bomb available (the unassembled Third Shot), academics, war planners, politicians, and the public began to speak of nuclear war as a global Armageddon. As cultural historian of the nuclear age Paul Boyer noted: “All the major elements of our contemporary engagement with the nuclear reality took shape literally within days of Hiroshima.”1 To be more precise, they occurred within days of surrender. Nuclear strategy was a field created out of whole cloth beginning in late August 1945. Considering the tremendous investment of resources, manpower, and sheer intellectual energy on the problem of planning for a nuclear war, it is astonishing that the basic concepts involved were

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created largely by two individuals in this first postsurrender year: Bernard Brodie and William Liscum Borden. The first emphasized deterrence for preventing a nuclear war from breaking out; the second insisted that a nuclear war could (indeed would) be fought and could be won with enough preparation.2 Over time, these doctrines would evolve into Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and the “flexible response” strategy, respectively, and they have developed in dialectical tandem ever since. It is crucial to note, however, that both strategies were initially based directly on the experiences of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and surrender—all anyone knew or has ever known of nuclear war— and that both assumed the image of the atomic bomb as different in kind from other weapons, as intrinsically “special.” From that point of agreement, the divergence began. Bernard Brodie was trained as a student of naval strategy in the final days of World War II, and he had been on the faculty of Yale University for only five days when Hiroshima was destroyed by the Little Boy uranium bomb. He was thirty-five years old, and he immediately took to the issues raised by this new weapon—the “absolute weapon,” he would dub it.3 For Brodie, who relied heavily on the Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) conclusions that argued that strategic bombing was less effective than had been expected in the European war, the crucial difference in an atomic world was that the bomb could potentially destroy so much so quickly. The compression of time was the vital point. With such a revolutionary weapon on hand, all of an enemy’s crucial assets could already be wiped out before conventional forces could be mobilized, and such a threat could apply equally to all nuclear powers. (This at a time when the Soviet Union was four years away from a workable atomic bomb, let alone a full-fledged deterrent.) As a result, the United States must plan to prevent war before it broke out: the atomic bomb metamorphosed from the most terrible instrument of war into an agent of peace. All of this hinged on the atomic bomb being in fact as revolutionary as it had been proclaimed. As Brodie put it on 1 November 1945, two and a half months after surrender: Even the most “revolutionary” developments of the past seem when contrasted with the atomic bomb to have been mere steps in a continuing and many-sided evolutionary process. . . .

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[T]he atomic bomb . . . is not just another and more destructive weapon to be added to an already long list. It is something which threatens to make the rest of the list relatively unimportant.4

The atomic bomb’s very specialness summoned into being the need for a nuclear strategist, and Bernard Brodie was that man. William Liscum Borden was intellectually the opposite of Brodie, although biographically they shared certain commonalities. Borden was a twenty-five-year-old law student at Yale when Brodie began working and writing, and his pessimism toward the ability of the world order to maintain peace tinged his belief that no amount of destructiveness would deny war its perennial role as the final arbiter of conflict in the international world. Deterrence was possible—even vital—but it would not be primarily nuclear. Borden agreed that nuclear weapons would be terribly destructive, and that both sides would indeed amass them and launch them at the beginning of a conflict, wreaking terrific damage. The question for Borden was: then what? After the nuclear arsenals were exhausted, the remaining forces would be engaged in a lengthy war of attrition, similar to the Second World War. To prevent that war, one must prepare for it: building up decentralized industries, enhancing conventional deterrents, and eschewing reliance on nuclear weapons exclusively. The real use of the atomic bomb in this conflict would not be to launch immediately, but to reserve them as tactical weapons to support engagements in the field. War would still be fought, and the atomic bomb would become a transformative power within the confines of conventional warfighting.5 Borden is not a household name today, even in policy circles, but his most prolific (even notorious) follower, Herman Kahn, achieved a new degree of visibility for precisely this kind of reasoning in the late 1950s and early 1960s.6 The positions on nuclear deterrence had been set. The “special” nature of atomic bombs was equally “obvious” to these civilian strategists immediately after the cessation of hostilities in 1945 as it seems to us today, and it shaped the way they reacted to their postwar environment. Given the tight governmental control of information about nuclear weapons, it should not be surprising that Brodie and Borden both to some degree shared the public’s view of the nature of nuclear weapons. They both believed that a future war would feature

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nuclear weapons, and that those weapons might indeed prove decisive. Their differences may be seen as different interpretations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: for Brodie, those were strategic bombing raids designed to shock the enemy into surrender and thus could in the future be used as models of deterrence; for Borden, they were tactical attacks on enemy targets. (The similarity in outlook was such that later in his career Brodie himself shifted more toward the Borden camp of tolerating limited nuclear warfighting.) The affinity between the Borden/Kahn view and Dr. Strangelove’s insanity reflects how deeply the “scientists’ narrative” of the atomic bomb had displaced all others, although it did not extinguish them completely. The surreal quality of the world that Brodie and Borden offered us set the terms of the debate because they focused on what everyone assumed was true: the issue was not whether the bombs were special, but how their special features would or should alter the basic concepts of military planning. Yet these nuclear strategy theories not only presumed a world with (at least) two nuclear powers at a time when there was only one, they also assumed that at least one of those powers would possess a sizable nuclear force, while in fact the sole atomic power (the United States) was shockingly ill-prepared in matters atomic. Nuclear weapons were considered to be world changing by both the public and the lay strategists, but the state of the arsenal bore no resemblance to these visions of annihilation. There were simply not enough weapons to follow through on any of these detailed war plans. As a result, one observes a growing chasm between what people assumed to be true about the bomb and what was actually the case, injecting some of the fun-housemirror quality that colors so many early Cold War debates. The simple truth—unknown even to many at the highest levels in the late 1940s—was that the United States had very few nuclear weapons, and those that it possessed were not ready for delivery against an enemy target. Although in August 1945 General Leslie Groves had predicted that a plutonium implosion bomb might be ready roughly every ten days until the end of 1945, following Japanese surrender the actual size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile fell far short of that optimistic assessment, due to slowdowns at Oak Ridge (deemed inefficient at isotope separation) and reactor difficulties at Hanford (caused by overusage). By January 1946, there were only two weapons in the stockpile, a number that had climbed to nine in July, indicating a production rate of about

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one a month. By July 1947, there were thirteen weapons, halving the production rate, although one year later the number had climbed to fifty. Even at this late date, with the Cold War a certainty, none of these weapons—all were either Nagasaki-style Fat Men or improvements on that basic design—was assembled and ready for delivery. A special hoist was needed to load these into the same modified Silverplate B-29s that had formed the flotilla of the 509th Composite Group, only twentyseven of which were extant in January 1946 (five more were equipped within the next two years), and all of them stationed in Roswell, New Mexico, at some remove from the stored nuclear bombs.7 Neither President Harry Truman nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew how many atomic bombs they controlled, or any other aspect of nuclear readiness, until April 1947, simply because no one had thought to create a mechanism for the information to get to the top.8 To some extent, this shows the delay with which atomic bombs came to be seen as “special” devices: bookkeeping practices had not yet adapted to their elevated status. With this limited information about the size of the American nuclear forces, it proves difficult to know exactly how large the stockpile was, since extant documents make no distinction between test devices and weapons proper. Given that there were nine active implosion cores and nine implosion assemblies as of 30 June 1946, if that includes test weapons, then this signified only seven bombs, since two were detonated in the Bikini Atoll Crossroads tests. As of 30 June 1947, the U.S. military counted only thirteen nuclear components, and twenty-nine implosion assemblies for the Mark III, a modification of the Fat Man. The 509th Composite Group remained the only team equipped to deliver these bombs through the summer of 1948.9 Assuming, of course, that the bombs could be located in time and brought to a B-29. Some of the “gadgets” were kept unassembled in a basement at Los Alamos and then moved to an air force base outside Albuquerque, and even at one point stored near the gold at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The bombs were never in this period less than two days away from readiness (let alone loading time and flying time for delivery), and authorization for their proper use remained murky until as late as 1952.10 The problems of assembly were likewise vexing. The bomb assembly team of Alberta had long ago disbanded, and a military assembly team was only formed in December 1947. It took twenty-four men

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nearly two days to bring an unassembled plutonium bomb to combat readiness. This was more than an issue of hardware. As Norman Ramsey, the lead Los Alamos scientist on Tinian, had foreseen in those uncertain days between the surrender of Japan and the beginning of the occupation, it would be difficult to replicate the success of the Tinian assembly laboratory on short notice: “I also think that serious thought should be given to the means whereby from now on the United States can remain in a state of readiness in which an atomic bomb could be delivered to any place in the world on a moment[’]s notice. To establish a base similar to the present one at Tinian would take a long time.”11 The intense military effort that had proven essential for the rapid mobilization of an advanced nuclear base had slackened even as international tensions with a possibly nuclear Soviet Union were rising. In part, the faith in the atomic bomb as the be-all and end-all of modern warfare had blinded decision makers to the realities of technological lead time that the weapons shared with conventional devices. The bomb was nothing but radioactive hardware if it could not be delivered. And yet American military strategists—following the assumptions of Brodie or Borden, depending on the war planner in question—came to rely increasingly on nuclear weapons as the linchpin of plans for World War III. Military facts on the ground in Europe were not encouraging for the Truman administration. The Soviet Union’s conventional superiority on the continent at the end of the war was simply overwhelming. Western analysts believed the Soviets had 175 divisions ready to take over Western Europe. Even with only half of that probably exaggerated estimate, they could have swept Europe, at least to the Pyrenees mountains and the English Channel, in a matter of days.12 With the partial demobilization that followed Japanese surrender, there was simply no way the Americans and their allies could muster sufficient conventional forces to counter this threat. As a matter of necessity, then, reliance on nuclear weapons was incorporated into military strategy far beyond the actual capacities of the stockpile.13 The demand for atomic bombs far outstripped supply, and quickly. A year after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. strategy proposed dropping fifty atomic bombs on twenty separate Soviet cities (a preliminary target list had been generated by the end of the Second World War), at a time when the United States had exactly thirteen bombs, in various states of disarray.14

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The conceptualization of a war between the United States and the Soviet Union as necessarily a nuclear war was only more deeply ingrained after the Soviets detonated their first device in August 1949 and broke the American nuclear monopoly. (Although we do not have access to the exact size of the Soviet stockpile, presumably it could not have numbered very much within a few months after the successful explosion of the first test device.) Even before the hydrogen bomb raised the factor of nuclear destruction by orders of magnitude, studies were undertaken of nuclear warfighting in Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, the military consensus, following Borden, was that a nuclear war would be long: the United States would presumably be pushed out of Europe, and the Soviets would convert European industry to produce war materiel, including atomic bombs, and reciprocal bombing would continue for years.15 Fears of precisely such an outcome led to determined, but unsuccessful, advocacy of a preventative nuclear war against the Soviet Union before the monopoly was broken or the American stockpile was matched.16 Yet Truman was reluctant to authorize the use of atomic weapons a second time, a historical curiosity potentially explained by reflecting on the history presented in this book. In a manner of speaking, his stoporder imposed after Nagasaki was never rescinded; Truman simply rejected military efforts to persuade him to use his atomic arsenal (however small) in the Korean War against North Korean or Chinese forces.17 And yet air force officers like Curtis LeMay—who had publicly declared that conventional firebombing, not nuclear bombing, had ended World War II—assumed that the administration believed its own rhetoric about the essential revolution caused by nuclear weapons. LeMay was bewildered as to why, if Truman and his advisors believed that nuclear weapons ended conflicts, they would be reluctant to use them to end this specific conflict.18 It had, after all, already been built into military strategy. Public thinking unwittingly mirrored the military’s increasing reliance on nuclear weapons. Even though there were no global nuclear arsenals in the 1940s of any substantial size, visions and fears of total annihilation emerged almost immediately upon Japanese surrender, complete with intercontinental ballistic missiles (extrapolated from the Nazi development of the V-2). Public attention focused on the atomic bomb almost to the exclusion of all other weapons.19

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It is in this context that the controversy over the crash development of the hydrogen bomb should be seen. Several physicists, principally Edward Teller, had advocated a fusion bomb (the “Superbomb,” or “Super”) since the early days of Los Alamos. Teller, in fact, worked on the problem of making the Super tractable while on the Mesa; it proved administratively and personally easier for Oppenheimer to keep this avenue open than to close down this problem as an unwise allocation of resources for the war effort. Like the atomic bomb, a hydrogen bomb exploits the energy stored in the nucleus of atoms, but instead of releasing that energy through fission—the splitting of heavy nuclei like uranium or plutonium—it relies upon the fusion of two hydrogen nuclei into helium. The amount of energy to be released was theoretically enormous and unlimited, dwarfing by orders of magnitude the potential destruction of a fission bomb, because the Super could be scaled up possibly indefinitely by simply increasing the quantities of materials in the bomb core. The Super proved elusive, however; the physics was simply too challenging. While research on the Super continued during the 1940s, it was not until the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949 that the issue became a live one for members of the recently formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its scientist-staffed General Advisory Committee (GAC). The story of how the GAC recommended against a crash program to develop a hydrogen device in the shortest possible time and Truman’s 1950 decision to disregard that advice has been told well many times, and it lies outside the scope of this book.20 On 1 November 1952, the first prototype hydrogen bomb was detonated at Eniwetok Atoll, not too far from Tinian. The thermonuclear age was born, and hydrogen weapons added a new valence to the “special” status of nuclear weapons. Or did they? One of the distinctive features of the debates over the development of the hydrogen bomb—up to and including its role in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ill-fated security-clearance hearings in 1954, which drew much of their rationale for declaring Oppenheimer a security risk from his opposition to the project—was the prominence of moral arguments made by scientists against developing such a “genocidal” weapon, a bomb so large that its only practical purpose would be to destroy cities and civilians. Almost to a man (and they were all men), scientists who had worked on and advocated fission bombs, such as

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Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, and James Bryant Conant, considered that a moral boundary would be breached by the development of this weapon.21 For individuals today, who know that a thermonuclear weapon has never been used in combat—indeed, that the only combat uses of any nuclear device remain the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—such fears may seem overblown, even hypocritical in the light of World War II. The story related in these pages, however, may provide another explanation for the perceived difference between scientists’ almost universal endorsement of work on the uranium and plutonium bombs, as opposed to the hydrogen bomb. As members of the GAC knew, by 1949 tremendous overkill had become an integral part of U.S. military strategy, and that bomb supply was quickly becoming capable of meeting the enormous demand the armed forces placed on this “winning weapon.”22 At this date, of course, the scientists in Washington who were advising the AEC had no clairvoyant foreknowledge of how the Cold War would evolve and then end, no more than the scientists on Tinian knew that World War II would end in a matter of days after Nagasaki. Based on recent experience in World War II, individuals like Conant—the closest of the newly dissenting scientists to Truman’s and Stimson’s decision-making process in 1945—knew that the possibility of any nuclear device, even one so tremendously destructive as a Super, being appropriated by the military as a reasonably “ordinary” weapon was a live one. Although the broader public may have long since been convinced that nuclear weapons were so unique that they would not, even could not, be used again in wrath, those closest to the often arbitrary and ad hoc nature of nuclear decision making might be excused for having second thoughts. The split between the views of the GAC (and even branches of the military such as the newly minted air force) on the potential usability of thermonuclear weapons and the popular view of these weapons as unusable deterrents alone is perhaps best exemplified by the strategic views of Bernard Brodie, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the leading apostle among strategists for the view that nuclear weapons had changed everything. If one believed that Hiroshima had inaugurated an “absolute weapon,” surely the hydrogen bomb would raise the stakes to a qualitatively different level, much as the scientists were then arguing. But this was not Brodie’s view. For him, the “absolute” threshold had already been crossed in August 1945, and it was only to be

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crossed once. No important change in strategy was to be forthcoming with the development of the hydrogen bomb, certainly not to the level of genocide, “for the A-bomb revolution was so drastic that no mere multiplication of the bomb’s power, even by a thousand times, could compare with it in significance.”23 Brodie did not consider that this very same argument could be made for why atomic bombing was simply firebombing on a larger scale. For him, the military had already come to terms with a weapon of transformative, even revolutionary, power, and there was no way to unlearn that knowledge. The aura that the nuclear had acquired of being absolutely unique had intercalated itself into the logic of the future arms race. It also quickly embedded itself into interpretations of the past, rewriting the history of the world before the destruction of Hiroshima. The very “specialness” that was attributed to the atomic bomb and shaped the way Americans thought (and still think) about the end of World War II likewise colored Japanese war memories to the point of recasting the Japanese government and military as victims, not as aggressors, a point often raised by traditionalist defenders of the atomic bombing of cities in World War II. If the narrative of the end of the war in the United States—such as the “two-bomb” myth and the punctiform interpretation of surrender—have been so tinged by the speediness of surrender after the explosion of both atomic bombs, there is no question that the use of the atomic bomb against Japan in the war has elicited highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the historical record in that nation. Japan remains the only country that has been exposed to nuclear weapons launched in anger. Politicians, soldiers, sociologists, and historians have expended considerable resources to understand how Japanese citizens both then and now perceive that state of historical uniqueness. Whether or not nuclear weapons are intrinsically special, the fact of their twofold use at one historical moment certainly renders the memory of them in a distinctive light. Japanese attitudes toward nuclear weapons have not been constant, and they were not formed in their present state in the immediate wake of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.24 Of course, residents of those cities, or those Japanese who had relatives killed, wounded, or displaced by the devastation, formed their views of the atomic bombing from direct or reasonably immediate experience. For most Japanese, however, knowledge

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of the atomic bombings and the reason for their use in the war was a highly mediated concern, with word of mouth supplemented by strictly regulated public pronouncements. While the Japanese government had censored the media both before and during the war, with the announcement of surrender many of the controls of the press were lifted (intentionally or accidentally), and a wide array of views about the bombings began to spread. Within a few weeks, however, and certainly by early September 1945, this diversity of opinion had flattened into a few characteristic viewpoints, as the American Occupation imposed its own censorship on the Japanese press. Reports of the atomic bombings’ aftereffects were among the most strictly controlled news, as per the instructions of General Leslie Groves, until the lifting of the censorship in October 1949.25 With such tight scrutiny as to what Japanese citizens were writing about the atomic bomb, and with the removal of offending articles that discussed the extent of the destruction or the motivations for the bombing too extensively, the flood of media attention about these topics in the United States was represented in Japan by only a trickle. Between 1945 and 1948 only four books appeared on the atomic bombings, supplemented by one book of poetry.26 Western material that criticized the atomic bombings was translated only slowly, and not completely. (The hallmark text of atomic bomb revisionism, Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy, has never been translated into Japanese.) The most important of these translations were the appearances of John Hersey’s Hiroshima in Japanese in April 1949, and P.M.S. Blackett’s Fear, War, and the Bomb in 1951.27 The first text emphasized the horrible human costs of the bombing on the ground, with its close attention to the experiences of ordinary Japanese. Blackett, by contrast, considered the bombing to be unnecessary to end the war and cast it instead as a manifestation of the budding Cold War between the superpowers. Together, these two strands of analysis—an attention to the terrible consequences of atomic bombing in human terms, and a dismissal of the military necessity of the atomic bombing—came to stand as hallmarks of the Japanese “establishment” view of the events of August 1945. What was “revisionist” in the United States became orthodoxy in Japan. This inversion of the accepted “common-sense” interpretations of the atomic bombings in both nations was only the beginning of a much deeper rift in interpretations of the end of the war. In the aftermath of

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the Korean and Vietnam wars, which pitted Americans once again against East Asians, and the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident, in which a Japanese fishing boat was irradiated by fallout from an American nuclear test, accusations that the atomic bomb was a racist weapon used only against Asians began to achieve currency.28 It is interesting to note that this claim did not surface until a decade after the end of World War II, and it tends even today to be more popular among Japanese who are too young to remember the conflict. This interpretation also relies very heavily on the notion of the atomic bomb as intrinsically “special”: it is a weapon with qualitatively different destructive power, and it is therefore inflected with qualities—in this case racist ones—that are not borne by other, more ordinary weapons (such as the firebombs that leveled Japanese cities). More prominently, American defenders of the use of the atomic bomb in World War II often point to the refusal of conservatives in the Japanese government to acknowledge significant responsibility for the war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by Japanese officers and troops across Asia during the Second World War.29 This is a large topic and has been addressed by numerous scholars. Suffice it to say here that the redefinition of the war (initially by the American Occupation) from an “Asian war” to a “Pacific war” reoriented the terms of the conflict away from China and Southeast Asia and toward the United States. This emphasis on the Americans leads naturally to a juxtaposition of the atomic bomb with Japanese war crimes.30 Thus, the more “special” the atomic bomb is, the easier it is for those who wish to deny the import of the actions of Japanese soldiers and government officials during the war to do so. In this case, the very success of the “shock strategy”—created to persuade the Japanese government that atomic bombing was something qualitatively different—has lingered to contaminate open discussion of the memory of World War II in the Japanese public sphere.31 In a more benign fashion, the emphasis on the atomic bomb as a unique weapon has enabled even moderates and liberals in Japan to minimize recognition of any war responsibility on the part of the Japanese government. The Cold War, and especially the Korean War, reinforced Japan’s position as a centerpiece of United States military and diplomatic strategy in East Asia and thus could overshadow unpleasant aspects of Japan’s role in Asia only a decade earlier. The retention of Hirohito as emperor, as discussed earlier, only made these elisions of guilt

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easier to take by those less implicated than the throne in the conduct of the war in Asia.32 And, finally, the claim that the atomic bomb, essentially alone, defeated Japan, provided an excuse for the Japanese government and industry to invest heavily in science and technology after the war as a prerogative for national survival in the future. The removal of the burden of paying for their own defense with the adoption of the pacifist constitution written by the Americans only made this transition to a science-friendly, industrial nation even smoother.33 The elevation of the atomic bomb to the ultimate weapon has thus generated a series of unintended ramifications downstream. Outside of the issue of Japanese perceptions of the atomic bomb, the apotheosis of nuclear weapons dramatically reshaped the postwar battlefield. It is often claimed that atomic weapons have produced a peaceful world after the carnage of the Second World War. Yet many individuals the world over—in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Africa, and Central America, for example—would be surprised indeed to hear that they had been living in a time of peace. True, atomic weapons were not used again as military weapons after the destruction of Nagasaki, but that does not mean that their shadow has not been cast across the wars that have been fought since. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by being declared “unique” events in the history of warfare, have removed certain constraints on the permissibility of conventional bombing. The conventional bombings in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq have occasionally been justified by declaring that “at least” they were not nuclear. This kind of moral pass—the exact argument that so irritated Curtis LeMay and members of the 509th Composite Group after the war—was first instantiated by Truman, who, while he forbade further atomic bombing on 10 August to avoiding killing “all those kids,” nevertheless authorized firebombing to continue on 14 August.34 It is arguable that the proliferation of smaller wars during the Cold War was in part a consequence of the tremendous awe in which nuclear weapons were held.35 These weapons were so shocking—so “unthinkable,” in the parlance of nuclear strategy—that they must be avoided at all costs. Since nuclear war was to be avoided, and Europe was the most likely battleground that could escalate into an atomic conflict, war was pushed out of Europe and onto a global “periphery.” The uncertain attitude toward nuclear weapons in the Korean War—the last conflict in which they were seriously considered—only highlights the position

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into which nuclear strategy had confined both American and Soviet war planners.36 Nuclear weapons were “special” weapons, and the imposition of an absolute firebreak between the conventional and the nuclear has had the paradoxical effect of lowering the barriers for the use of military force in nonnuclear contexts. After all, it’s not as though those conflicts were “serious”; if they were, they would be atomic. Recent American thinking about strategic bombing has ironically managed to bring nuclear weapons back full circle, into the conventional sphere. Whereas in the early summer of 1945, military officers evaluated and deployed atomic bombs as analogs to conventional firebombs, in the post–Cold War Pentagon, conventional “smart bombs” were turned into analogs of atomic bombs, specifically citing the supposed “shock” effect evidenced by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a strategic and tactical survey produced in 1996, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade coined the phrase “Shock and Awe” to describe saturation bombing early in a conflict in order to achieve the goal of “Rapid Dominance”: shocking an enemy into submission before the bloodshed of infantry fighting was permitted to progress too far—a strategy memorably invoked at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. As they put it seven years earlier: Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. The Japanese were prepared for suicidal resistance until both nuclear bombs were used. The impact of those weapons was sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of Shock and Awe. The Japanese simply could not comprehend the destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension produced a state of awe. We believe that, in a parallel manner, revolutionary potential in combining new doctrine and existing technology can produce systems capable of yielding this level of Shock and Awe. In most or many cases, this Shock and Awe may not necessitate imposing the full destruction of either nuclear weapons or advanced conventional technologies but must be underwritten by the ability to do so.37

The interest in this passage is not the misrepresentation of the process or the pace of Japanese surrender; rather, it is the way the “specialness” of

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nuclear weapons has come to represent one extreme form of warfighting that has now become somewhat detached from actual fission weapons. This does not, as the second paragraph makes clear, mean that nuclear weapons are “ordinary,” only that conventional weapons can be deployed in a manner to make them just as extraordinary as atomic bombs. Yet this position of nuclear weapons in our contemporary imaginations was not an inevitable consequence of the hardware of the devices themselves. Rather, over the course of many deliberations in the waning months of World War II, war planners, journalists, and scientists worked hard to make these weapons into extraordinary “shocks” in the hopes that these fission bombs might persuade the Japanese government to enact the unthinkable—unconditional surrender—after firebombing of cities on a ferocious scale had not convinced them. This shock interpretation of the bombs became naturalized as an aftereffect of many contingent decisions and actions, most of them unintentional and in line with standard military operating procedure during a brutal war, and then finessed by public relations. It is possible that if these weapons had not been used, or had not been considered “absolute weapons,” they might have been employed with great destructive effect in the ensuing Cold War. Perhaps. We will never know. Then why elaborate all of these contingencies, why open the black box of nuclear weapons? If indeed these weapons have managed to stave off major war for the last sixty years, wouldn’t diminishing their “specialness” expose us all to a tremendous danger? This is a point worth considering, but in the end one wants to have the actual historical contingencies mapped out. Hamlet did not caution us in vain: thinking does make things so, and even if nuclear weapons did not necessarily have to be perceived as the fearsome weapons we take them for, nonetheless it is manifestly the case that they possess this power now. It would take more than a history book to explode that. Humanity has been given too few opportunities to evaluate its relationship with these terrible devices, which carry with them—especially in their present quantity—so much peril. The first chance lay in the hands of Stimson, Truman, and their advisors before 6 August 1945, before the first atomic bombs had been used to destroy an enemy city. To those based on the island of Tinian who assembled and dropped the bomb, the question of evaluating the transhistorical revolution that

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might be caused by these weapons never came up. The second opportunity lay in the aftermath of surrender, with the possibility for arms control mooted before the fledgling United Nations in the form of the Baruch Plan or the Gromyko Plan. At that point, there was an American nuclear monopoly, and there existed a real possibility for world leaders—newly aware of what had been before Hiroshima one of the world’s best-kept secrets—to think creatively about these weapons that had become all-too Special. And, finally, a chance arrived with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of a bipolar Cold War and nuclear stalemate. The window on this third opportunity is fast closing. If there was ever a time to actually reflect on the status of these destructive weapons, to think about them critically without an international nuclear standoff urgently dictating the course of our thinking, this is that moment. It should be approached with seriousness. We may not get a fourth.

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Coda: On the Scholarly Literature

Much excellent work has been published over the last sixty years on the history of the atomic bomb use on Japan, and many of the claims in the preceding pages build on this valuable literature. Both the largescale and small-scale debates are fully documented in the notes to each chapter. Nevertheless, this valuable scholarship does possess certain limitations, largely stemming from the desire of historians and political scientists to answer one (or both) of two questions: what was President Harry S. Truman’s intent in using the bomb? and, what ended World War II?1 These questions are both compelling, and they drive right to the heart of the perpetual fascination with the United States government’s choice to introduce humanity to nuclear warfare. Both questions, however, pose some conceptual and historical difficulties, which are worth considering briefly here. The question of Truman’s intentions poses two difficulties. The first is practical: how are we to determine the private intentions and thoughts of a public figure, concerning which the documentary evidence is either lacking, misleading, or retrospective? We simply have too few reliable contemporary (either pre-Hiroshima or presurrender) reports to assess Truman’s decision-making process fully. Much of the scholarship has had, necessarily, to rely to a greater or lesser degree on memoirs produced after surrender, often substantially after.2 If the argument presented in this book is correct, evidence produced after surrender must be handled very gingerly. My analysis has been based, as far as possible, on documents produced before the surrender of Japan when referring to what relevant individuals thought of the nature of atomic weapons. The surrender of Japan and the end of World War II

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were such momentous events that their tendency to color (usually unwittingly) the recollection of participants is a danger we must avoid in order to uncover the real history of the planning for the actual delivery of the bombs.3 The second difficulty with gauging Truman’s intentions runs deeper: asking the question about Truman in this way presumes that the atomic bomb was unique at the time, and that Truman explicitly considered it to be so. There is indeed significant evidence that the procedures involved in the decision making about the atomic bomb were extraordinary in certain respects, but they were also quite similar in many other significant respects to standard procedures. The assumption behind the Truman question works backwards: we know that nuclear weapons are special now, and so Truman must have taken extraordinary pains with the decision then. The status of nuclear weapons is intrinsic to them and not historically contingent, so this presumption runs. This is precisely the issue to be proven, not a truism to be assumed. Nevertheless, the vast bulk of scholarship on the atomic bomb drop focuses precisely here, attempting to gauge what Truman “had in mind” when he authorized the use of nuclear weapons: was it primarily to avert the need for an invasion, to end the war quickly, to intimidate the Soviet Union, or some combination of these? Although the nuances in interpretations are very important, conventional wisdom tends to group the series of studies into two camps: traditionalist and revisionist. The traditionalist account, which most closely resembles American public opinion about the history of the atomic bomb, can be understood as composed of several somewhat independent arguments: American officials believed that the atomic bomb was a legitimate weapon of war and assumed that it would be used once it was ready; the decision was carefully thought out; there were no alternatives to achieve unconditional surrender; and, related to this last point, its use was militarily indispensable.4 The first full defense of these views was an article published in Harper’s Magazine by the former secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, in 1947. With significant modifications and quite detailed interpretative development and archival support, this position has been strongly defended ever since.5 “Revisionist” studies bear little in common with each other except

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that they question one or more of the traditionalist premises. Most significant among them are repeated assaults on military necessity and exploration of possible contemporary alternatives for achieving unconditional surrender. Much as traditionalist historians develop their positions from Stimson, revisionists draw on the criticism of the atomic bombings by Nobel Prize–winning physicist P.M.S. Blackett, as developed in a chapter of his 1949 book Fear, War and the Bomb.6 The controversy in 1994–1995 over a proposed exhibit in the Smithsonian Museum of the Enola Gay, the plane that released the Little Boy bomb over Hiroshima, has only served to retrench positions on both sides.7 A different set of problems bedevil the question of what “ended the war.” We know who ended the war: the Japanese government, the only ones who had the power to do so by surrendering unconditionally. Attempting to figure out the intentions of the members of the Big Six in the imperial Japanese cabinet poses the same problems as trying to divine Truman’s intentions, but without even the substantial (although insufficient) documentation we have for the Americans. As soon as the emperor announced surrender, but before U.S. troops arrived to begin the occupation of Japan, the transcripts of all imperial conferences, all records of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, all deliberations of the cabinet and the Privy Council, as well as all files on prisoners of war and about the Southeast Asian, Manchurian, and Chinese campaigns, were burned in anticipation of future war crimes trials.8 As a result, essentially all studies of how Japan surrendered are based on incomplete data gathered long after surrender, with a few isolated documentary exceptions, and thus cannot illuminate the questions explored here. Nevertheless, in recent years historical scholarship has produced perhaps the most detailed accounts we are likely ever to have about the process by which the Japanese government came to a decision to surrender, an academic achievement that is not to be undervalued. The interested reader should by all means consult those studies.9 These comments are not meant to either summarize or evaluate the different strands and debates within the literature. Much of that work takes place in the narrative of the text, and the scholarly apparatus can refer interested readers to the specific claims in the sources cited here or to more specialized debates within the literature. However, it is

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important to flag the general sweep of the historiography, even if only in this cursory fashion, because so much has been invested politically and morally into what are at root historical questions that need to be answered through the documentation available before being abstracted into present-day concerns and disputes.

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Abbreviations Used in Notes

AFHC

Records of the 313th Bomb Wing, Air Force Historical Center, Maxwell, AL.

BC

Bush-Conant File Relating to the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1940–1945, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, NARA.

CAS

Carl A. Spaatz Papers, LOC.

CEL

Curtis E. LeMay Papers, LOC.

HB

HHA HLS

HSTL

Harrison-Bundy Files Relating to the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1942–1946, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, RG 77, microfilm publication M1109, NARA. Henry H. Arnold Papers, LOC. Henry Lewis Stimson, Diaries, microfilm edition, Henry Lewis Stimson Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO.

JCG

Joseph C. Grew Papers, MS Am 1687, v. 122–123, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

JRO

J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, LOC.

JVF

James V. Forrestal Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Published with the permission of Princeton University Library.

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145

LOC

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

LRG

Leslie R. Groves, Diary of 1 Jan. 1945–31 Dec. 1946, Box No. 3, Diaries, 1940–1948, Papers of Leslie R. Groves, RG 200, NARA.

MDH

United States Army Corps of Engineers, Manhattan District, Manhattan District History, RG 77, NARA.

NARA

National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

NFR

Norman F. Ramsey papers, in his personal possession.

OHRO

Oral History Research Office, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY.

TF

Tinian Files, April–December 1945, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Records of the Office of the Commanding General, Manhattan Project, RG 77, Boxes 17–21, NARA.

TS

Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942–1946, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Records of the Office of the Commanding General, Manhattan Project, RG 77, microfilm publication M1109, NARA.

USSBS

United States Strategic Bombing Survey.

1 4 6 A B B R E V I AT I O N S U S E D I N N O T E S

Notes

Chapter 1: Endings 1. The unconventional, but nonetheless true, observation that World War II was the first nuclear war is indebted to Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race (New York: Vintage, 1987 [1973]), xiii; and Strobe Talbott, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 32. 2. Specialists have repeatedly noted the gap between scholarly accounts of the use of the atomic bomb in World War II, whatever their conclusions, and the unsophisticated account widely accepted by the public and in school textbooks. For a helpful analysis, see J. Samuel Walker, “History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb,” Diplomatic History 19 (1995): 319–328. 3. Edward Teller with Allen Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1962), 4. 4. Only rarely has a study considered the possibility that atomic weaponry is not intrinsically “special” and viewed it as a relatively ordinary bomb at the end of the war. See, for one instance, George H. Quester, Nuclear Diplomacy: The First Twenty-Five Years (New York: Dunellen Company, 1970). This is also suggested by John Mueller in “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World,” International Security 13 (1988): 55–79, but he does not draw out the implications. 5. Historians have virtually ignored the very real possibility of a third atomic bombing. The only full account of how American decision makers regarded this Third Shot is Barton J. Bernstein, “The Perils and Politics of Surrender: Ending the War with Japan and Avoiding the Third Atomic Bomb,” Pacific Historical Review 46 (1977): 1–27. 6. The assumption of the uniqueness of nuclear weapons has imbued many excellent accounts, which place the atomic bomb in the historical context of American notions of the “superweapon.” For accounts of how the atomic bomb was appropriated after the war into this narrative, see Spencer R. Weart,

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Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 2d ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1985]); H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995). Although the British were centrally involved in the creation of the atomic bomb, they were only marginally involved in the decision to use the weapon. As a result, this book focuses heavily on the views among American participants with only occasional reference to perceptions among British, Soviet, or Japanese individuals. The ur-source on the atomic bomb as “absolute” is H. G. Wells’s novel The World Set Free (N.p.: Quiet Vision Publishing, 1999–2000 [1914]), even though the “atomic bombs” described in this pre–World War I novel are quite different in conceptualization from the ones used in World War II (they are radiological weapons, not explosives). 7. For a discussion of the major historiographical schools in the extensive literature on the decision to use the atomic bombs in World War II, see the coda at the end of this book, and the sources referenced therein. 8. For just one example of the Trinity-centric historiography, see one of the earliest monographic accounts of the Manhattan Project: Stephane Groueff, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967). 9. These questions are, of course, counterfactual, and most of the questions posed in the atomic-bomb historiography are likewise such: What if we had warned Japan? What if we had made a demonstration? What if we had modified the terms of unconditional surrender? What if we had used only one bomb? What if we had waited until the Soviet Union entered the war before using any? All these questions are impossible to answer definitively, since we cannot rerun the tape and see what the result would be in different circumstances. Their purpose is to determine origins and assign blame: Who caused the Cold War? Was the bombing militarily necessary? Was the bombing morally justified? On the problems and potentials of counterfactuals in history, see Niall Ferguson, “Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past,” in Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 1998 [1997]): 1–90, and references therein; Robert N. Strassfield, “If . . . : Counterfactuals in the Law,” George Washington Law Review 60 (1992): 339–416; Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives,” in Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–38; Alexander Demandt, History That Never Happened: A Treatise on the Question, What Would Have Happened If . . . ?, 3d rev. ed., tr. Colin D. Thomson (Jefferson,

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NC: McFarland & Company, 1993); Philip Nash, “The Use of Counterfactuals in History: A Look at the Literature,” SHAFR Newsletter 22 (March 1991): 2–12; and James D. Fearon, “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science,” World Politics 43 (1991): 169–195. For an example of counterfactuals in use in the specific context of the Pacific Theater of World War II, see Peter G. Tsouras, ed., Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternate History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War (London: Greenhill Books, 2001). Psychologists have conducted significant research on the appeal of counterfactuals and why they persist as a way of shaping memories of the past: Scott A. Hawkins and Reid Hastie, “Hindsight: Biased Judgments of Past Events After the Outcomes Are Known,” Psychological Bulletin 107 (1990): 311–327; Dale T. Miller and William Turnbull, “The Counterfactual Fallacy: Confusing What Might Have Been with What Ought to Have Been,” Social Justice Research 4 (1990): 1–19; and Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson, “Counterfactual Thinking: A Critical Overview,” in Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson, eds., What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 1–55. For sensitive historical accounts of the problem of collective memory both in and out of wartime, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, “Setting the Framework,” in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6–39; and Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 10. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Chapter 2: Shock 1. Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine 194 (February 1947): 97–107, on 101. For historical accounts of the origins of the “shock” strategy, see Lawrence Freedman, “The Strategy of Hiroshima,” Journal of Strategic Studies 1 (1978): 76–97; and Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dockrill, “Hiroshima: A Strategy of Shock,” in Saki Dockrill, ed., From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941–45 (London: Macmillan, 1994), 191–212. In his diary, Stimson indicated that both the atomic bomb and Soviet entry could function as useful shocks on the Japanese: Stimson, 15 May 1945, HLS. 2. Similarly, there was nothing necessarily “nuclear” about opposition to city bombing or the doctrine of unconditional surrender—both now seen as hallmarks of the internal debates about the use of the atomic bomb. In Great Britain and, to a lesser degree, the United States, there was desire for a negotiated peace with Germany (a modification of unconditional surrender) and opposition to

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area bombing as early as 1944. See James J. Martin’s essay “The Bombing and Negotiated Peace Questions” in his Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1971). 3. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 27, 30; and Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 315. 4. “How Long Will We Have to Fight the Jap War?” Yank (8 June 1945): 2–5, on 2. 5. On the history of the development of the B-29, see Kenneth P. Werrell, Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), chap. 3. 6. Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1965), 387. As Michael Sherry has pointed out, this claim of continuity of firebombing with atomic bombing was used after the fact even by those who believed in a clear discontinuity—such as Secretary of War Stimson—in order to rationalize their actions. See Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 321. 7. Norman F. Ramsey, The Reminiscences of Norman F. Ramsey (1962), OHRO, 72. 8. Conrad C. Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 118–119. Much of the history of the efficacy of bombing has relied on the postwar United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) reports. As has been decisively argued in recent years, these reports are unreliable as to the impact strategic bombing and atomic bombing had on the Japanese elite and civilian morale. See Gian P. Gentile, How Effective Is Strategic Bombing? Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo (New York: New York University Press, 2001); idem, “Shaping the Past Battlefield, ‘For the Future’: The United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s Evaluation of the American Air War against Japan,” Journal of Military History 64 (2000): 1085–1112; idem, “Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan,” Pacific Historical Review 66 (1997): 53–79; Talbott, The Master of the Game; Barton J. Bernstein, “Compelling Japan’s Surrender without the A-Bomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the US Bombing Survey’s Early-Surrender Conclusions,” Journal of Strategic Studies 18 (1995): 101–148; Robert P. Newman, “Ending the War with Japan: Paul Nitze’s ‘Early Surrender’ Counterfactual,” Pacific Historical Review 64 (1995): 167–194; and David MacIsaac, Strategic Bombing in World War Two: The Story of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976). For a memoir account of the USSBS work, see Paul H. Nitze with Ann H. Smith and Steven L. Rearden, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), 37–45.

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9. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power; Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); George E. Hopkins, “Bombing and the American Conscience during World War II,” The Historian 28 (1966): 451–473; Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); idem, “British and American Approaches to Strategic Bombing: Their Origins and Implementation in the World War II Combined Bomber Offensive,” Journal of Strategic Studies 18 (1995): 91–144; and Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians. Strategic bombing was also very expensive. Neglecting opportunity costs, the bombing effort consumed 30 percent of British war costs and 10 percent of American. Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 31. 10. Wilbur H. Morrison, Point of No Return: The Story of the Twentieth Air Force (New York: Times Books, 1979), 53. On Arnold, see Dik Alan Daso, Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Airpower (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). 11. Schaffer, Wings of Judgment, 12–13. 12. Werrell, Blankets of Fire; Thomas R. Searle, “ ‘It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers’: The Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945,” Journal of Military History 66 (2002): 103–134; E. Bartlett Kerr, Flames over Tokyo: The U.S. Army Air Forces’ Incendiary Campaign against Japan, 1944–1945 (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991); Morrison, Point of No Return; and Hoito Edoin, The Night Tokyo Burned: The Incendiary Campaign against Japan, March–August, 1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). For a personal account of the early air war, see the memoirs of Haywood Hansell, LeMay’s predecessor: Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., The Strategic Air War against Germany and Japan: A Memoir (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force, 1986). The connection of local command and traditional military culture to a rise in destructive capacity and intentions in certain contexts has been explored recently in Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 13. Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 48–51. 14. Ibid., 140–141. 15. MacIsaac, Strategic Bombing in World War Two, 106. 16. LeMay with Kantor, Mission with LeMay, 352. 17. Thomas R. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 176–177; Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 193. 18. Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 207. 19. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, 259. 20. Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, tr. Linda Haverty Rugg (London: Granta, 2001 [1999]), 96, 239. 21. Quoted in Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

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Press, 1961), ix. Armstrong’s book remains the classic study on the doctrine but focuses on its origin and its application exclusively in Europe. For studies that include the Japanese context, see Brian L. Villa, “The U.S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,” Journal of American History 63 (1976): 66–92; Makoto Iokibe, “American Policy towards Japan’s ‘Unconditional Surrender,’ ” Japanese Journal of American Studies 1 (1981): 19–53; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005); Dale M. Hellegers, We the Japanese People: World War II and the Origins of the Japanese Constitution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); John L. Chase, “Unconditional Surrender Reconsidered,” Political Science Quarterly 70 (1955): 258–279; Raymond G. O’Connor, Diplomacy for Victory: FDR and Unconditional Surrender (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); and William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 180–181. 22. Villa, “The U.S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,” 69–70; Hellegers, We the Japanese People, 2; Charles F. Brower, IV, “Sophisticated Strategist: General George A. Lincoln and the Defeat of Japan, 1944–45,” Diplomatic History 15 (1991): 317–337, on 320; Sir John Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1972), 55; and O’Connor, Diplomacy for Victory, 101. On Roosevelt as the primary source for the doctrine, see Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender, 12–13; and Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948), vol. 2, 1570. 23. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 56–57. Roosevelt set most of the policy for Germany, while the State Department had more autonomy with respect to Japan. The president usually assumed that policies tailored to Germany would necessarily apply to Japan. See Iokibe, “American Policy towards Japan’s ‘Unconditional Surrender,’ ” 24. 24. Quoted in Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 531. 25. Villa, “The U.S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,” 70–71. On the German context, see Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender, 157. 26. Villa, “The U.S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,” 71–72; Hellegers, We the Japanese People, xi. 27. Villa, “The U.S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,” 92. 28. Brower, “Sophisticated Strategist,” 318. 29. See Richard B. Frank, “Ketsu Go: Japanese Political and Military Strategy in 1945,” in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., Reinterpreting the End of the Pacific War: Atomic Bombs and Soviet Entry into the War (Stanford: Stanford University

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Press, 2006); Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 222; and idem, In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 148, 153. 30. See “Alternatives to Olympic,” 4 August 1945, reproduced as document 17 in Douglas J. MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan: Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision (N.p.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998), 53. On plans to invade Japan, see John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991); and Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar, Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan—and Why Truman Dropped the Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). It is not, however, obvious that Truman would have given final authorization for Olympic or the subsequent invasion of Honshu (Coronet) if their casualty estimates were in fact as high as some have claimed: Rufus E. Miles, Jr., “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved,” International Security 10 (1985): 121–140, on 137; and Barton J. Bernstein, “The Alarming Japanese Buildup on Southern Kyushu, Growing U.S. Fears, and Counterfactual Analysis: Would the Planned November 1945 Invasion of Southern Kyushu Have Occurred?” Pacific Historical Review 68 (1999): 561–609. 31. The question of how severe casualties would be, and what Truman or the military leadership considered to be “severe,” has generated a contentious subfield of atomic-bomb studies. From Stimson’s 1947 Harper’s essay onward, the assumption that casualties would be high has generally been thought to justify the atomic bombing, whereas deflations of casualty estimates are seen as making the decision to use the bomb more problematic. Studies inclined to give a higher assessment to casualty estimates include D. M. Giangreco, “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasions of Japan, 1945–1946: Planning and Policy Implications,” Journal of Military History 61 (1997): 521–581; idem, “ ‘A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas’: President Truman and Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan,” Pacific Historical Review 72 (2003): 93–132; and Robert James Maddox, “Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan: The ‘Postwar Creation’ Myth,” Continuity, no. 24 (Fall 2000): 11–29. Studies that argue that the very large numbers are a post-Hiroshima creation include Miles, “Hiroshima”; Barton J. Bernstein, “A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June/July 1986): 38–40; idem, “Reconsidering Truman’s Claim of ‘Half a Million American Lives’ Saved by the Atomic Bomb: The Construction and Deconstruction of a Myth,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22 (1999): 54–95; and idem, “Reconsidering ‘Invasion Most Costly’: Popular-History Scholarship, Publishing Standards, and the Claim of High U.S. Casualty Estimates to Help Legitimize the Atomic Bombings,” Peace & Change 24 (1999): 220–248. Regardless of what the actual casualties would

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have been or what various planners thought them to be before summer 1945, these studies also contain a subdebate about which casualty estimates actually reached Truman. 32. On Vatican peace feelers, see Martin S. Quigley, Peace without Hiroshima: Secret Action at the Vatican in the Spring of 1945 (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1991); and Ellis M. Zacharias, “The A-Bomb Was Not Needed: The Inside Story of Nippon’s Secret Peace Bids through Vatican City and the Kremlin,” United Nations World 3 (August 1949): 25–29. 33. Boris Slavinsky, The Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact: A Diplomatic History, 1941–1945, tr. Geoffrey Jukes (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); George Alexander Lensen, The Strange Neutrality: Soviet-Japanese Relations during the Second World War, 1941–1945 (Tallahassee: The Diplomatic Press, [1972]). On troop concentrations, see Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964), 1027. 34. Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999), 94. 35. Lensen, The Strange Neutrality, 209–210. For the more short-term advantages and disadvantages of the Soviet Union as a mediating partner, see Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 30. Some Japanese officers in former European colonies such as Indonesia were convinced in late 1944 that the Soviet Union would inevitably enter the war on the Japanese side, recognizing the need to counter American imperialism in the wake of the global conflict. On this position, see George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952), 119–120. 36. Ernest R. May, “The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Far Eastern War, 1941–1945,” Pacific Historical Review 24 (1955): 153–174. See also United States Department of Defense, The Entry of the Soviet Union into the War against Japan: Military Plans, 1941–1945 ([Washington, DC: 1955]). 37. Throughout World War II, American leaders worried that Stalin would seek a separate peace with Nazi Germany, obviating unconditional surrender, a rumor that Stalin did everything in his power to squelch. See Vojtech Mastny, “Stalin and the Prospects of a Separate Peace in World War II,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 1365–1388. Averell Harriman believed that the Soviets were afraid of the same separate peace between the Americans and the Japanese, as reflected in James Forrestal’s diary entry of 11 May 1945, Forrestal Diaries 1944–1945, vol. 2, JVF. 38. Stimson, 19 June 1945, HLS; and Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 114. 39. Marc S. Gallicchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the Japanese Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 60. 40. On Soviet plans to enter the war, see Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy; David Holloway, “Jockeying for Position in the Postwar World: Soviet Entry into the War with Japan in August 1945,” in Hasegawa, Reinterpreting the End

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of the Pacific War; and Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–67 (New York: Praeger, 1968), 395–397. 41. V. P. Safronov, SSSR, SShA i iaponskaia agressiia na Dal’nem Vostoke i Tikhom Okeane, 1931–1945 gg. (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2001), 323–324, 336. For another interpretation, see Boris Slavinskii, SSSR i Iaponiia—na puti k voine: diplomaticheskaia istoriia, 1937–1945 gg. (Moscow: Iaponiia segodnia, 1999), 471; Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 178; and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “The Soviet Factor in Ending the Pacific War: From the Neutrality Pact to Soviet Entry into the War in August 1945,” in Hasegawa, Reinterpreting the End of the Pacific War. 42. Raymond L. Garthoff, “The Soviet Manchurian Campaign, August 1945,” Military Affairs 33 (October 1969): 312–336; David M. Glantz, The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945: “August Storm” (London: Frank Cass, 2003); and idem, Soviet Operational and Tactical Combat in Manchuria, 1945: “August Storm” (London: Frank Cass, 2003). On the failure of Japanese intelligence to predict the timing of the Soviet attack, see Edward J. Drea, “Missing Intentions: Japanese Intelligence and the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria, 1945,” Military Affairs 48 (April 1984): 66–73. On the vitiation of the Kwantung Army, see Louis Allen, The End of the War in Asia (London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1976), 194. 43. Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 511, 523. This view is expressed most strikingly in the 14 February 1945 memorial of Prince Konoe to the emperor: “From the point of view of preserving our national polity what concerns your subject most is not defeat itself, but the possibility of a communist revolution accompanied by the defeat.” See the translation in David John Lu, ed., Sources of Japanese History (New York: McGraw-Hill, [1974]), vol. 2, 169–172, on 170. 44. Paul Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 199. Yukiko Koshiro has recently advanced the thesis that certain Japanese leaders were delaying a surrender so that the Soviet Union could enter the war, in order to provide a postwar counterweight to American hegemony in East Asia. See her “Japan’s World and World War II,” Diplomatic History 25 (2001): 425–441; and “Eurasian Eclipse: Japan’s End Game in World War II,” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 417–444. 45. Grace Person Hayes, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II: The War against Japan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1982), 716; Lisle A. Rose, Dubious Victory: The United States and the End of World War II ([Kent, OH]: The Kent State University Press, 1973), 340. 46. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War against Japan, Volume 5: The Surrender of Japan (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969); Stephen Harper, Miracle of Deliverance: The Case for the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (New York: Stein and Day, 1985), 69. 47. Morrison, Point of No Return, 130.

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48. Louis Allen, “The Campaigns in Asia and the Pacific,” Journal of Strategic Studies 12 (1990): 162–192, on 163–164. 49. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 27–28. 50. Theodore Cohen, Remaking Japan: The American Occupation as New Deal, ed. Herbert Passin (New York: Free Press, 1987), 16; Meiron Harries and Susie Harries, Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarisation of Japan (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 13. For more on Grew and his efforts, see Masanori Nakamura, The Japanese Monarchy: Ambassador Joseph Grew and the Making of the “Symbol Emperor System,” 1931–1991, tr. Herbert P. Bix, Jonathan Baker-Bates, and Derek Bowen (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992); and Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966). Grew’s memoirs are still a useful source, but they complicate the chronology somewhat and tend to paint all the events with the aura of hindsight: Joseph C. Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952). 51. Cohen, Remaking Japan, 44. 52. Grew to Charles C. Batchelder, 26 September 1945, JCG; Grew to his daughter Elsie Lyon, 2 September 1945, JCG. 53. Grew to Stimson, 12 February 1947, reproduced as Joseph C. Grew, “The War Could Have Been Ended without the Bomb,” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 29–32. 54. Hugh Borton, American Presurrender Planning for Postsurrender Japan (New York: East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 1967), 15. 55. Grew to Wolfe, 23 June 1945, JCG. Grew would consistently deny any knowledge of Japanese peace feelers in public communications until the end of the war. See, for one example, Grew to Boyd M. Beagle (Sayre, PA), 14 August 1945, JCG. 56. Grew to S[tettinius], 3 January 1944 [sic: 1945], JCG. 57. Grew to J. M. Ethridge (Atlanta, GA), 11 July 1945, JCG. 58. Grew to Randall Gould (editor, American Edition, Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury), 14 April 1945, JCG. See also Grew’s analysis of the memorandum submitted to Truman by former President Herbert Hoover, 13 June 1945, White House Central Files, Confidential Files, “State Department. World War II.” HSTL. 59. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 626; James Forrestal, 12 June and 18 June 1945, and 13 July 1945, Forrestal Diaries 1944–1945, vol. 2, JVF. For excellent studies of Forrestal’s limited role in the Truman cabinet at the end of the war, see Arnold A. Rogow, Victim of Duty: A Study of James Forrestal (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1966); Richard Greenhalgh Albion and Robert Howe Connery, Forrestal and the Navy (New York: Columbia University

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Press, 1962); and Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 60. Grew to Randall Gould, 14 April 1945, JCG. On trying Hirohito as a war criminal, see Grew’s letter to his daughter and son-in-law, Grew to Elsie and Cecil Lyon, 30 September 1945, JCG; and his post-Hiroshima memo to Byrnes, 7 August 1945, JCG. 61. James Forrestal, 1 May 1945, Forrestal Diaries 1944–1945, vol. 2, JVF. 62. Grew to Lt. Gen. Robert C. Richardson, Jr., 25 May 1945, JCG; Grew to Washington columnist Stanley Washburn, 25 May 1945, JCG; Grew, “Comments on Memorandum Forwarded by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson on ‘Observations on Post-Hostilities Policy Toward Japan,’ ” 6 August 1945, JCG. 63. Grew to Mrs. Gerald Jones (Tucson, AZ), 23 July 1945, JCG. 64. Stimson, 29 May 1945, HLS. 65. Grew to E. M. Zacharias, 29 June 1945, JCG; Gallicchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia, 53; Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 144–145. In general, as Winkler notes (p. 137), commanders in the Pacific theater tended to pay less attention to OWI advice. 66. Ellis M. Zacharias, Secret Missions: The Story of an Intelligence Officer (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 377, 380. 67. Grew, memorandum of conversation with Harry Truman, 29 May 1945, JCG. 68. Grew to Lt. William W. Wertz, Jr., company B of 8th tank battalion, 9 May 1945, JCG. 69. Memorandum of conversation by Grew with Truman, Assistant Secretary General Julius Holmes, 9:30 a.m., 15 June 1945, JCG; Grew to Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, 16 June 1945, JCG. 70. Grew, Memorandum of Conversation, “Appointment with the President, 12:35 p.m.,” 28 May 1945, JCG. 71. Grew, memorandum of conversation with Truman, T. V. Soong, and Charles E. Bohlen, 14 June 1945, JCG. 72. For example, Grew to Judge W. Cameron Forbes, 13 August 1945, JCG. The declaration was entirely an American product, as explained in Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 263. 73. As quoted in Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 156. 74. Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 657. Much more detail on American domestic hostility to Hirohito’s postwar retention is provided in John D. Chappell, Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), esp. 126–129. 75. Holloway, “Jockeying for Position in the Postwar World.” 76. Grew to Byrnes, 16 July [1945], JCG; Grew, memorandum of telephone conversation with Cordell Hull, 17 July 1945, JCG.

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77. Villa, “The U.S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,” 85–87. On the problem of Okinawa, see Hellegers, We the Japanese People, 83; on the battle, see George Feifer, Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992). For the delay until Potsdam, see Grew, memorandum of conversation with Truman, 9:30 a.m., 18 June 1945, JCG. 78. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, vol. 2, 1582. 79. See, for example Shigenori T –og–o, The Cause of Japan, tr. and ed. – Tog–o Fumihiko and Ben Bruce Blakeney (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 299. 80. As quoted in Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 212. 81. Arnold to Spaatz, 11 August 1945, WAR 47880, Box I:21, File: “August 1945 Personal,” CAS. 82. Stimson, 10 August 1945, HLS. See also Barton J. Bernstein, “Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory,” Diplomatic History 19 (1995): 227–273, on 257. 83. Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 221. 84. Kazuo Kawai, “Militarist Activity between Japan’s Two Surrender Decisions,” Pacific Historical Review 22 (1953): 383–389, on 387; Alan J. Levine, “Dropping the A-Bomb in Retrospect,” Asian Profile 14 (August 1986): 315–325, on 322. On abdication rumors, see “Waiting,” New York Times, 13 August 1945, 18. 85. “Hirohito Tells People A-Bomb Defeated Japan,” Los Angeles Times, 15 August 1945, A. 86. Koichi Kido, The Diary of Marquis Kido: Selected Translations into English (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), esp. 441–453. See also Frank, Downfall, 272. Historian Herbert Bix has argued that Hirohito actually delayed an earlier surrender by not intervening immediately after the Potsdam Declaration, because he actively wanted the final battle his military was preparing. See Herbert P. Bix, “Japan’s Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation,” Diplomatic History 19 (1995): 197–225. 87. Herbert P. Bix, “Inventing the ‘Symbol Monarchy’ in Japan, 1945–52,” Journal of Japanese Studies 21 (1995): 319–363; R. Kersten, “Revisionism, Reaction and the ‘Symbol Emperor’ in Post-War Japan,” Japan Forum 15 (2003): 15–31; and Awaya Kentar–o, “Emperor Sh–owa’s Accountability for War,” Japan Quarterly 38 (October 1991): 386–398. 88. Herbert P. Bix, “The Showa Emperor’s ‘Monologue’ and the Problem of War Responsibility,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18 (1992): 295–363, on 330. On the Tokyo war crimes trials, see Arnold C. Brackman, The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987); and Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

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Chapter 3: Special 1. James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 227. 2. Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 198–199. 3. Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: Da Capo, 1983 [1962]), 265. Such claims of assumed use are made throughout the atomic bomb memoir literature: Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 639; Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 238; and John J. McCloy, “McCloy on the A-Bomb,” in James Reston, Deadline: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 493–502, on 500. 4. Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965), 316 (emphasis in original). See also Barton J. Bernstein, “The Quest for Security: American Foreign Policy and International Control of Atomic Energy, 1942–1946,” Journal of American History 60 (1974): 1003–1044; idem, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb, 1941– 1945: A Reinterpretation,” Political Science Quarterly 90 (1975): 23–69; Martin J. Sherwin, “The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War: U.S. Atomic-Energy Policy and Diplomacy, 1941–45,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 945–968; idem, A World Destroyed, 5; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990 [1968]), 538; and MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan, 29. For criticisms of the “assumption” view, see Gar Alperovitz, “More on Atomic Diplomacy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (December 1985): 35–39; and idem, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Vintage, 1995), 631–632. 5. My account focuses almost exclusively on American decision makers, to the exclusion of the British. Although there was much lip service both during and after the war about British involvement in the decision, the Americans essentially determined the end result. See John Ehrman, Grand Strategy, vol. 6: October 1944–August 1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1956), 275; and Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 370. For the official British consent, see the Minutes of the Combined Policy Committee, 4 July 1945, Folder 11: “Combined Policy Committee [1943–1945],” BC. At one point, the British had felt so shut out of the atomic bomb project (a consequence of General Leslie Groves’s intense security procedures) that Churchill intimated to Harry Hopkins that the British might have to pursue work on their own atomic bomb separately from the United States. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950 [1948]), 704.

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6. Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study in the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), 613. 7. John W. Dower, “ ‘N1’ and ‘F’: Japan’s Wartime Atomic Bomb Research,” in John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: New Press, 1993): 55–100; idem, “Science, Society, and the Japanese Atomic-Bomb Project during World War Two,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 10 (April–June 1978): 41–54; and Kenji Ito, “Values of ‘Pure Science’: Nishina Yoshio’s Wartime Discourse between Nationalism and Physics, 1940–1945,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (2002): 61–86. 8. The literature on the Manhattan Project is tremendous. The most accurate technical histories are Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume 1: 1939/1946 (Washington, DC: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1962); David Hawkins, Edith C. Truslow, and Ralph Carlisle Smith, Project Y: The Los Alamos Story (Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1983); Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1985); and Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henricksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The first official history of the project, released on 12 August 1945, after the atomic bombings of Japan but before surrender, is Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), which is still in print and informative on many issues. Popular histories of the atomic bomb are dominated by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). For a critical review of this book, see Barton J. Bernstein, “An Analysis of ‘Two Cultures’: Writing about the Making and the Using of the Atomic Bombs,” Public Historian 12 (1990): 83–107. Other popular histories include F. G. Gosling, The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2001); Jeff Hughes, The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). On General Groves, who is a pivotal figure in any account of the Manhattan Project, see the excellent recent study by Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2002). For another view on the power Groves wielded—or failed to wield—during the Hiroshima decision, see Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 592. 9. Robert Serber with Robert P. Crease, Peace & War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 104. 10. Norman F. Ramsey, “History of Project A,” September 1945, NFR, p. 5. For extensive technical details on these bombs, insofar as it is possible to

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determine them without access to still-classified materials, see the remarkable reconstructive work in John Coster-Mullen, Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (N.p.: John Coster-Mullen, 2005). 11. For biographical details on Stimson, see Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Morison, Turmoil and Tradition; David F. Schmitz, Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2001); and Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954). On the social exclusivity of Stimson’s inner circle and the importance of Bundy and Harrison to the atomic bomb decision, see Hodgson, The Colonel, 244–247; Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 614; Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 83; and Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 132. On the reliability of Stimson’s diary, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Ike and Hiroshima: Did He Oppose It?” Journal of Strategic Studies 10 (1987): 377–389, on 380. For an interesting analysis of Stimson’s philosophy of culture and history as expressed in his diary, see John Bonnet, “Jekyll and Hyde: Henry L. Stimson, Mentalité, and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb on Japan,” War in History 4 (1997): 174–212. 12. On the working of the Interim Committee, see Leon V. Sigal, “Bureaucratic Politics & Tactical Use of Committees: The Interim Committee & the Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb,” Polity 10 (Spring 1978): 326–364. Placing scientists as advisers on this committee was quite an unusual move, and it marks one of the first uses of expert scientific advice on a largely political and military question. Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 52. 13. “Recommended Action by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” 20 June 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5B: “Directives, Memorandums, etc., to and from the Chief of Staff, Secretary of War, etc.,” TS. On targeting, see especially Sean Malloy, “ ‘The Rules of Civilized Warfare’: Scientists, Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Debate over Nuclear Targeting, 1940–1945,” manuscript courtesy of the author, 27 September 2004. See also Barton J. Bernstein, “The Dropping of the A-Bomb: How Decisions Are Made When a Nation Is at War,” Center Magazine (March/April 1983): 7–15, on 8; Otis Cary, “Atomic Bomb Targeting— Myths and Realities,” Japan Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1979): 506–514; and Arjun Makhijani, “ ‘Always’ the Target?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 51 (May/ June 1995): 23–27. 14. Robert C. Batchelder, The Irreversible Decision, 1939–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 186–187; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 67. 15. See the correspondence in Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers: The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference) 1945, 2 vols.

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(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 1372–1373; and Stimson, 1 June 1945, 21 July 1945, 22 July 1945, HLS. For a helpful analysis, see Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 386–387; Otis Cary, “The Sparing of Kyoto: Mr. Stimson’s ‘Pet City,’ ” Japan Quarterly 22 (1975): 337–347. On the singularity of moral restraint, see Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 176. 16. Ian Clark, Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Contemporary Strategy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 58. 17. Stimson, memorandum to Truman, 16 May 1945, HLS. 18. As a case in point of the confusion and uncertainty of the state of the atomic project in early summer 1945, it is actually quite a tricky archival chore to find out who approved the Trinity test, as detailed in Roger M. Anders, “The President and the Atomic Bomb: Who Approved the Trinity Nuclear Test?” Prologue 20 (Winter 1988): 268–282. 19. J. B. Conant, “Notes on the ‘Trinity’ Test,” 16 July 1945, Folder 28: “Bush, V. [1943–45],” BC. For many other instances, see Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, tr. James Cleugh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958 [1956]), 201. 20. George Harrison to Stimson, 23 July 1945, Roll 4, Target 10, File 64: “Interim Committee—Potsdam Cables,” HB. See also the discussion in Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 414–415. 21. For excellent discussions of this issue, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Reconsidering the ‘Atomic General’: Leslie R. Groves,” Journal of Military History 67 (2003): 883–920, on 905; and Giovannitti and Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb, 248, 317. 22. Karl T. Compton, “If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used,” The Atlantic (December 1946): 54–56, on 56. Emphasis in original. This psychological two-bomb-leads-to-many assumption was first touted immediately following the Nagasaki bombing, but not before. See W. H. Lawrence, “Nagasaki Flames Rage for Hours,” New York Times, 10 August 1945, 1, 5, on 1. 23. Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 342. Stanley Goldberg, a historian highly critical of Groves, tends to accept this two-bomb narrative uncritically. See Stanley Goldberg, “General Groves and the Atomic West: The Making and the Meaning of Hanford,” in Bruce Hevly and John M. Findlay, eds., The Atomic West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 39–89; idem, “Racing to the Finish: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4 (1995): 117–128, esp. 126. 24. Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973), 283; and Charles W. Sweeney with James A. Antonucci and Marion K. Antonucci, War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission (New York: Avon, 1997), 176–177. Some have even claimed that the two-bomb strategy as sufficient was articulated as early as December 1944 (as in Richard F. Haynes, The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Com-

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mander in Chief [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973], 56). They offer no evidence to support such an early date for atomic strategy. 25. Reprinted as an enclosure in Churchill to Stimson, 18 July 1945, no. 1306, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1371. 26. Groves to Oppenheimer, 19 July 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5B: “Directives, Memorandums, etc., to and from the Chief of Staff, Secretary of War, etc.,” TS. 27. Groves testimony, 28 November 1945, Part I of United States Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Atomic Energy: Hearings on S. Res. 179, 79th Congress, 1st session, 1945–1946 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945), 36. 28. Batchelder, The Irreversible Decision, 98. 29. Thos. T. Handy to Carl Spaatz, 25 July 1945, Box I:21, File: “July 1945 Personal,” CAS. 30. Col. E. L. Sykes, memo for Dr. Bruce C. Hopper, 3 October 1946, Box I:73, Folder: “Atom Bomb Directives,” CAS. 31. Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 209. George M. Elsey, an aide to Admiral Leahy, recalled in his recent memoirs that after Hiroshima, Truman, Stimson, and Marshall “saw no reason to interfere with the army’s plan to release a second bomb when weather conditions were right.” George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life: A Memoir (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 93. This observation is clearly colored by hindsight; there is no contemporary evidence to indicate that any of these individuals either knew or concerned themselves about plans to drop another atomic bomb. It is possible that they did not recall that the order itself called for multiple bombings. 32. Compton, Atomic Quest, 234. 33. Quoted in Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, “Hiroshima: The Decision That Changed the World,” Look 24, no. 12 (7 June 1960): 25–33, on 27. And yet, no written orders from either Truman or Arnold were required for the 9–10 March firebombing raids on Tokyo. 34. Giovannitti and Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb, 249. 35. Ibid., 248; J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 61. 36. Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 211, 222; Bernstein, “Reconsidering the ‘Atomic General,’ ” 885. Delegation of target choice to the field was typical military procedure for conventional firebombing, as noted in Henry H. Arnold, Global Mission (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1951), 255. Groves’s biographer sees the Handy memo as in essence devolving control of the bomb to Farrell on Tinian, which he in turn interprets as devolution directly to Groves, who kept strong tabs on the operation. Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 413.

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37. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Volume 1: Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1955), 420–421; Jonathan Daniels, The Man of Independence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1950), 280–281. Even biographies very favorable to Truman, such as Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945–1948 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), see the second atomic bombing as a loss of control for the president (p. 98). Truman’s need to be in control of events, or to be perceived in control of them, is a theme that runs through almost all biographical studies of him and his personality. See, for example, Alonzo L. Hamby, “Harry S. Truman: Insecurity and Responsibility,” in Fred I. Greenstein, ed., Leadership in the Modern Presidency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 41–75, on 55; idem, “An American Democrat: A Reevaluation of the Personality of Harry S. Truman,” Political Science Quarterly 106 (1991): 33–55; Barton J. Bernstein, “Writing, Righting, or Wronging the Historical Record: President Truman’s Letter on His Atomic-Bomb Decision,” Diplomatic History 16 (1992): 163–173, on 172; and Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 147–148. On the ghost-writing of Truman’s memoirs, see Francis H. Heller, “The Writing of the Truman Memoirs,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 13 (1983): 81–84. 38. Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 414. 39. Kenneth M. Glazier, Jr., “The Decision to Use Atomic Weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Public Policy 18 (1969): 463–516, on 499–502. 40. Groves to Spaatz, 18 April 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. 41. Fredric Solomon and Robert Q. Marston, eds., The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1986). One good popular history of the Manhattan Project (Wyden, Day One) makes radioactivity the central narrative aspect of the story. One should also, however, bear in mind that conventional firebombing also produced long-lasting transformations in the physical and biotic environment. This is vividly illustrated in W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, tr. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2003 [1999]). 42. Karl T. Compton, 5 Atomic Bombs and the Future (Birmingham, AL: The Rushton Lectures Foundation, 1959), 35. 43. Barton C. Hacker, The Dragon’s Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942–1946 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 277–278; and Russell Olwell, “Atomic Workers, Atomic City: Labor and Community in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942–1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997). 44. Derry and Ramsey to Groves, 12 May 1945, “Summary of Target Committee Meetings on 10 and 11 May 1945,” Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. The negligence of secondary effects, whether radiation or fire, was in fact an endemic problem. Nuclear planners in the early Cold War refused to consider fire effects,

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regarding nuclear bombs to be essentially blast weapons. See Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 45. After the war, Groves’s deputy claimed in his memoirs that the reason the atomic bomb was detonated as an air burst was expressly to minimize remnant radioactivity. K. D. Nichols, The Road to Trinity (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 184–185. On the contrary, the evidence from the Target Committee reveals that the height of blast was calculated to maximize blast damage, full stop. It was set without explicit consideration of radiation. 46. “Toxic Effects of the Atomic Bomb,” 12 August 1945, Roll 1; Target 6, Subfile 5G: “Radiological Effects,” TS. 47. Norman F. Ramsey, The Reminiscences of Norman F. Ramsey (1962), OHRO, 166–167. 48. “Atom Bomb’s Radioactivity Fades Rapidly,” Washington Post, 9 August 1945, 1. 49. J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The New Weapon: The Turn of the Screw,” in Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds., One World or None (London: Latimer House Limited, 1946), 53–60, on 58. 50. Groves, 8 August 1945, LRG. 51. Groves to Marshall, 24 August 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5B: “Directives, Memorandums, etc., to and from the Chief of Staff, Secretary of War, etc.,” TS. See also MDH, Book 1, vol. 4, chap. 6, p. 8. 52. Marshall to MacArthur, 12 August 1945, Roll 4, Target 10, File 64: “Interim Committee—Potsdam Cables,” HB. 53. Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation (New York: Delta, 1982), 7. 54. Consodine to Derry, re: “Cable to Gen. Farrell,” 5 September 1945, Box 17, untitled folder, TF. 55. Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 103. 56. Dwight Macdonald, “The Bomb,” Politics (September 1945): 257–260, on 257. The salience of radioactivity in the postwar period was underscored with the summer 1946 publication of John Hersey’s account of the consequences of the bombing in Hiroshima: John Hersey, Hiroshima, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1985). 57. William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 441. 58. Barton J. Bernstein, “Truman and the A-Bomb: Targeting Noncombatants, Using the Bomb, and His Defending the ‘Decision,’ ” Journal of Military History 62 (1998): 547–570, on 559; idem, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb,” 52.

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59. Quoted in William L. Laurence, “The Scientists: Their Views 20 Years Later,” in Hiroshima Plus 20, Prepared by the New York Times (New York: Delacorte Press, 1965), 114–125, on 123. 60. Robert P. Patterson to George Harrison, 2 August 1945, Roll 1, Target 8, File 8: “Manhattan (District) Project,” HB. 61. George Harrison to Robert P. Patterson, 8 August 1945, Roll 1, Target 8, File 8: “Manhattan (District) Project,” HB. 62. Reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1365 and 1370. In another example, Bundy remembered Churchill’s reaction to Stimson about Trinity at Potsdam: “Stimson, what was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath.” Harvey H. Bundy, “Remembered Words,” The Atlantic (March 1957): 56–57, on 57. 63. Gordon Arneson, “Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting,” 31 May 1945, Roll 4, Target 6, File 3: “Interim Committee and Scientific Panel,” TS. Stimson indicated in his diary entry for that day that he said this at least partially to make “an impression on the scientists that we were looking at this like statesmen and not like merely soldiers anxious to win the war at any cost.” Stimson, 31 May 1945, HLS. See also Henry L. Stimson, “The Bomb and the Opportunity,” Harper’s Magazine (March 1946): 204. 64. Martin J. Sherwin, “The Atomic Bomb as History: An Essay Review,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 53, no. 2 (Winter 1969–1970): 128–134, on 133. Danish physicist Niels Bohr, for example, offered a particularly strong defense of the uniqueness of the atomic bomb, as described in Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 96. 65. Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 629. 66. O’Neill, A Democracy at War, 196; Walter Smith Schoenberger, Decision of Destiny (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 290; John J. McCloy, The Challenge to American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 42. The vast weight of the archival evidence contradicts the assertions of later historians, such as: “The first of the precedents Truman set was the most important: it was recognition of the fact that atomic weapons differed in character from all other weapons, and so could not be dealt with in purely military terms.” John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 106. That precedent was not set, as demonstrated in the analysis of the Handy order above. 67. This point is suggested by Barton J. Bernstein, “Truman at Potsdam: His Secret Diary,” Foreign Service Journal 57 (July/August 1980): 29–36, on 31. 68. Marshall, Notes for the Secretary of War’s Press Conference, 8 August 1945, in Larry I. Bland, ed., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 260. 69. Marshall, Notes for the Secretary of War’s Press Conference, 9 August 1945, in Bland, ed., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, 262.

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70. Quoted in David E. Lilienthal, entry of 12 June 1947, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Volume 2: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 198. 71. Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 271.

Chapter 4: Miracle 1. The quotations come, in order, from Jeter A. Isely and Philip A. Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War: Its Theory, and Its Practice in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 351; Philip A. Crowl, United States Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific: Campaign in the Marianas (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1960), 269; and Holland M. Smith and Percy Finch, Coral and Brass (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 201. The casualty rates in the invasion of the Marianas also became crucial data points in the calculation of anticipated casualties in war plans for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. See Giangreco, “ ‘A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas,’ ” 99. 2. Philip Morrison testimony, 6 December 1945, in Part 2 of United States Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Atomic Energy, 234. 3. For a description of the physical terrain of Tinian, see David B. Doan, Harold W. Burke, Harold G. May, and Carl H. Stensland, Military Geology of Tinian, Mariana Islands ([n.p.], 1960). On archaeological remains on the island, see Alexander Spoehr, Marianas Prehistory: Archaeological Survey and Excavations on Saipan, Tinian and Rota (Chicago: Chicago Natural History Museum, 1957). 4. Neal M. Bowers, Problems of Resettlement on Saipan, Tinian and Rota, 2d ed. (Saipan, CNMI: Division of Historic Preservation, 2001 [1950]), 35; Tadao Yanaihara, Pacific Islands under Japanese Mandate (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 9–10. 5. For accounts of Anson’s voyage to Tinian, see Glyn Williams, Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage Round the World (London: HarperCollins, 1999); S.W.C. Pack, Admiral Lord Anson: The Story of Anson’s Voyage and Naval Events of His Day (London: Cassell, 1960); Walter Vernon Anson, The Life of Admiral Lord Anson, the Father of the British Navy, 1697–1762 (London: John Murray, 1912); and the crew’s journals in Richard Walter and Benjamin Robins, A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV, by George Anson, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 6. Reproduced in Glyndwr Williams, ed., Documents Relating to Anson’s Voyage Round the World, 1740–1744 (London: Navy Records Society, 1967), 129. 7. Bowers, Problems of Resettlement on Saipan, Tinian and Rota, 38–40; D. Colt Denfield, Hold the Marianas: The Japanese Defense of the Mariana Islands (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing, 1997), 103; and Carl W.

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167

Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1951), 2. 8. Yanaihara, Pacific Islands under Japanese Mandate, 22–23, 31; Denfield, Hold the Marianas, 104; Henry I. Shaw, Jr., Bernard C. Nalty, and Edwin T. Turnbladh, Central Pacific Drive: History of the U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Volume 3 ([Washington, DC]: Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1966), 356; Felix M. Keesing, “The Former Japanese Mandated Islands,” Far Eastern Survey 14 (26 September 1945): 269–271; E. C. Weitzell, “The Marianas, Caroline, and Marshall Islands,” Scientific Monthly 63 (September 1946): 218–226. On the Marianas around the time of the American invasion, see Willard Price, Japan’s Islands of Mystery (New York: John Day Company, 1944). 9. Dan Van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign: World War II, the U.S.-Japanese Naval War, 1941–1945 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 330–331; F. C. Jones, Japan’s New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall, 1937–45 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 423–424; Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender, 156; and Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 28. 10. Crowl, The War in the Pacific, 271. For brief surveys of the course of the campaign on Tinian, see Richard Harwood, A Close Encounter: The Marine Landing on Tinian (Washington, DC: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1994); Edwin P. Hoyt, To the Marianas: War in the Central Pacific: 1944 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980); Gordon L. Rottman, Saipan & Tinian 1944: Piercing the Japanese Empire (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1944); and Scott Russell, Tinian: The Final Chapter ([n.p.]: CNMI Division of Historic Preservation, 1995). Matters were further complicated (and then simplified) by a change of command right before the Tinian operation. On 12 July General Holland Smith, who had commanded the marines in Saipan, was relieved and ordered to take command of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, a new headquarters. The new commanding general of the Northern Troops and Landing Force was now General Harry Schmidt. Crowl, The War in the Pacific, 271–272, 303. Tinian was going to be a marine job on the ground, although the army would supply much of the logistics and transportation support. The invasion of Saipan produced much comment on supposed marine/army conflicts, leading many to posit a fundamental difference between the two services: the marines sacrificed lives for speed, while the army was conservative with manpower at the expense of time. Although this belief had tremendous currency among the armed services, there were in fact few important theoretical differences between the two services, and the training in infantry tactics for both corps differed in no major detail. See Isely and Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War, 339. 11. Samuel Eliot Morison, New Guinea and the Marianas, March 1944–August 1944. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume 8 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1953), 341; Isely and Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War, 368. 12. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 27.

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13. Smith and Finch, Coral and Brass, 210. 14. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 30; Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 361. 15. Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 361–364. 16. Smith and Finch, Coral and Brass, 203; Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 358, 366–369; Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 25; and Isely and Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War, 351. 17. Frank O. Hough, The Island War: The United States Marine Corps in the Pacific (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1947), 228. 18. Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 359–361; and Denfield, Hold the Marianas. 19. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 41, 92; and Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 376. 20. Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 377–378, 382–383, 403; Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 59; Morison, New Guinea and the Marianas, 368. 21. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 129; Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 364. Napalm began to be used as an antipersonnel weapon only in the invasion of the Philippines, and this has led some commentators to exaggerate its importance in the case of Tinian. James A. Huston, “Tactical Use of Air Power in World War II: The Army Experience,” Military Affairs 14 (1950): 166–185, on 173. For an overstated account of napalm’s decisiveness on Tinian, see Clive Howard and Joe Whitley, One Damned Island After Another (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 228–229. 22. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 122. 23. Shaw et al., Central Pacific Drive, 419; Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 140. On the plans for mass suicide, see Matome Ugaki, Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–1945, tr. Masataka Chihaya (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 437. 24. Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 117, 121. This problem of declaring an island “secure” was a general one for larger islands. Hough, The Island War, 258. 25. Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II: History of the Bureau of Yards and Docks and the Civil Engineer Corps, 1940–1946, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947), 358, 367; Hoffman, The Seizure of Tinian, 6. 26. Karl C. Dod, The Corps of Engineers: The War against Japan (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, 1966), 492. On Saipan construction, see Clinton Green, “Our B-29 Base: An Epic Job,” New York Times Magazine, 10 December 1944, 8–9, 38–39. For a first-person account of Tinian construction, see Van Rensselaer Sill, American Miracle: The Story of War Construction Around the World (New York: Odyssey, 1947), 195–199. 27. Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II, 360–362. 28. Ibid., 362; Doan et al., Military Geology of Tinian, 7.

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29. Sill, American Miracle, 197. 30. Arnold, 15 June 1945, Box 3, Folder 5: “Journals 1945, June 6–24, Trip to Pacific,” HHA. 31. Sill, American Miracle, 198–199; Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II, 368. The large hospital was meant to be the center of medical care for the western Pacific theater. J. Arthur Rath, Soldiers Remember: World War II in the Pacific ([Syracuse, NY]: Rath Organization, 1995), 79. 32. Bowers, Problems of Resettlement on Saipan, Tinian and Rota, 65. On Tinian today, see Stephen Walker, “A Ghost in the Jungle,” New York Times, 8 August 2004. 33. David Hawkins, Edith C. Truslow, and Ralph Carlisle Smith, Project Y: The Los Alamos Story (Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1983), 248–249. 34. They were joined by Commander Francis Birch, head of the Gun Group, and Kenneth Bainbridge, who was in charge of the implosion model until Alberta was established, whereupon he was assigned to direct Project Trinity. R. B. Brode was in charge of the Fusing Group; George Galloway, the Engineering Group. Norman F. Ramsey, “History of Project A,” September 1945, NFR, p. 2. Ramsey claimed in an interview with the author on 10 January 2001 that he regretted what he now sees as the chauvinistic tone of this report, but that he feels it reflects well the attitude of people at the time of surrender. 35. Al Christman, Target Hiroshima: Deak Parsons and the Creation of the Atomic Bomb (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998); Barton J. Bernstein, “The Making of the Atomic Admiral: ‘Deak’ Parsons and Modernizing the U.S. Navy,” Journal of Military History 63 (1999): 415–426; Norman F. Ramsey, The Reminiscences of Norman F. Ramsey (1962), OHRO, 161–162. 36. Ramsey, interview with the author, 10 January 2001; Christman, Target Hiroshima, 127; and Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 315–316. 37. Derry to Groves, 10 February 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS; Groves to Norstad, 23 February 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS; and F. L. Ashworth to Groves, 24 February 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. 38. Ashworth entry in Robert Krauss and Amelia Krauss, eds., The 509th Remembered: A History of the 509th Composite Group as Told by the Veterans That Dropped the Atomic Bombs on Japan (Buchanan, MI: Robert Krauss, 2005), 19; and Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 323. 39. Kirkpatrick telecon to MED, [late July 1945,] APCOM 5627, Box 17, Envelope A, TF; Kirkpatrick to Major Derry, 1 June 1945, Box 17, Folder B, TF. In shipping, materials codenamed “Bronx” were considered to be irreplaceable if lost (such as active uranium fuel); “Bowery” shipments, if lost, would produce only several weeks’ delay. Naturally, Bronx shipments received extremely high priority. 40. Ramsey, “History of Project A,” 10; idem, interview with Magdolna

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Hargittai, 5 February 2002, in Magdolna Hargittai and István Hargittai, eds., Candid Science IV: Conversations with Famous Physicists (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), 317–343, on 333. 41. The leaders of Alberta on Tinian were officer-in-charge, Captain William S. Parsons; scientific and technical deputy to officer-in-charge, Norman F. Ramsey; operations officer and military alternate to officer-in-charge, F. L. Ashworth; Fat Man Assembly Team head, Roger Warner; Little Boy Assembly Team head, Commander Francis Birch; Fusing Team head, E. B. Doll; Electrical Detonator Team head, Lieutenant Commander E. Stevenson; Pit Team heads Philip Morrison and C. P. Baker; Observation Team heads Luis Alvarez and Bernard Waldman; and Aircraft Ordnance Team head Sheldon Dike. Serving as special consultants were Robert Serber, W. G. Penney, and Captain J. F. Nolan. The team leaders together formed a Project Technical Committee under Ramsey to coordinate efforts and make recommendations to Parsons. Military officers associated with Alberta were representative of the Atomic Bomb Military Policy Committee, Rear Admiral W. R. Purnell; Groves’s representative, Brigadier General T. F. Farrell; alternate to Farrell and in charge of construction, Colonel E. E. Kirkpatrick; Colonel Paul Tibbets, commanding officer of the 509th Composite Group; and Lieutenant Colonel Peer de Silva, commanding officer of 1st Technical Service Detachment, concerning administration, security, and housing for Project A; and Major Charles Begg, commanding officer of First Ordnance Squadron, Special. Ramsey, “History of Project A,” 11. For a complete list of Alberta team members, see the appendix in Coster-Mullen, Atom Bombs, 88. 42. Norris Bradbury was Ramsey’s alternate; they were to each serve twomonth stints on Tinian and then return to Los Alamos to provide field expertise in further bomb design. 43. Ramsey, Reminiscences, 186 (quotation), 100 (on alternation). 44. Wyden, Day One, 17. 45. Robert Serber to Charlotte Serber, 31 July 1945, [Tinian,] in Serber with Crease, Peace & War, 105. 46. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume 5: The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944 to August 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 706. 47. Paul W. Tibbets, “Training the 509th for Hiroshima,” Air Force Magazine (August 1973): 49–55, on 53. 48. Captain Derry to General Groves, 29 August 1944, Subject: “Army Air Forces’ Program for Operations,” Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. See also Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 644n17. 49. Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., with Clair Stebbins and Harry Franken, The Tibbets Story (New York: Stein and Day, 1978), 156; idem, “Training the 509th for Hiroshima,” 51. 50. Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, No High Ground (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 141.

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51. On the process of training, see the first-person account in Tibbets, “Training the 509th for Hiroshima.” For views from the ranks, see 509th Pictorial Album: Written and Published by and for the Members of the 509th Composite Group (Tinian: n.p., 1945); and Krauss and Krauss, The 509th Remembered. Much attention has been given over the years to the case of Claude Eatherly, who flew the weather plane over Hiroshima, declaring the target clear for visual bombing on 6 August 1945. Eatherly was arrested after the war for breaking into post offices and gained sympathy by arguing that the guilt over Hiroshima had disturbed his mental faculties. This story is recounted, among other places, in Ronnie Dugger, Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967). It must be noted that Eatherly’s reaction was highly exceptional, and that feelings of remorse in the 509th are not common. 52. See the final roster of planes and their captains in Richard H. Campbell, The Silverplate Bombers: A History and Registry of the Enola Gay and Other B-29s Configured to Carry Atomic Bombs (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005), 18. This volume offers many interesting details about these planes and their postwar fates. 53. Derry to Groves, 30 December 1944, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. In his memoirs, Tibbets claimed that the reason he trained so many crews was so that a team could be sent to both Europe and Japan simultaneously. Tibbets, The Tibbets Story, 8, 179. This may be true, but there remains no trace of preparations for a European delivery in the Manhattan Project archives. 54. Derry to Groves, 6 January 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. 55. Hoddeson et al., Critical Assembly, 383; Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 259. 56. Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 260. 57. Knebel and Bailey, No High Ground, 93. 58. Christman, Target Hiroshima, 167. 59. Norstad to Commanding General, 21st Bomber Command, 29 May 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. See also Ramsey, Reminiscences, 151; Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 284–285. 60. For a complete list of the targets of Pumpkin raids on Japan, see CosterMullen, Atom Bombs, 90. See also Campbell, The Silverplate Bombers, 20. For a first-person account of a 24 July 1945 Pumpkin raid on the Sumitomo plants at Niihama on the island of Shikoku, see Fred C. Bock’s account in Krauss and Krauss, The 509th Remembered, 43–45. 61. Hoddeson et al., Critical Assembly, 379, 384. 62. Ramsey, “History of Project A,” 12. 63. W. S. Parsons testimony, 13 December 1945, Part 3 of United States Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Atomic Energy, 384.

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64. Ramsey, Reminiscences, 154. 65. Van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign, 392. For two popular histories of this sinking, see Dan Kurzman, Fatal Voyage: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis (New York: Atheneum, 1990); and Richard F. Newcomb, Abandon Ship!: Death of the U.S.S. Indianapolis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958). For the account of the Japanese submarine commander, see Mochitsura Hashimoto, Sunk: The Story of the Japanese Submarine Fleet, 1941–1945, tr. E.H.M. Colegrave (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1954), 225–228. McVay was court-martialed in December 1945 for losing his ship. 66. Ramsey, Summary Status Report as of 1 August 1945, to Brig. General Farrell and Captain Parsons, 1 August 1945, Box 17, File: “Outgoing Telecons, June 1945,” TF; Ramsey, “History of Project A,” 13. 67. Ehrman, Grand Strategy, 310. 68. Quoted in Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Enola Gay (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 229. 69. Ashworth entry in Krauss and Krauss, The 509th Remembered, 19. 70. The best synthetic account of the mission is Coster-Mullen, Atom Bombs, chap. 4. For first-person accounts, see Robert A. Lewis with Eliot Tozer, “How We Dropped the A-Bomb,” Popular Science (August 1957): 71–75, 209–210; Robert A. Lewis, “My Plane Dropped the A-Bomb,” Parade, 31 July 1960, 3; and Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., with Wesley Price, “How to Drop an Atom Bomb,” Saturday Evening Post 218 (8 June 1946): 18–19, 133–136. For other secondary accounts, see Dan Kurzman, Day of the Bomb: Countdown to Hiroshima (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986); Thomas and Witts, Enola Gay; and Joseph L. Marx, Seven Hours to Zero (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967). Stephen Walker’s recent Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) bounds its entire narrative of the atomic bombings between Trinity and Hiroshima. 71. Farrell, handwritten memo of the Hiroshima mission, [7 August 1945,] Box 17, Envelope B, TF. 72. Extracts from the telegram, reprinted in Knebel and Bailey, No High Ground, frontispiece. 73. Quoted in Leahy, I Was There, 430. 74. See the invitation reproduced in Thomas and Witts, Enola Gay, 268. 75. Tibbets with Price, “How to Drop an Atom Bomb,” 18. For example, in his memoirs from the 1970s, Tibbets claimed he told his copilot, Bob Lewis, “I think this is the end of the war” after the Hiroshima detonation. Tibbets, The Tibbets Story, 228. 76. Frederick L. Ashworth, “Dropping the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki,” Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute 84 (1958): 12–17, on 14. See also Christman, Target Hiroshima, 198. 77. Merle Miller and Abe Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1946), vii. 78. Norman F. Ramsey, interview with author, 10 January 2001.

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79. Ramsey, Reminiscences, 172. On the Dupont suggestion, see Ramsey to Oppenheimer and Parsons, 12 April 1945, Box 291, Folder: “1945,” JRO. 80. [Kirkpatrick] to Groves, 21 July 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5C: “Preparation and Movement of Personnel and Equipment to Tinian,” TS. 81. Christman, Target Hiroshima, 195. 82. Bissell to Marshall, “Estimate of Japanese Situation for Next 30 Days,” War Dept. General & Special Staffs, OPD, File #2, Box 12, RG 165, NARA, quoted in Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 106. 83. Forrestal to Truman, 8 August 1945, in Forrestal Diaries, Volume 2, 1944–1945, JVF. 84. Joseph C. Harsch, “Japs Say Atomic Bomb Halted Trains,” Christian Science Monitor (7 August 1945): 1, 6, on 1.

Chapter 5: Papacy 1. Henry Stimson noted that after the successful Trinity test, the participants at Potsdam worked to finalize the speech for greatest impact: “We made some changes in it which were induced by the difference of psychology which now exists since the successful test. I did not realize until I went over these papers now what a great change that had produced in my own psychology. We put some more pep into the paper and made it a little more dramatic . . . .” Stimson, 30 July 1945, HLS. 2. Document no. 1315 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1376. 3. This point is also made in Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 6. They also fault Truman for not mentioning radiation, which, as shown in chapter 3, was hardly Truman’s or Laurence’s fault. The comparison to conventional bombing was quite common in the immediate press coverage of Hiroshima, as seen in “Atomic Energy Smashing Japan,” Los Angeles Times, 7 August 1945, A4. For an interesting analysis of the speech’s rhetoric that splits the description of the bomb from the destruction it caused and was meant to cause, see Vincent Leo, “The Mushroom Cloud Photograph: From Fact to Symbol,” Afterimage 13 (1985): 6–12, on 7. 4. Document no. 1315 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1377. Laurence’s early draft of the speech made an even sharper point of this factor of multiple bombs: “We can produce enough of these bombs to lay waste every one of their cities and to cause much havoc in the rest of their country that it will be a wilderness for generations to come.” W. L. Laurence, “Form E (Tentative draft of radio address by President Truman to be delivered after the successful use of the atomic bomb over Japan),” 17 May 1945, Roll 1, Target 5, File 4: “TRINITY Test (at Alamogordo, July 16, 1945),” TS. 5. Roscoe Drummond, “More ‘Hiroshimas’ Threaten Nippon,” Christian Science Monitor, 8 August 1945, 1, 11; “Deferred Men to Be Drafted, Officials Warn,” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1945, 1; Luther Huston, “No Cut in the

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Army Is Planned as a Result of New Bomb Use,” New York Times, 8 August 1945, 1, 8; Gordon Walker, “Invasion Holds,” Christian Science Monitor, 9 August 1945, 1, 6; “War Rages on in Pacific Amid Peace Furore,” Christian Science Monitor, 11 August 1945, 1, 6; and “New Weapon Not to Bring Army Cut Now,” Washington Post, 8 August 1945, 1–2. 6. Stimson, 9 August 1945, HLS. 7. George Marshall to Carl Spaatz, 8 August 1945, in Bland, ed., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, 259. For LeMay’s and Spaatz’s offending comments, see “Flyers Report on Atomic Bomb: 60 Per Cent of City Wiped Out,” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1945, 1–2, on 2. 8. George B. Bryant, Jr., “Peace Preparations,” Wall Street Journal, 9 August 1945, 1, 5. See the similar press coverage in “Review and Outlook,” Wall Street Journal, 11 August 1945, 1; “Farley Calls for Speed,” New York Times, 10 August 1945, 12; “Stock Prices Slump on Talk of Quick Peace,” Washington Post, 8 August 1945, 9; and Felix Belair, Jr., “Truman Reveals Move of Moscow,” New York Times, 9 August 1945, 1, 3. 9. James Forrestal, 6 July 1945, Forrestal Diaries, vol. 2 1945–1946, JVF. 10. C. P. Trussell, “Congress Expects an Earlier Recall,” New York Times, 9 August 1945, 4. 11. See extracts reproduced in Compton, Atomic Quest, 256–257. The authorization for this campaign only came through on 6 August: Arnold to Spaatz, 6 August 1945, WAR 44787, Box 20, Envelope G, Dead File, TF; Farrell to Groves, “Report on Overseas Operations—Atomic Bomb,” 27 September 1945, MDH, p. 4. There was also a private missive to the scientists of Japan penned by Alberta members, although there is no evidence to indicate that the warnings in this letter ever made it up the chain of command to the Japanese cabinet. 12. On the decrypts, see Bruce Lee, Marching Orders: The Untold Story of World War II (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), 541; and Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA, 223. On the military reaction, see Robert J. C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954), 151. On Japanese radiation measures, see the reminiscences of one participant, written and published only in the 1980s: Taro Takemi, “Remembrances of the War and the Bomb,” Journal of the American Medical Association 250 (5 August 1983): 618–619. 13. There have been multiple accounts of the ill-fated Bockscar flight that released the atomic bomb over Nagasaki. The best attempt to reconcile the various narratives of what happened on this mission is Coster-Mullen, Atom Bombs, chap. 6. For earlier secondary accounts, see Frank W. Chinnock, Nagasaki: The Forgotten Bomb (New York: World Publishing Company, 1969); William Craig, The Fall of Japan (New York: Dial Press, 1967); Joseph L. Marx, Nagasaki: The Necessary Bomb? (New York: Macmillan, 1971). For firstperson accounts, see Ashworth, “Dropping the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki,” and the much more unreliable and retrospective Sweeney, War’s End.

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14. Bernard T. Feld, “The Nagasaki Binge,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1968): 35–37, on 35. 15. Groves, 18 July 1945, LRG. 16. For a defense of the Nagasaki bombing, see Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, chap. 5. For a criticism of the raid as unnecessary, see, for example, Barton J. Bernstein, “Doomsday II,” New York Times Magazine, 27 July 1975, 7, 21–29. Both formulations imply that it is analytically possible to separate the two bombings for the purposes of evaluation. 17. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [after 19 August 1945, Tinian,] Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO. 18. Norman F. Ramsey, “History of Project A,” September 1945, NFR, 9. 19. Ramsey, “History of Project A,” 12. 20. Ramsey, Summary Status Report as of 1 August 1945, to Brig. General Farrell and Captain Parsons, 1 August 1945, Box 17, File: “Outgoing Telecons, June 1945,” TF. 21. Harlow W. Russ, Project Alberta: The Preparation of Atomic Bombs for Use in World War II (Los Alamos, NM: Exceptional Books, 1990 [1984]), 66. 22. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [7 or 8 August 1945, Tinian,] Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO. 23. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [after 19 August 1945, Tinian,] Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO. 24. Russ, Project Alberta, 57. 25. Ibid., 67. 26. Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 145. 27. Sweeney, War’s End, 3. 28. Coster-Mullen, Atom Bombs, 334, 361. 29. Ibid., 68. There apparently remains some debate among members of the 509th about whether there was actually a pump problem or if the failure to make it work was due to the crew’s unfamiliarity with this particular plane (they had been transferred from The Great Artiste, the instrument plane on both missions). On the poor weather, see Clark, Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present, 63. 30. Ashworth entry in Krauss and Krauss, eds., The 509th Remembered, 20. This notion of Sweeney’s self-imposed pressure to be “perfect” is also voiced in Coster-Mullen, Atom Bombs, 72. 31. Clark, Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present, 59. 32. Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 422. 33. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [after 19 August 1945, Tinian,] Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO. 34. Ashworth to Kirkpatrick, 9 August 1945, AFHC. See also CosterMullen, Atom Bombs, 74. 35. This has been pointed out, among other places, in Clark, Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present, 60.

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36. Kolko, The Politics of War, 597. 37. LeMay with Kantor, Mission with LeMay, 388; Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume 5, 732; Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 221; “Planes Strafe Tokyo Area as 5 Cities Blaze,” Washington Post, 7 August 1945, 1–2; “ ‘Superforts’ Stage 6-Target Wind-Up,” New York Times, 15 August 1945, 8; “B-29’s Bomb Again,” New York Times, 14 August 1945, 1, 4. 38. Lee, Marching Orders, 542; Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA, 224. For a press account of the silence, see “Japs Silent on Atom Raid Destruction at Nagasaki,” Washington Post, 10 August 1945, 1. 39. Patterson to Rosenman, 9 August 1945, Samuel Rosenman Papers, 1945, Box 3, HSTL, quoted in Lisle A. Rose, After Yalta (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 53. 40. Rear to Kirkpatrick, received 5 August 1945, Box 17, File: “August Telecons,” TF. 41. Kirkpatrick to Derry, 9 August 1945, APCOM 5472, Box 19, File: “Outgoing Telecons,” TF. See also Ramsey, “History of Project A,” 15. None of this preparation is reflected in the otherwise very helpful chronology presented in Campbell, The Silverplate Bombers, 111. 42. Russ, Project Alberta, 72–73. 43. Curtis LeMay, memo dated 10 August 1945, Box 11, unmarked folder, CEL. My thanks to Sean Malloy for bringing this document to my attention. 44. Spaatz to Norstad, 10 August 1945, Box I:21, File: “August 1945 Personal,” CAS. See also Farrell to Groves, “Report on Overseas Operations— Atomic Bomb,” 27 September 1945, MDH, p. 3. 45. Kirkpatrick to Nimitz and Spaatz, 9 August 1945, APCOM 5449, Box 19, File: “Outgoing Telecons,” TF, orthography emended. General Norstad responded to Spaatz on the same day that “[y]our recommendations on targets are being considered on a high level,” but that “Radar drops will be used only in case of emergency.” Norstad to Spaatz, 10 August 1945, Box 19, File: “Outgoing Telecons,” TF. 46. Frank, Downfall, 303; and Bernstein, “The Perils and Politics of Surrender,” 13. 47. Kirkpatrick telecon to MED, [after 9 August 1945,] APCOM 5788, Box 17, Envelope A, TF. See also Commanding General, 313th Bombing Wing, Tinian, to War Department, 26 August 1945, APCOM 5909, Box 19, Untitled Folder, TF. 48. Clark, Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present, 69. 49. Col. F. T. Matthias, Diary, 11 and 12 August 1945, Hanford Engineer Works, MDH. See also Hoddeson et al., Critical Assembly, 397. 50. Col. F. T. Matthias, Diary, 11 and 12 August 1945, Hanford Engineer Works, MDH. 51. Groves, Memorandum for Marshall, 10 August 1945, Roll 1, Target 6, Subfile 5B: “Directives, Memorandums, etc., to and from the Chief of Staff, Secretary of War, etc.,” TS. An apocryphal story permeates the atomic bomb

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literature that J. Robert Oppenheimer had to run after physicist Robert Bacher and stop him from loading the plutonium core onto a truck. This is repeated many times, as in DeGroot, The Bomb, 102. Robert Bacher’s oral history touches on this event during the interview of 1 July 1981, relating the familiar incident in a vague and retrospective fashion, almost as if echoing the histories that had already been written. See Robert F. Bacher, interview by Mary Terrall, Pasadena, California, June–August 1981, February 1983, Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, retrieved 10 January 2006 from http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Bacher_R, p. 78. (I would like to thank Robert S. Norris for pointing me to this citation.) There is no contemporary archival evidence that substantiates this, and much to contradict the claim that a core was ready on this date, as in the quotation above. 52. Groves to Marshall, 10 August 1945, Roll 3, Target 8, File 25: “Documents Removed from Gen. (L.R.) Groves’ Locked Box, Plus Certain Documents of Historical Importance,” TS. 53. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [after 19 August 1945, Tinian,] Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO. 54. Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 352. 55. Quoted in Norris, Racing for the Bomb, 425. 56. Quoted in K. D. Nichols, The Road to Trinity (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 215. 57. Groves, 11 August 1945, LRG. 58. Quoted in Marc Gallicchio, “After Nagasaki: General Marshall’s Plan for Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Japan,” Prologue 23 (1991): 396–404, on 401. See also Barton J. Bernstein, “Eclipsed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Early Thinking about Tactical Nuclear Weapons,” International Security 15 (1991): 149–173. 59. Nichols, The Road to Trinity, 203. 60. Gordon Arneson, “Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting,” 31 May 1945, Roll 4, Target 6, File 3: “Interim Committee and Scientific Panel,” TS. 61. John P. Sutherland, “ ’The Story Gen. Marshall Told Me’: Hitherto Unpublished Views on Fateful Decisions of World War II,” U.S. News & World Report (2 November 1959): 50–56, on 53; and David E. Lilienthal, entry of 12 June 1947, in The Journals of David E. Lilenthal, Volume 2, 198–199. See also Edward J. Drea, “Previews of Hell,” Military History Quarterly (Spring 1995): 74–81, on 79. 62. Groves, 13 August 1945, LRG. 63. This order produced no immediate results, of course, because the Third Shot was not ready to be released; Truman was simply reasserting control over the devices which he had delegated to the forward commanders in the Handy order. Bernstein, “The Perils and Politics of Surrender,” 10–11. 64. See Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 60–61. 65. James Forrestal, 10 August 1945, Forrestal Diaries, Volume 2, 1944–1945,

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JVF. See also Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking Press, 1951), 83. 66. John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942–1946 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), 474. 67. Balfour to Foreign Office, 14 August 1945, F.O. 800/461, Public Records Office, London, as quoted in Bernstein, “Eclipsed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” 167. 68. On popular support for a Third Shot, see Barton J. Bernstein, “The Dropping of the A-Bomb,” 15. 69. Dower, War without Mercy, 300. 70. Byrnes, memorandum to Truman, 10 August 1945, White House Central Files, Confidential Files, “State Department. World War II,” HSTL. 71. Marshall to MacArthur and Spaatz, 13 August 1945, in Bland, ed., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 5, 271. 72. Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War Two, Volume 5, 732–733. Abe Spitzer, a member of the 509th, recalled in his memoirs, which appeared directly after the war, how frightening flying on this Pumpkin raid after the atomic missions was: Miller and Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb, 136. 73. Bernstein, “The Perils and Politics of Surrender,” 17. 74. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [after 19 August 1945, Tinian], Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO; Norman F. Ramsey, The Reminiscences of Norman F. Ramsey (1962), OHRO, p. 184; Kirkpatrick to Derry, 15 [August] 1945, Box 19, Envelope A, TF. See also Major J. A. Derry to 313th Wing, 21st Bomb Command, Tinian, 15 August 1945, Box 19, Untitled Folder, TF; and Farrell to Groves, 14 August 1945, APCOM 5645, Box 20, Envelope G, Dead File, TF. 75. Ramsey testimony in United States Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before the Personnel Security Board and Texts of Principal Documents and Letters (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 441. 76. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [after 19 August 1945, Tinian,] Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO; Ramsey, “History of Project A,” 15. 77. Alvarez, Alvarez, 146. 78. Kirkpatrick to Derry, 15 [August] 1945, Box 19, Envelope A, TF. 79. Washington Liaison Office, Washington, DC, to Commanding Officer, Clear Creek, 22 August 1945, Box 18, Folder: “Incoming Teletypes August 1945,” TF. 80. Samuel Eliot Morison, Victory in the Pacific, 1945. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Volume 14 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 353. On coup attempts after both conditional and unconditional surrender offers, see Kazuo Kawai, “Militarist Activity between Japan’s Two Surrender Decisions,” Pacific Historical Review 22 (1953): 383–389. Karl Compton recalled after the war that there were several days when Washington

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worried about whether surrender would “take” or not. Compton, 5 Atomic Bombs and the Future, 43. 81. For example, Kirby, The War against Japan, Volume 5, 200. 82. Samuel Eliot Morison, “Why Japan Surrendered,” The Atlantic (October 1960): 41–47, on 47. 83. Stimson, 12 August to 3 September 1945, HLS. 84. Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 255, 301; and Allen, The End of the War in Asia, 198. 85. Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 96. Stalin had expressed his desire for a zone in Japan, according to Averell Harriman, on 18 May 1945. See Borton, American Presurrender Planning for Postsurrender Japan, 24; and Marc Gallicchio, “The Kuriles Controversy: U.S. Diplomacy in the Soviet-Japan Border Dispute, 1941–1956,” Pacific Historical Review 60 (1991): 69–101. 86. Alan J. Levine, “Dropping the A-Bomb in Retrospect,” Asian Profile 14 (August 1986): 315–325, on 325. 87. Richard B. Finn, Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 6–7. 88. Kirkpatrick and Ashworth to Parsons, 8 September 1945, Box 17, File: “Shipping,” TF; and Kirkpatrick Diary, Box 17, File: “Daily Diary,” TF; Ramsey, Reminiscences, 84.

Chapter 6: Revolution 1. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946); Hersey, Hiroshima; and Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Impact of the A-Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945–85, tr. Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985). For a first-person account, see Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki, tr. William Johnston (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984 [1949]). For a reaction in Hiroshima to the bombing of Nagasaki, see Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945, tr. Warner Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 48. 2. John W. Dower, “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Politics of Memory,” Technology Review (August/September 1995): 48–51. On the American POWs, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Unraveling a Mystery: American POWs Killed at Hiroshima,” Foreign Service Journal 56 (October 1979): 17–19, 40. 3. James N. Yamazaki with Louis B. Fleming, Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician’s Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 43, 71.

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4. “Japan Files Atomic Protest,” Christian Science Monitor, 10 August 1945, 6. 5. “Calendar of Important Events in the Development of Atomic Energy, 1938 to 1946,” press release of War Department Public Relations Division, 30 October 1946, MDH, Book 1, vol. 4, chap. 8. This elision persists. Even the otherwise meticulous John Coster-Mullen leaves any preparation for a third bomb or postsurrender mobilization out of his account of the technical operations on Tinian (Atom Bombs, 107). 6. Stewart L. Udall, The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 25. For limited secondary scholarship on Laurence, see Weart, Nuclear Fear, 98–102; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 187; and Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 13–22. 7. William L. Laurence, Reminiscences (1964, 1965), OHRO, p. 26. 8. Ibid., 235. 9. Laurence’s famous article that expressed the potential of nuclear weapons as a Nazi explosive was “Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by Science,” New York Times, 5 May 1940, 1, 51. 10. Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 325. 11. “War Department Called Times Reporter to Explain Bomb’s Intricacies to Public,” New York Times, 7 August 1945, 5 12. Ramsey, interview with author, 10 January 2001. 13. Laurence, Reminiscences, 321. 14. William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb, 2d enl. ed., (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972 [1946]). 15. Laurence, Reminiscences, 377–378. 16. Ibid., 355–356. 17. Wilfred Burchett, Shadows of Hiroshima (London: Verso, 1983), 16–17. On Burchett’s journalism from Hiroshima, see Richard Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima,” in Ben Kiernan, ed., Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939–1983 (London: Quartet Books, 1986): 13–40. 18. See, for example, George Fielding Eliot, “Atomic Bomb May Alter History of Human Race,” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1945, 2; Polyzoides, “Atomic Bomb Turning Point in Man’s History,” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1945, 6; and Daedalus, “War and Peace Revolutionized,” Christian Science Monitor, 6 August 1945, 1, 7. 19. Martin J. Sherwin, “How Well They Meant,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (August 1985): 9–15, on 9. 20. Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 42. For a detailed account of the motivation for, composition of, and later effects on classification, publicity, and the public status of physicists due to the Smyth Report, see Rebecca Press Schwartz, “The Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb: Henry

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DeWolf Smyth and the Historiography of the Manhattan Project” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, in progress). 21. Philip Morrison testimony, 6 December 1945, in Part 2 of United States Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Atomic Energy, 234. 22. Alice Kimball Smith, “Behind the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: Chicago 1944–45,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 14 (October 1958): 288– 312; Matt Price, “Roots of Dissent: The Chicago Met Lab and the Origins of the Franck Report,” Isis 86 (1995): 222–244; Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy; and Donald A. Strickland, Scientists in Politics: The Atomic Scientists Movement, 1945–1946 ([n.p.]: Purdue University Studies, 1968). 23. On the scientists’ movement, see Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America: 1945–47 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); and Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). On the concept of “social responsibility” within the movement, see Lawrence Badash, “American Physicists, Nuclear Weapons in World War II, and Social Responsibility,” Physics in Perspective 7 (2005): 138–149. 24. On these early arms control efforts and their failure, see Sherwin, A World Destroyed; and Larry G. Gerber, “The Baruch Plan and the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 6 (1982): 69–95. 25. J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The New Weapon: The Turn of the Screw,” in Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds., One World or None (London: Latimer House Limited, 1946), 53–60, on 53–54. 26. Uday Mohan and Sanho Tree, “Hiroshima, the American Media, and the Construction of Conventional Wisdom,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4 (1995): 141–160. In retrospect, this collapsing of the common perception of the end of the war into a simple narrative is not surprising: the atomic bombs almost certainly influenced the decision-making process within the Japanese government. The question is not why people thought the bomb ended the war, but why all the other stories vanished. 27. Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., and Sylvia Eberhart, American Opinion on World Affairs in the Atomic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 15. 28. “The Quarter’s Polls,” Public Opinion Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1945): 365–393, on 385. By October 1947, the numbers had fallen even further: only 55 percent thought the atomic bomb’s development was a good thing, as opposed to 38 percent who considered it bad. Lillian Wald Kay, “Public Opinion and the Atom,” Journal of Educational Sociology 22 (1949): 356–362, on 357. 29. “The Fortune Survey,” Fortune 32 (December 1945): 303–310, on 305. 30. Ibid., 309. 31. The Quarter’s Polls,” 389. There was little risk of chemical weapons being used in the Pacific theater before 1946 at the earliest. With the end of the war in Europe, all available transports were employed to move personnel and

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conventional materiel to prepare for Operation Olympic. Moving the stockpiles of chemical weapons from their storage facilities in the United States would not have been possible before Coronet in spring 1946 at the very earliest, even if Truman and Marshall had decided to authorize it. See John Ellis van Courtland Moon, “Project SPHINX: The Question of the Use of Gas in the Planned Invasion of Japan,” Journal of Strategic Studies (September 1989): 302–323. 32. See, for example, Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 126 and passim; “Use of Atomic Bomb Criticized in Several Capital Pulpits,” Washington Post, 12 August 1945, 1–2; Reinhold Niebuhr, “Our Relations to Japan,” Christianity and Crisis 5, no. 15 (17 September 1945): 5–7; and “America’s Atomic Atrocity,” The Christian Century (29 August 1945): 629–631. On Catholic opposition, see “Vatican Press Deplores Discovery of New Weapon,” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1945, 2; Lawrence S. Wittner, One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 57; “Editorial Comment: The Atom Bomb,” The Catholic World (September 1945): 449–452; Edgar R. Smothers, S.J., “An Opinion on Hiroshima,” America (5 July 1947): 379–380; John C. Ford, S.J., “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing,” Theological Studies 5 (September 1944): 261–309; and “Horror and Shame,” Commonweal 42 (24 August 1945): 443–444. For a survey of some of the theological problems posed by nuclear weapons, see R. Bauckham, “Theology after Hiroshima,” Scottish Journal of Theology 38 (1985): 583–601. 33. Wittner, One World or None, 39; Norman Thomas, “When Cruelty Becomes Pleasurable,” Human Events 2 (1947): 160–163. On isolationism in the early Cold War, see Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979). 34. For example, Lewis Mumford, “Atom Bomb: ‘Miracle’ or Catastrophe,” Air Affairs 2 (July 1948): 326–345. 35. Alvin M. Weinberg, “The Sanctification of Hiroshima,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (December 1985): 34; Hanson W. Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950 [1949]), 107; and Felix Morley, “The Return to Nothingness,” Human Events 2 (1947): 144–147. 36. Hersey, Hiroshima; Michael J. Yavenditti, “John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of ‘Hiroshima,’ ” Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974): 24–49; idem, “The American People and the Use of Atomic Bombs on Japan: The 1940s,” The Historian 36 (1974): 224–247; and Joseph Luft and W. M. Wheeler, “Reaction to John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’ ” Journal of Social Psychology 28 (1948): 135–140. 37. Janet Besse and Harold D. Lasswell, “Our Columnists on the A-Bomb,” World Politics 3 (October 1950): 72–87. 38. Ansley J. Coale, The Problem of Reducing Vulnerability to Atomic Bombs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947).

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39. LeMay with Kantor, Mission with LeMay, 380. 40. This was the case for James Bryant Conant, for example. See James G. Hershberg, “James B. Conant and the Atomic Bomb,” Journal of Strategic Studies 8 (1985): 78–92; and James B. Conant, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 302. 41. Gertrude Stein, “Reflection on the Atomic Bomb,” Yale Poetry Review, no. 7 (1947): 3–4, on 3. 42. William H. Stringer, “Russians on Trail of Splitting Process,” Christian Science Monitor, 14 August 1945, 9. 43. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 237. On the continuities between Roosevelt and Truman on excluding the Soviet Union from information about the Manhattan Project, see Barton J. Bernstein, “The Quest for Security: American Foreign Policy and International Control of Atomic Energy, 1942–1946,” Journal of American History 60 (1974): 1003–1044. 44. See the archival documents reproduced in L. D. Riabev, Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy, 2 v. (Moscow: MFTI, 1999–2002), vol. 1, pt. 2, 329–330, 333. 45. W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941–1946 (New York: Random House, 1975), 496. 46. See David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); M. J. Ruggles and A. Kramish, The Soviet Union and the Atom: The Early Years (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1956); Arnold Kramish, The Soviet Union and the Atom: The “Secret” Phase (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1957); Alexei Kojevnikov, Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), chap. 6; and Thomas B. Cochran, Robert S. Norris, and Oleg A. Bukharin, Making the Russian Bomb: From Stalin to Yeltsin (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). 47. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “The Soviet Factor in Ending the Pacific War: From the Neutrality Pact to Soviet Entry into the War in August 1945,” in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., Reinterpreting the End of the Pacific War. 48. David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984 [1983]), 18, 21; and idem, “Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb, 1939– 1945,” Social Studies of Science 11 (1981): 159–197. 49. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964), 1037. 50. This can be seen by even a cursory reading of Pravda between the bomb drop on Hiroshima and surrender. On 15 August, in its declaration of victory, “Porazhenie iaponskogo imperializma,” Pravda, no. 194 (9965) (15 August 1945): 1, the atomic bomb did not even rate a mention. 51. As reported to M. J. Ruggles and quoted in Kramish, The Soviet Union and the Atom, 34–35.

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52. Quoted in Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 27. 53. Nikita Moiseyev, “The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Tragedy in Documents,” Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn’, no. 8 (1990): 122–139. 54. R. Y. Malinovsky and M. V. Zakharov, Finale: A Retrospective Review of Imperialist Japan’s Defeat in 1945 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972). See also Michael Amrine, The Great Decision: The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Putnam, 1959), 241. 55. Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 646. This view is not fanciful. Oil imports to Japan had been cut off by the blockade as of April 1945, and industry was starting to grind to a halt. After the war it was found that Japanese refineries were operating at only 4 percent of capacity. O’Neill, A Democracy at War, 410. 56. “Atomnye bombardirovki 1945,” Voennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, 2d ed. (Moscow: Voennoe izd., 1986): 53. This interpretation took some time to coalesce. Soon after the war, the Stalinist Left in the United States considered the atomic bombing to be a positive event, and certainly not an aggressive move against the Soviet Union. See Paul F. Boller, Jr., “Hiroshima and the American Left: August 1945,” International Social Science Review 57 (Winter 1982): 13–28. 57. Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 149. This low coverage of the atomic bomb continued into the postwar period. Wittner, One World or None, 147, 287. 58. Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 179. 59. Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 195. 60. Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 209. 61. Arnold, “Third Report of the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, November 12, 1945, to the Secretary of War,” in The War Reports of General of the Army George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, General of the Army H. H. Arnold, Commanding General, Army Air Forces, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1947), 462. The press also pushed this idea of air power winning the war with or without (but especially with) the atomic bomb: Bill Henry, “By the Way,” Los Angeles Times, 16 August 1945, A1; W. H. Lawrence, “Air Might Clinched Battle of Japan,” New York Times, 15 August 1945, 11; and Sidney Shallet, “Pattern of Future War Is Changed,” New York Times, 12 August 1945, E4. See also Perry McCoy Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace, 1943–1945 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 16; and Sherry, Preparing for the Next War, 207. 62. Stimson, memorandum of a conference with the President, 8 August 1945, 10:45 a.m., HLS. On early plans for demobilization, see Sherry, Preparing for the Next War, 10.

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63. Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, “A Theory of Cold War Dynamics: U.S. Policy, Germany, and the Bomb,” The History Teacher 29 (1996): 281–300, on 292. 64. Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate (New York: Praeger, 1974),15. 65. Noel Francis Parrish, Behind the Sheltering Bomb: Military Indecision from Alamogordo to Korea (New York: Arno Press, 1979 [1968]), 113. 66. Henry Lewis Stimson, “The Challenge to Americans,” Foreign Affairs 26 (1948): 5–14. See also Adam Ulam, “Re-reading the Cold War,” Interplay (March 1969): 51–53, on 53. 67. Herken, The Winning Weapon, 217; and Parrish, Behind the Sheltering Bomb, 236. 68. Jonathan M. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994); Lloyd J. Graybar, “The 1946 Atomic Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?” Journal of American History 72 (1986): 888–907; and idem, “Bikini Revisited,” Military Affairs (October 1980): 118–123. 69. William L. Laurence, “The Bikini Tests and Public Opinion,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2, no. 5 (1 September 1946): 2, 17, on 2. 70. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 90. 71. Kenneth L. Moll, “Operation Crossroads: The Bikini A-bomb Tests— 1946,” Air Force Magazine 54 (July 1971): 62–69.

Chapter 7: Beginnings 1. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, xxi. 2. Gregg Herken, Counsels of War, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 14; and Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 73. 3. Herken, Counsels of War, 7. On Brodie’s long-term influence on the field, see Barry H. Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). Classic Brodie works that propound the “absolute weapon” argument include Bernard M. Brodie and Fawn M. Brodie, From Crossbow to H-Bomb, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973 [1962]); Bernard Brodie, “War in the Atomic Age,” in Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), 21–69; and idem, “Implications for Military Policy,” in ibid., 70–107. 4. Bernard Brodie, The Atomic Bomb and American Security (New Haven: Yale Institute of International Studies, 1945), 1–2. On Brodie’s reliance on USSBS data, see Gentile, How Effective Is Strategic Bombing? 161. 5. William Liscum Borden, There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy (New York: Macmillan, 1946). On Borden’s biography, see Herken, Counsels of War, 10ff.

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6. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [1960]). For more on Kahn’s tremendous influence on nuclear strategy, see the recent study by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 7. David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7 (1983): 3–71, on 14–15; idem, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” Journal of American History 66 (1979): 62–87, on 65–66. See also Steven T. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg, The Atomic Bomb and War Planning: Concepts and Capabilities, vol. 9 of America’s Plans for War with the Soviet Union, 1945–1950 (New York: Garland, 1989). For detailed information on the Silverplate bombers, see Campbell, The Silverplate Bombers. For details about those handling the bombs, see James L. Abrahamson and Paul H. Carew, Vanguard of American Atomic Deterrence: The Sandia Pioneers, 1946–1949 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 8. Herken, The Winning Weapon, 196. 9. David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945 to 1950,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (May 1982): 25–30. 10. Herken, The Winning Weapon, 263. The most detailed information available on the locations of the early stockpiles names the first three official storage sites as Manzano Base, at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, Killeen Base (known today as West Fort Hood), and Carksville Base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. See William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Joshua Handler, Taking Stock: Worldwide Nuclear Deployments 1998 (Washington, DC: Natural Resources Defense Council, March 1998), 16–17. 11. Ramsey to Oppenheimer, [after 19 August 1945, Tinian,] Box 60, Folder: “Ramsey, Norman,” JRO. 12. Gerard H. Clarfield and William M. Wiecek, Nuclear America: Military and Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States, 1940–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 87. 13. Harry R. Borowski, A Hollow Threat: Strategic Air Power and Containment before Korea (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). 14. Herken, Counsels of War, 27. A traditionalist interpretation of these figures argues that the very limited size of the American stockpile indicates that the United States knew it could not engage in atomic diplomacy and therefore did not. For this interpretation, which reads back from the situation in the late 1940s to summer 1945, see John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), chap. 4. 15. Marc Trachtenberg, “A ‘Wasting Asset’: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,” International Security 13 (1988–1989): 5–49. 16. Russell D. Buhite and Wm. Christopher Hamel, “War for Peace: The Question of an American Preventive War against the Soviet Union, 1945–1955,” Diplomatic History 14 (1990): 367–384.

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17. Herken, The Winning Weapon, 333. 18. Peter J. Roman, “Curtis LeMay and the Origins of NATO Atomic Targeting,” Journal of Strategic Studies 16 (1993): 46–74. 19. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 15; Hanson W. Baldwin, “The New Face of War,” New York Times, 8 August 1945, 4. 20. See, for example, Peter Galison and Barton Bernstein, “In Any Light: Scientists and the Decision to Build the Hydrogen Bomb, 1942–1954,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 19 (1989): 267–347; Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Legacies of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002); Barton J. Bernstein, “The H-Bomb Decisions: Were They Inevitable?,” in Bernard Brodie, Michael D. Intriligator, and Roman Kolkowicz, eds., National Security and International Stability (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1983), 327–356; idem, “Crossing the Rubicon: A Missed Opportunity to Stop the H-Bomb?” International Security 14 (1989): 132–160; Warner R. Schilling, “The H-Bomb Decision: How to Decide without Actually Choosing,” Political Science Quarterly 76 (1961): 24–46; and Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 21. The full spectrum of opinion is well demarcated in Galison and Bernstein, “In Any Light.” 22. Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill.” 23. Brodie and Brodie, From Crossbow to H-Bomb, 264. Herman Kahn, the doyen of the nuclear warfighters, disagreed and considered “the development and perfection of thermonuclear bombs” to be the “most startling change” in the postwar period. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 428. 24. For data on Japanese attitudes toward nuclear weapons, see the early study by A. M. Halpern, Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Atomic Weapons, RM–1331 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1954); as well as the more recent survey reported in Sadao Asada, “Japanese Perceptions of the A-Bomb Decision, 1945–1980,” in Joe C. Dixon, ed., The American Military and the Far East (Colorado Springs: United States Air Force Academy, 1980), 199–219; and idem, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the A-Bomb Decision, 1945–1995,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4 (1995): 95–116. 25. On Japanese publications on the atomic bomb before occupation, see John W. Dower, “The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory,” Diplomatic History 19 (1995): 275–295, on 276. On the censorship, see Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed. 26. Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 56. 27. Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches,” 97. 28. On the gradual evolution of Japanese popular conceptions toward a sense of nuclear victimhood, see the analysis in James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). On the temporal origins of the racism

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claims, see Asada, “Japanese Perceptions of the A-Bomb Decision,” 211. The racism argument has been raised many times, and always with tremendous evidentiary and logical difficulties. For one recent example, see Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995). The weakness of arguments about the role of racism in the atomic bomb decision does not deny the widespread American and Japanese racism in the Pacific War. See Dower, War without Mercy. 29. Such as, to take just one example, Japanese biological warfare in Manchuria, the cover-up of which has been extensively documented in Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-Up (London: Routledge, 1994). 30. Laura Hein and Mark Selden, “Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 3–34, on 6. On the significance of redefining the war to a “Pacific war,” see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999). 31. Dower, “The Bombed,” 281; idem, “Three Narratives of Our Humanity,” in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 63–96; Sadao Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender—A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review 67 (1998): 477–512, on 508–509; and Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army, 1868–1945 (London: Heinemann, 1991), 418. 32. John W. Dower, “ ’An Aptitude for Being Unloved’: War and Memory in Japan,” in Omer Bartov, Anita Grossmann, and Mary Nolan, eds., Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 2002), 217–241, on 229, 232. 33. Dower, “The Bombed,” 279. 34. Clark, Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present, 102. 35. Harper, Miracle of Deliverance, 199. 36. Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War,” International Security 13 (1988–1989): 50–91. 37. Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance ([Washington, DC]: NDU Press Book, [1996]), 12–13. My thanks to David Kaiser for bringing this reference to my attention.

Coda: On the Scholarly Literature 1. The size of the literature on the decision to use the atomic bomb is overwhelming. For chronological guides to the general themes of the scholarship over the past sixty years, see, in order, Barton J. Bernstein, “The Atomic Bomb and American Foreign Policy, 1941–1945: An Historiographical Controversy,”

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Peace & Change 2, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 1–16; J. Samuel Walker, “The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update,” Diplomatic History 14 (1990): 97–114; and idem, “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground,” Diplomatic History 29 (2005): 311–334. For anthologies of primary and secondary literature on the decision, including reprints of many relevant archival documents, see Dennis Merrill, general ed., Documentary History of the Truman Presidency. Volume 1: The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1995); Barton J. Bernstein, ed., The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976); Paul R. Baker, ed., The Atomic Bomb: The Great Decision (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1968); Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow (Stony Creek, CT: The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998); Edwin Fogelman, ed., Hiroshima: The Decision to Use the A-Bomb (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964); and Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Harry S. Truman and the Bomb: A Documentary History (Worland, WY: High Plains Publishing, 1996). For survey studies of the decision-making process that attempt to sidestep or encompass the two competing camps analyzed below, to greater and lesser degrees of success, the best introductions are J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965); Kenneth M. Glazier, Jr., “The Decision to Use Atomic Weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Public Policy 18 (1969): 463–516; Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, No High Ground (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); Robert C. Batchelder, The Irreversible Decision, 1939–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962); Walter Smith Schoenberger, Decision of Destiny (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969); Pacific War Research Society, The Day Man Lost: Hiroshima, 6 August 1945 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1972); Ian Clark, Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Contemporary Strategy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); Michael Amrine, The Great Decision: The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Putnam, 1959); Murray Sayle, “Did the Bomb End the War?” The New Yorker (31 July 1995): 40–64; and Peter Maslowski, “Truman, the Bomb, and the Numbers Games,” MHQ 7 (Spring 1995): 103–107. For a general survey of the role of nuclear weapons in the last sixty-odd years, see Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 2. The difficulties of using these memoirs are nowhere more evident than in those of the secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947); and All In One Lifetime (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958). On Byrnes’s obsession with domestic politics as a context for the use of the atomic bomb on Japan, see David Robertson, Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), especially 405. For analyses of the flaws of the memoir literature, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Ike and Hiroshima: Did He Oppose It?” Journal of Strategic Studies 10 (1987):

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377–389; and idem, “Writing, Righting, or Wronging the Historical Record: President Truman’s Letter on His Atomic-Bomb Decision,” Diplomatic History 16 (1992): 163–173. 3. This is similar to the admirable efforts of Richard B. Frank in his Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999), as explained on xviii. The clarity by which we now see what took place at the end of the war is belied by looking at what actually happened on each day during the last month of hostilities. This is chronicled, in all its confusion, in Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July/August 1945 (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1995). 4. This analysis of the components of the traditionalist narrative is indebted to Melvyn P. Leffler, “Truman’s Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb,” IHJ Bulletin 15, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 1–7, on 3. 5. The classic touchstone of traditionalist interpretations of the atomic bomb decision is Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine 194 (February 1947): 97–107. On the history of the writing and ghostwriting of this Stimson piece by his assistant McGeorge Bundy and others involved in the initial decision, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Diplomatic History 17 (1993): 35–72. Analyses that have built on Stimson’s, deepening the position in some places and correcting errors in others, but hewing fairly close to the frame of the argument, include Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995); idem, “Hiroshima and the Trashing of Henry Stimson,” New England Quarterly 71 (1998): 5–32; Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988); Stephen Harper, Miracle of Deliverance: The Case for the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (New York: Stein and Day, 1985); Louis Morton, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Foreign Affairs 35 (1957): 334–353; Donald Kagan, “Why America Dropped the Bomb,” Commentary (September 1995): 17–23; and André Ryerson, “The Cult of Hiroshima,” Commentary 80, no. 4 (October 1985): 36–40. An often-cited memoir-style account of a soldier’s perspective along these lines is Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit Books, 1988). 6. P.M.S. Blackett, Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (London: Turnstile Press, 1948), published the following year in the United States as Fear, War, and the Bomb: Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949 [1948]). On Blackett’s antinuclear activism in the context of 1940s Britain, see Mary Jo Nye, “A Physicist in the Corridors of Power: P.M.S. Blackett’s Opposition to Atomic Weapons

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Following the War,” Physics in Perspective 1 (1999): 136–156; and idem, Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Some contemporaries of Blackett enunciated similar views apparently independently, with the chief focus being on the role of the bomb in diplomacy against the Soviet Union: Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter, “A Beginning for Sanity,” Saturday Review of Literature (15 June 1946): 5–9, 38–40; and Helen Mears, Mirror for Americans: Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948). The classic revisionist development of Blackett’s theses is Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Vintage Books, 1965). Alperovitz recently updated and expanded his argument, while preserving the essential structure, in his The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Vintage, 1995). A more nuanced reading along classic revisionist lines is offered in Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race. (New York: Vintage, 1987 [1973]). Somewhat difficult to classify is the work of Barton Bernstein, which began in the late 1960s as fairly close to Alperovitz but has since shifted much more toward a middle ground. His works remain some of the most detailed and informative on the intricacies of the decision to use the bomb. See, in particular, Barton J. Bernstein, “Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory,” Diplomatic History 19 (1995): 227–273; and idem, “The Struggle Over History: Defining the Hiroshima Narrative,” in Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1995), 127–256. 7. The scholarly literature on this conflict is already tremendous, with the majority of the scholarship approaching the issue from the revisionist side. A selection of revisionist or revisionist-friendly histories of the Smithsonian controversy includes Martin J. Sherwin, “Hiroshima as Politics and History,” Journal of American History 82 (1994): 1085–1093; Vera L. Zolberg, “Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy,” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 565–590; Uday Mohan, “History and the News Media: The Smithsonian Controversy,” in Phil Hammond, ed., Cultural Difference, Media Memories: Anglo-American Images of Japan (London: Cassell, 1997), 175–200; Tony Capaccio and Uday Mohan, “Missing the Target,” American Journalism Review (July/August 1995): 18; Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay (New York: Copernicus, 1996); Michael J. Hogan, “The Enola Gay Controversy: History, Memory, and the Politics of Presentation,” in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 200–232; and Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). For a traditionalist account of the narratives in which the history of the bomb has been told, leading up to the Enola Gay controversy, see Robert P. Newman, Enola Gay and the Court of History (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

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8. Arnold C. Brackman, The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 40. This burning was also true of any information about the very small Japanese atomic bomb program. See John W. Dower, “ ’N1’ and ‘F’: Japan’s Wartime Atomic Bomb Research,” in John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: New Press, 1993), 55–100, on 60. Most end-of-war studies have relied on the postwar interviews about the bombings provided in United States Army Air Forces, Mission Accomplished: Interrogations of Japanese Industrial, Military, and Civil Leaders of World War II (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946), which are all retrospective. The same holds for the often-cited Japanese memoir literature, which tends to emphasize the role of the atomic bombs in generating the government’s decision to surrender. See, for one example, Toshikazu Kase, Journey to the Missouri, ed. David Nelson Rowe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 9. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005); Frank, Downfall; Sadao Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender—A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review 67 (1998): 477–512; Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume 5: The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944 to August 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); idem, “Why Japan Surrendered,” International Security 18 (1993): 154–201; Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985); and Forrest E. Morgan, Compellence and the Strategic Culture of Imperial Japan: Implications for Coercive Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). The classic study of Japan’s interior decisionmaking process, although based on postwar evidence, is Robert J. C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954). More popular accounts based heavily on Butow include Thomas M. Coffey, Imperial Tragedy: Japan in World War II: The First Days and the Last (New York: World Publishing Company, 1970); Pacific War Research Society, Japan’s Longest Day (London: Souvenir Press, 1968 [1965]); and Lester Brooks, Behind Japan’s Surrender: The Secret Struggle That Ended an Empire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). The narrative in Butow is very close to that reconstructed by Mark Gayn in his Japan Diary (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948), entry for 15 August 1946. On end-of-war studies since Hirohito’s death, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Interpreting Japan’s 1945 Surrender: A Historiographical Essay on the Past Fifteen Years of Literature in the West, 1989– 2004,” in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., Reinterpreting the End of the Pacific War: Atomic Bombs and Soviet Entry into the War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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193

Index

Acheson, Dean, 30 Alamogordo, New Mexico, 46, 89 Allied POWs, 105, 107 Allies, 5, 9, 17, 22, 23, 26–27, 30, 50, 117 Alperovitz, Gar, 119; Atomic Diplomacy, 135 Alvarez, Luis W., 93, 103 Anson, Lord George, 61 Aomori, 22 arms control, 112 arms race, 14, 124, 125, 134 Army Air Forces: and authorization for use of atomic bombs, 58; desire for autonomy of, 18, 103, 120; fragmented command of, 19; strategic bombing by, 18–19; and targeting concerns, 46. See also military Army Corps of Engineers, 41, 43 Arnold, Henry “Hap”: and Army Air Force desire for autonomy, 120; on atomic bombs as tactical weapons, 39; and authorization for use of atomic bombs, 52, 57; and bombing after Nagasaki attack, 103; and cease-fire, 96; command of, 19; and incendiary bombs, 20; and LeMay’s development of firebombing, 21; on Tinian, 69

Ashworth, Frederick L., 75, 78, 81, 83, 94, 95 Asia, war in, 136 Asiga Bay, 64, 65 Atlantic Charter, 33 Atlee, Clement, 9, 49 atomic bomb(s): American arsenal of, 122, 125, 128–30; American intimidation of Soviets with, 119, 142; authorization for use of, 57–58, 129; censorship about in Japan, 135; Cold War development of, 116, 135, 139; conventional narrative concerning, 8–9; counterfactual questions concerning, 148n.9; decisions on use of, 44; destructive power of, 107; development of, 41–44, 46–47; dropped by radar, 99; as equalizing Soviet superiority, 121; evaluation of attack with, 53; and firebombing, 7, 10, 53, 85, 150n.6; gun assembly of, 42, 43, 47, 89; and invasion casualties, 153n.31; and invasion plans, 142; as legitimate weapon, 142, 143; lengthy campaign using, 60; mass production of, 83, 90; military justification for, 7; and military modernization, 120; as military weapons, 9–10; as

atomic bomb(s) (continued) necessary, 143; number of needed, 6, 47–49, 50, 55–56, 76, 83–84, 86–87, 88; perspective on before surrender, 6, 10; postwar accounting of, 129; postwar assembly of, 129–30; postwar concerns about, 12; and Potsdam Declaration, 34, 35; production of until signing of surrender, 10; and Project Alberta, 72, 74; reasons for dropping, 5; role in ending war, 10; and Roosevelt, 41, 48; scholarship on, 141–44; surrender as caused by, 27, 35, 109; targets for, 74; and three-plane formation, 94–95, 98–99; timetable for delivery of, 43, 47, 56–57, 90, 92; Truman’s decisions about, 9, 49, 111, 115; writing about, 135. See also nuclear weapons atomic bomb(s), as conventional weapons: in authorization for use of, 40, 51–52; in Bikini Atoll tests, 122; and chain of command, 50–52; in context of Tinian, 60; and Fat Man drop, 89, 95; and firebombing, 14, 18, 45, 46, 51, 119, 131, 134; and invasion plans, 101; LeMay on, 18; in military perspective, 7, 10–11, 39, 40, 44–45, 108, 111, 119–20; and postwar views, 134; and quantitative vs. qualitative difference, 10–11, 51; and Roosevelt, 11; and shock strategy, 26; Soviet development of, 116–19; and Soviet entry into Pacific War, 26; before surrender, 11, 14; and targeting, 44–45; and Third Shot procedures, 99; and Truman’s decisions for use of, 40 atomic bomb(s), as special weapons: as agent of peace, 126, 137; American arsenal of, 113, 116; and

196 INDEX

changing nature of warfare, 112; in contemporary world, 124; and conventional bombs, 86, 139; in creating new relationship with universe, 39, 56; and demobilization, 120–21; demonstration of, 112; design of, 8; destructive power of, 8, 113; for ending World War II, 5–7, 10, 81, 113, 114, 116; and firebombing, 116, 137; and Hirohito’s surrender announcement, 17; and Hiroshima bombing, 81–82; in Japanese attitudes, 108, 134–37; and Laurence, 109, 110; mass production of, 86; military control of, 113; and modern dilemma, 116; and moral considerations, 125; as nuclear fission device, 11; and nuclear strategy, 125–28, 137–38; Oppenheimer on, 113; and permissibility of conventional bombing, 137; in postwar view, 134; and Potsdam Declaration, 39; press focus on, 113; prestige of, 121–22; public knowledge of, 113–14; and public opinion, 35–36; in public relations, 39, 41; public support for use of, 114–16; and quantitative vs. qualitative difference, 8, 56, 85, 86, 111, 113; in racist context, 136; for radiation aspect, 8, 11, 52–55, 122–23; and Ramsey, 110; in scientists’ perspective, 111–13; and shock strategy, 16–17, 35–36, 39, 85; source of, 16; to Stimson, 39, 40, 45–46; after surrender, 7, 14, 38, 108, 113, 114–16; surrender as caused by, 36, 37, 38, 99, 134, 137; and Trinity test, 46; for Truman, 102, 137, 142; and Truman’s call for legislative control, 108; and Truman’s message on Hiroshima bombing, 86; and use of on civilians, 112;

and use of as criminal, 108; vulnerability to, 116 Atomic Energy Act (1946), 113 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 57; General Advisory Committee of, 132 attrition, war of, 125, 127 Bacher, Robert, 177n.51 Bainbridge, Kenneth, 46 Balfour, M. J., 102 Ballantine, Joseph, 30 Baruch Plan, 112, 140 Batista Field, Cuba, 78 Bethe, Hans, 133 Big Three, 8–9 Bikini Atoll/Operation CROSSROADS tests, 55, 122–23, 129 Birch, Francis, 91 Bissell, Clayton, 83–84 Bix, Herbert, 158n.86 Blackett, P.M.S., 119; Fear, War, and the Bomb, 135, 143 Blakeslee, George, 30 Bockscar, 36, 93, 94, 98 Bohr, Niels, 166n.64 Borden, William Liscum, 126, 127–28, 130, 131 Borton, Hugh, 30 Boyer, Paul, 125 Brodie, Bernard, 126–28, 130, 133–34 B-29 bomber, 10, 17–18; and Army Air Force desire for autonomy, 120; and bomb design and development, 42–43; and concern over radioactivity, 53; development of, 20; firebombing with, 20, 21; losses of, 22; postwar status of, 129; Tibbets as test pilot of, 77; and Tinian as Project Alberta operations site, 75; and Wendover Field, 78 Bundy, Harvey Hollister, 43 Bush, Vannevar, 39, 41, 56, 57

Byrnes, James F., 5, 17, 28, 34, 35, 96, 102 California Institute of Technology, 78 Casablanca Conference, 5, 23 Catholic Church, 114–15 Chamorros people, 61 Cheshire, Leonard, 80 China, 20, 27, 37, 131 China Crowd, 30 Chinese, 107 Chinese Nationalists, 27 Christian groups, 114–15 Churchill, Winston, 9, 40, 48, 49, 119 civilians, 12, 18, 19, 21, 22, 45, 46, 112 Cold War, 6, 9, 119, 124; and atomic bomb development, 116, 135, 139; balance of terror during, 13; end of, 140; and hydrogen bomb, 133; and Japan, 136; and postwar nuclear arsenal, 129; small wars during, 137 Columbia University, 41, 71 communism, 25, 26 Compton, Arthur H., 51 Compton, Karl T., 47–48, 52 Conant, James Bryant, 39, 40, 41, 46, 56, 57, 133 Consodine, William, 55 Coolidge, Calvin, 30 Coventry, bombing of, 22 Delivery Group, 74 demobilization, 87–88, 103, 106, 120–21, 129 Derry, J. A., 55, 75, 97 deterrence, 122, 126, 127, 128, 133 Dooman, Eugene, 30 Eatherly, Claude, 172n.51 Eisenhower, Dwight, 77 Elsey, George M., 163n.31

INDEX

197

Eniwetok Atoll, 132 Enola Gay, 36, 77, 82, 143 Europe, 12, 31, 74, 87, 126, 131 Farrell, Thomas, 75, 81–82, 88, 106 fastax camera plane, 81, 93, 94 Fat Man: assembly of, 88–90, 92; assembly of second, 97; and Bikini Atoll tests, 122, 129; casing production for, 78; context for, 8; detonation of over Nagasaki, 95; development of, 43; feasibility of, 46–47; and military procedure violations, 89, 93, 94, 95; mission to detonate, 92–96; as ordinary weapon, 89; plan to drop, 48; plutonium detonator of, 89; and Pumpkins, 78; Ramsey’s account of, 94–95; testing of, 90–91, 92, 104; timetable for, 47, 80, 90, 91, 111; Tinian’s remaining stock of, 104; use of as necessary, 90; and USS Indianapolis sinking, 80 Fearey, Robert, 30 Fermi, Enrico, 133 50th Infantry Regiment, 65 firebombing, 79; after atomic attack, 53; and atomic bombs, 7, 10, 14, 18, 45, 46, 51, 85, 116, 119, 131, 134, 137, 150n.6; avoidance of on atomic bomb targets, 44–45; development of, 20–22, 50; and end of war, 113; lasting effects of, 164n.41; LeMay on, 18, 22, 116, 131, 137; military justification for, 7; and military procedure, 163n.36; after Nagasaki attack, 96, 102–3; pause in, 96; and shock strategy, 34, 139; targets for, 3, 21, 22, 35; from Tinian, 10, 60, 66, 69; Truman’s continuation of, 102; and unconditional surrender, 33 lst Ordnance Squadron, Special (Aviation), 77

198 INDEX

lst Technical Detachment, War Department Miscellaneous G, 77 509th Composite Group, 71; and authorization for use of atomic bombs, 52; and Fat Man assembly, 88, 89; and firebombing and atomic bombing, 137; and Handy order, 49; and Little Boy timetable, 80; makeup of, 76–77; morale of, 78–79; postwar status of, 129; preparations after Nagasaki mission by, 99; and Pumpkins, 78; and Third Shot plans, 97–98; Tinian station of, 9; training of, 77–79 Forrestal, James V., 24, 32, 84, 88, 101–2 Fort Knox, Kentucky, 129 France, 22, 28 Franck Report, 112 Fukuoka, 44, 102 Fukuyama, 96 Germany: occupation of, 49; and Soviet Union, 154n.37; strategic bombing of, 18–19, 21, 149n.2; surrender of, 17, 23, 24; and Tinian, 62. See also Nazis Gilbert Islands, 63 Grand Alliance. See Allies The Great Artiste, 80, 93–94, 98, 110, 111 Great Depression, 88, 121 Greenstreet, Sidney, 43 Grew, Joseph C., 29, 30, 31–34, 35, 37, 156n.50 Gromyko Plan, 140 Groves, Leslie, 40; and American arsenal, 128; and atomic bombs as tactical weapons, 101; and atomic bombs timetable, 47, 90; and authorization for use of atomic bombs, 57–58; and bomb targeting, 44–45; and firebombing after atomic attack, 53; and 509th Com-

posite Group, 78; and Handy order, 51; and Hirohito’s surrender announcement, 103; and Laurence, 110; and Lockhart, 109–10; and number of bombs needed, 48, 83; and post-Nagasaki timetable, 99–100, 101; and radiation sickness concerns, 54; and Third Shot cancellation, 100; and Third Shot procedures, 99; Tinian as independent of, 89; and Tinian as Project Alberta operations site, 75; and Truman’s message on Hiroshima bombing, 85, 110; and uranium fission research, 41; and visual vs. radar drops, 95; and weaponeer, 81 Guam, 18, 61, 62, 68, 75 Guernica, 22 Hague Convention, 33 Hahn, Otto, 42 Hakodate, 98 Hammett, Dashiell, 42 Handy, Thomas T.: and cancellation of Third Shot, 100; order from, 49–52, 55, 90, 98, 101, 111; and visual vs. radar drops, 95 Hanford, Washington, 42, 46, 47, 99, 128 Hansell, Haywood, 20 Harriman, Averell, 117 Harrison, George L., 43, 47, 56 helium, 132 Hersey, John, Hiroshima, 115–16, 135 Higashikuni, Naruhiko, 105 Hirohito, emperor: American public opinion about, 35, 37; and atomic bombs as cause of surrender, 36, 37, 38; and conditional surrender offer, 5, 96; confidence in intelligence services of, 28; and desire for peace, 37, 158n.86; and fall of Saipan, 63; Grew on, 34; guaran-

tees for, 35; as pacifist, 38; and Potsdam Declaration, 34; prosecution of, 31, 32; retention of, 29, 30, 31–32, 33, 34, 36–37, 136–37; and shock strategy, 16, 17; as subject to occupation leader, 37; surrender announcement of, 5, 9, 103, 108; and unconditional surrender policy, 24; use made of, 37 Hiroshima: attitudes before bombing of, 6; and authorization of atomic bombs, 40; Brodie vs. Borden/Kahn views of, 128; conventional narrative concerning, 9; and dawn of modern age, 81; destruction in, 21, 22, 107; detonation of Little Boy over, 36, 81–82, 93; and Handy order, 49, 50, 51; and hydrogen weapons, 133; Japanese awareness of bombing of, 82, 88–89; and nuclear strategy, 126; radiation sickness after bombing of, 53–54; and shock strategy, 83, 85; and Soviet entry into Pacific War, 27, 28; Soviet view of, 117, 118, 119; and sudden end of World War II, 5; as target, 44, 80; Truman’s message on bombing of, 85–87, 89 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 40, 110 Hornbeck, Stanley, 30 Hull, Cordell, 24, 35, 36 Hull, John E., 100–101 hydrogen bomb(s), 14, 131, 132–34 hydrogen fusion, 132 Indochina, 105 Indonesia, 105 industry, American, 88 instruments plane, 80, 93–94, 98, 110, 111 Interim Committee, 44, 56, 101, 161n.12

INDEX

199

invasion of Japan: anticipated casualty rates in, 153nn. 30, 31, 167n.1; and atomic bomb justification, 142, 153n.31; atomic bombs in support of, 101; avoidance of, 111; and colonial powers, 29; Forrestal on, 84; Japanese anticipation of, 24–25; and occupation terms, 31; post-Hiroshima plans for, 6, 87; and Saipan suicides, 63; and shock strategy, 34; Soviet help for, 27; and Tinian, 70; and Truman, 153n.30; and USS Indianapolis, 80 Iraq, 137 Isezaki, 103 isolationism, 121 Italy, 23 Iwo Jima, 37, 79, 95 Japan: and American Cold War strategy, 136; and American isolationism, 121; atomic bomb development by, 41; atomic bombs as defeating, 137; attitudes toward atomic bombs in, 108, 134–37; bases of in China, 27; bombing of Nanjing by, 22; British blockade of, 119; censorship in, 135; colonial possessions of, 26; and communism, 25, 26; coup threat in, 104; defense of, 24–25; expected defeat of, 66; experience of, 135; firebombing of, 3, 10, 20–22, 35, 66, 69; as free to choose government, 34, 37; and Grew, 30; historical consciousness of, 38, 124, 134, 136; invasion of, 6, 24–25, 27, 29, 31, 34, 63, 70, 80, 84, 87, 101, 111; Marxist movement in, 28; occupation of, 11, 23, 24, 30–31, 32, 37, 38, 55, 103, 104–6, 135, 136; in Pacific theater map, 2; and pacifism, 137; and post-Nagasaki atrocities, 102; post-Nagasaki bombing of,

200 INDEX

95–96, 102–3; and Potsdam Declaration, 9; removal of troops to, 28; science and technology investment by, 137; and shock strategy, 16; Soviet declaration of war with, 27–28, 36; Soviet mediation for, 25–26, 28; Soviet plans for occupation of, 104–5; strategic bombing of, 17–18; and suicide, 23, 62–63, 68; surrender of, 5, 9, 17, 23, 24–25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31–34, 35, 36, 47–48, 52, 85, 88, 96, 99, 102, 103; targeting of residential and industrial areas in, 20, 21, 22; target map of, 3; and Tinian, 60, 62, 63, 64–65, 75; as unique, 134; as victim, 134; and war crimes, 108; war responsibility of, 38, 124, 136–37 Japan Crowd, 29, 30, 37 Japanese Americans, 107 Japanese government: and atomic bomb delivery timetable, 90; on atomic bombs as cause of surrender, 36; and atomic bombs as special after surrender, 108; Big Six in, 5, 36, 59, 96, 143; change in, 17; and conventional narrative concerning surrender, 9; documents burned by, 143; and fall of Saipan, 63; and Hirohito’s calls for conditional surrender, 5; and Hiroshima bombing news, 82, 88–89; intentions of, 143; and Nagasaki bombing news, 96; negotiated surrender sought by, 9; offer of conditional surrender by, 96; offer of unconditional surrender by, 5; peace feelers from, 25, 28, 63, 156n.55; recognition of defeat by, 29; and seizure of Saipan, 63; and Truman’s message on Hiroshima bombing, 85, 89; and war crimes, 136; and war crimes trials, 143

Japanese Home Islands, 17–18, 28, 63, 87 Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact, 25, 26 Japanese submarine I-58, 80 Japanese submarines, 64 Johnston, H. G., 62 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 17, 122, 129 Just War theory, 115 Kahn, Herman, 127, 128 Kakuda, Kakuji, 65 kamikaze attacks, 35, 40 Kawasaki, 44 Ketsu Go, 24 Kido, Koichi, 37 Kirkpatrick, Elmer, 75, 83, 95, 97, 98, 104 Kitakyushu, 93 Kobe, 22, 44 Koiso, Kuniaki, 17 Kokura, 49, 80, 94, 98, 110 Kokura Arsenal, 44, 93 Korean War, 131, 136, 137–38 Korean workers, 62, 107 Kubrick, Stanley, 125 Kumagaya, 103 Kumamoto, 44 Kure, 44 Kurile Islands, 104 Kyoto, 44, 45 Kyushu, 6, 24–25, 27, 93, 101 Laurence, William Leonard (Leid Wolf Siew), 85, 109–11, 117, 119, 124, 125; Dawn over Zero, 110 Leahy, William, 32, 55 LeMay, Curtis E.: and authorization for use of atomic bombs, 52; as chief of staff, 19; development of firebombing by, 20–21; on firebombing and atomic bombing, 18, 22, 116, 131, 137; on Hiroshima

bombing, 87; and Korean War, 131; and Little Boy timetable, 80; and Okinawa as forward base, 97, 98 Lilienthal, David, 57 Lincoln, George A., 24 Little Boy: assembly of, 79, 80, 91; context for, 8; detonation over Hiroshima of, 36, 81–82, 93; development of, 43; gun design of, 47; and number of bombs needed, 48; observation teams for, 80; as obsolete after use, 89; Project Alberta testing of, 79, 80; readiness of, 49; target for, 45; timetable for, 80; as untested before Hiroshima, 46, 56; and USS Indianapolis sinking, 80 Lockhart, Jack, 109–10 London Agreement, 22 Los Alamos, New Mexico, 89, 91, 170n.34; bomb design and development at, 42; conventional narrative concerning, 8; fabrication at, 46; and hydrogen bomb, 132; and postwar nuclear arsenal, 129; preparations after Nagasaki mission at, 99; and Wendover Field, 78 Los Alamos Ordnance Division, 74 Lucky Dragon incident, 136 MacArthur, Douglas: and bombing after Nagasaki attack, 102–3; command of, 19; and Grew, 30; and Handy order, 50; and Japanese defense of Marianas, 65; and number of atomic bombs needed, 84; and occupation of Japan, 38; and radiation sickness concerns, 54–55 Magellan, Ferdinand, 61 Malaya, 29 The Maltese Falcon (film), 43 Manchuria, 5, 27–28, 121

INDEX

201

Manhattan Project: atomic bomb development by, 46–47; and atomic bombs as special, 112; and communications problems, 91; conventional narrative concerning, 8; and demobilization, 103; and Fat Man design, 47; future of, 106; after Japanese surrender, 104; lifting of secrecy about, 119; postNagasaki work by, 97, 99; principal facilities of, 42; and public opinion of atomic bombs, 35–36; and radioactivity concerns, 52–53; radioactivity estimates by, 41; Soviet information about, 117; and Tinian, 14, 61, 71; and uranium fission research, 42. See also Project Alberta; Trinity test Marianas, 18, 59, 61, 64, 65 Mark III, 129 Marshall, George C.: and anticipated end of World War II, 57; and atomic bomb as merely another weapon, 57; and atomic bomb as revolutionary, 56; and atomic bombs as tactical weapons, 39, 101; and bombing after Nagasaki attack, 102–3; and demobilization, 121; and Handy order, 51; and Hiroshima bombing, 87; and Lincoln, 24; and number of atomic bombs needed, 84; and preparations after Nagasaki mission, 99; and radiation sickness concerns, 54–55; on shock strategy, 57 Marshall Islands, 63, 68 Matthias, Franklin T., 99 May-Johnson Bill, 113 McCloy, John J., 55–56 McVay, Charles B., 79 Meitner, Lise, 42 Metallurgical Laboratory, Chicago, 42, 51, 112

202 INDEX

M-47 bomb, 20 Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw, 118 military: and atomic bomb as conventional weapon, 7, 10–11, 39, 40, 44–45, 57, 108, 111, 119–20; atomic bombs controlled by, 113; cease-fire by, 36; and chain of command, 19, 50–52; demobilization of, 87–88; Fat Man in procedures of, 89, 93, 94, 95; and fragmented command in Pacific theater, 19–20; and hydrogen bomb as ordinary weapon, 133; and Marianas infrastructure, 68; marine/army conflict in, 168n.10; and May-Johnson Bill, 113; nuclear strategy of, 124, 125–28, 130, 131; ordinary channels of, 39, 95, 96; and plans for surrender of Japan, 17; and postwar nuclear arsenal, 122, 129; procedures of, 79, 93, 94, 95, 98–99, 163n.36; size of, 121; surrender as surprise to, 120; and targets for atomic bombs, 44; unconditional surrender policy of, 23–24. See also Army Air Forces; Navy Molotov, Viacheslav, 118 Montgomery, Colonel, 77 moral considerations: and civilian deaths, 12; Compton on, 47–48; context for, 7–8; of firebombing vs. atomic bombing, 116; Hersey on, 116; and hydrogen bomb, 132–33; and Kyoto as target, 45; and nuclear weapons, 14; and nuclear weapons as special, 125; and Stimson, 45–46; and strategic bombing, 18–19; after surrender, 114–15; and Truman’s decisions about atomic bombs, 115; in wartime, 7 Morrison, Philip, 60, 112 Mt. Lasso, 65

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), 126 Nagasaki: atomic bomb production after, 92; attitudes after bombing of, 6; bombing after attack on, 95–96, 102–3; Brodie vs. Borden/Kahn views of, 128; continued preparations after, 97, 99; conventional narrative concerning, 9; destruction in, 21, 107; Fat Man detonation over, 36, 87, 95; Fat Man mission to, 92–96; and Handy order, 49, 50, 51; Japanese atrocities committed after, 102; Japanese awareness of attacks on, 96; and Laurence, 110–11; and nuclear strategy, 126; and radiation sickness concerns, 54; Soviet information about, 117; Soviet reaction to, 118, 119; and sudden end of World War II, 5; as target, 44, 45, 80, 94; and Third Shot planning, 11 Nagoya, 22, 44, 98 Nanjing, 22 Nanyo Kohatsu Kabushiki Kaisha, 62 napalm, 7, 20, 50, 66 National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), 20 Navy, 122; Construction Battalions, 68, 69–70, 71. See also military Nazis, 22, 26, 40, 41, 42, 118, 121, 131. See also Germany New Guinea, 65 New Netherlands, 37 New Yorker, 115 New York Times, 109, 110 Nichols, K. D., 101, 165n.45 Niigata, 44, 49 Nimitz, Chester, 19, 31, 50, 84 Norstad, Lauris, 78, 98 North Korea, 131 North Vietnam, 105

nuclear fission, 8, 11. See also plutonium; uranium fission nuclear fission bomb, 132–33 nuclear strategy, 124, 125–28, 130, 137–38 nuclear weapons: as absolute weapons, 124; as conventional, 119; Japanese attitudes toward, 134–37; legitimacy of, 114; as quantitatively vs. qualitatively different, 12, 14, 115, 119; role of today, 13; as special, 12, 125; as transformative, 6, 14; as unique, 52; utility of, 12. See also atomic bomb(s) Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 42, 46, 47, 79, 128 occupation of Japan. See under Japan Office of Far Eastern Affairs, 30 Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 20 Office for War Information, 33 Ogata, Kiyoshi, 65 Okinawa, 33, 35, 37, 94, 95, 97, 98 1027th Material Squadron, 77 1395th Military Policy Company (Aviation), 77 Operation CROSSROADS. See Bikini Atoll/Operation CROSSROADS tests Operation FORAGER, 63 Operation MAILFIST, 29 Operation OLYMPIC, 25 Operation ZIPPER, 29 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 177n.51; and atomic bomb production timetable, 92; on atomic bombs as special, 113; and bomb design and development, 42; and demobilization, 103; and Fat Man mission, 94; and Fat Man timetable, 90, 91; and hydrogen bomb, 132, 133; and number of bombs needed, 48, 76,

INDEX

203

Oppenheimer (continued) 83; and Parsons, 74; and Project Alberta, 72; and radiation sickness concerns, 54; and Ramsey, 83, 94; security clearance hearings on, 132; and Third Shot cancellation, 100; and Trinity test, 46 Osaka, 22, 44, 98 Oya, Geichi, 65 Oyabu, 98 Pacific, war in, 19–20 pacifism, 115, 137 Palau Islands, 65 Papacy, codename of, 89 Parsons, William S., 74, 75, 79, 83, 92, 106 Patterson, Robert P., 56, 96 Pearl Harbor, attack on, 32, 41 Penney, William, 80 P-47 Thunderbolt, 66 plutonium, 97; Pu-239, 42 plutonium fission, 11, 42, 43, 47, 132 plutonium fission weapon, 46–47 plutonium implosion device, 8, 72, 89 poison gas, 114 Portugal, 28 Potsdam Conference, 34, 82; and anticipated end of World War II, 57; conventional narrative concerning, 8–9; and Handy order, 51; and Kyoto as target, 45; Stalin at, 27; and Stimson’s account of Trinity test, 56; and timetable for delivery of atomic bombs, 47; and Truman’s decisions about atomic bombs, 49; Truman’s journey from, 85; Truman-Stalin discussion of atomic bombs at, 117 Potsdam Declaration, 9, 29, 34, 35, 36, 39 precision bombing, 19, 45 press/media: American, 55, 84, 113, 116; Japanese, 135; Soviet, 118

204 INDEX

Project Alberta, 170n.34, 171n.41; creation of, 71–72; demobilization of, 103, 106, 129; Fat Man assembly by, 88, 89, 90, 92, 111; functions of, 72, 74; Little Boy testing and preparation by, 79, 80; postNagasaki preparations of, 97, 99; and radiation sickness concerns, 53–54; Tinian station of, 9. See also Manhattan Project Project Trinity, 72. See also Trinity test public opinion: about atomic bombs, 113–14; on atomic bombs as apocalyptic, 113; and atomic bombs as shock, 35–36; and atomic bombs as special pre-surrender, 108; on atomic bombs as world-changing, 128; and Bikini Atoll tests, 122–23; and Dresden bombing, 22; about Hirohito, 35, 37; and nuclear annihilation, 131; and shock strategy, 87, 108; and Third Shot cancellation, 102; and Truman’s message on Hiroshima bombing, 87 Pumpkins, 78, 103 Purnell, W. R., 75 racism, 136 radar, 19, 95, 99, 120 radar proximity fuse, 74 radiation sickness, 53–55, 107 radioactive fallout, 41, 52, 55, 122, 136 radioactivity, 42; concern over after surrender, 52; consideration of, 40–41; Hersey on, 115–16; limited knowledge of, 101; as special aspect of atomic bombs, 8, 11, 52–55, 122–23 Ramsey, Norman F.: and atomic bomb production timetable, 92; and components tests, 79; and de-

livery operation, 74; Fat Man mission account of, 94–95; and Fat Man timetable, 90, 91; on firebombing and atomic bombing, 18, 22; and Hirohito’s surrender announcement, 103; and Laurence, 110; and number of atomic bombs needed, 76, 83; on postwar atomic readiness, 130; and radiation sickness concerns, 53–54; and Third Shot cancellation, 100; and Tinian infrastructure, 75–76 Rangoon, 28–29 Rapid Dominance, 138 revisionism, 26, 142–43 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: death of, 17; and development of atomic bombs, 41; fears of isolationism by, 121; foreign policy of, 29; and Grew, 30; and Japan planning, 30; and number of bombs needed, 48; and planning for atomic bomb drops, 11; unconditional surrender policy of, 5, 23; and weapons development, 50 Rosenman, Samuel I., 96 Roswell, New Mexico, 129 Russ, Harlow, 92 Saipan, 18, 61, 62–63, 66, 68 San Francisco Conference, 29 Sapporo, 98 Sargent, Sir Orme, 23 Sasebo, 44 scientists, 115; and atomic bombs as special, 11, 46, 56, 60, 111, 113; attitudes of after Trinity test, 46; and firebombs vs. atomic bombs, 18; and 509th Composite Group, 77; and hydrogen bomb, 132–33; on Interim Committee, 161n.12; and Laurence, 110; and Parsons, 74; post-Nagasaki preparations by, 99; and Project Alberta, 71–72, 76;

and radiation, 40–41, 53, 54–55; and source of atomic bombs, 11; as spokesmen concerning atomic bombs, 111–13, 128; and target choices, 44; on Tinian, 10 Seaborg, Glenn, 42 Seeman, Lyle E., 100 Serber, Robert, 42, 76 Sherry, Michael, 150n.6 Shimosenka, 44 Shintoism, 32 Shock and Awe strategy, 138–39 shock strategy: and atomic bombs, 16–17, 26, 35–36, 39, 85; and Brodie, 128; and colonialism, 28; evolution of, 139; firebombing as, 34, 139; and Hiroshima bombing, 83, 85; Hull’s questioning of, 100–101; and Japanese historical consciousness, 136; Marshall on, 57; and number of atomic bombs needed, 86–87; and Potsdam Declaration, 34; and public opinion, 87, 108; and seizure of Okinawa, 33, 35; and smart bombs, 138; and Soviet entry into Pacific War, 26, 27, 34; and targeting issues, 44–45; and Truman’s decisions about atomic bombs, 49; and unconditional surrender, 29 Siew, Leid Wolf. See Laurence, William Leonard (Leid Wolf Siew) Silverplate, as codename, 77 Singapore, 29 603rd Air Engineering Squadron, 77 Smith, Holland, 60 Smithsonian Museum, 143 Smyth, Henry D., Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 112 S-1 (Stimson’s code), 40 Southeast Asia, 105 Soviet-Japanese War, 104

INDEX

205

Soviet Union: American use of atomic bombs to intimidate, 119, 142; atomic bombs as conventional to, 119; atomic war with, 123; collapse of, 140; conventional superiority of, 121, 130; declaration of war with Japan by, 27–28, 36; detonation of fission bomb by, 132; entry into Pacific War by, 5, 9, 26–28, 34, 35, 36, 37, 57, 87, 88, 104, 113, 117, 118, 119, 121; and Germany, 154n.37; and invasion of Japan, 27; invasion of Manchuria by, 27–28, 121; and Japanese colonial possessions, 26; and knowledge about Manhattan Project, 117; and London Agreement, 22; mediation for Japan by, 25–26, 28; Nazi invasion of, 118; nuclear arsenal of, 116–19, 131, 132; nuclear strategy of, 125–28, 131; and occupation of Japan, 28, 104–5; as postwar counterweight to Americans, 155n.44; postwar threat from, 121, 130; and shock strategy, 35; and sudden end of World War II, 5; and Truman, 17; and unconditional surrender policy, 23, 33 Spaatz, Carl, 49, 51, 52, 87, 97–98, 102–3 Spain, 22, 61, 62 Spanish-American War, 62 Spitzer, Abe, 80–81, 83 Stalin, Joseph: and development of atomic bombs, 116, 117–18; discussion of atomic bombs with Truman by, 117; and guarantees for Hirohito, 35; and Japanese surrender, 104; and Potsdam Conference, 9; and Potsdam Declaration, 34; and Soviet entry into Pacific War, 27; and Truman’s decisions about atomic bombs, 49

206 INDEX

State Department, 24, 29, 30–31, 37 State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), 29–30 Stein, Gertrude, 116 Stettinius, Edward, 29–30 Stilwell, Joseph, 19 Stimson, Henry L., 55, 56, 139; and atomic bomb development, 41; and atomic bomb planning, 43–44; and atomic bombs as legitimate weapons, 142, 143; and atomic bombs as revolutionary, 56–57; and atomic bombs as special, 39, 40, 45; and atomic bombs in shock strategy, 39; and atomic bomb timetable, 47; and authorization for use of atomic bombs, 52; and cease-fire, 96; and demobilization, 121; and Handy order, 50, 51; isolationism feared by, 121; and Japanese surrender, 24, 33, 35, 36–37, 104; and Kyoto as target, 45; moral considerations of, 45–46; and Potsdam Declaration, 34; on public opinion and shock strategy, 87; and retention of emperor, 32, 36–37; and shock strategy, 16, 39; and Third Shot cancellation, 101; on Trinity test, 46; and Truman’s message on Hiroshima bombing, 85, 110; and visual vs. radar drops, 95 Strangelove, Dr., 13, 125, 128 strategic bombing, 17–19, 21, 126, 138, 149n.2 Strategy and Policy Group, 24 Sunharon Harbor, 64, 65 Superbomb, 132, 133. See also hydrogen bomb(s) surrender, Japanese: anticipation of, 56; and Atlantic Charter, 33; after atomic bombings, 134; atomic bombs as cause of, 27, 35, 36, 37, 38, 99, 109, 134, 137; and atomic

bomb as special, 108; atomic bombs as special after, 7, 14, 38, 108, 113, 114–16; attitudes toward atomic bombs before, 6, 10, 11; and bombing pause, 96; concern over radioactivity after, 52; conditional, 5, 24, 25, 33, 36, 37, 83, 96, 102; continued fighting after, 103–4; and demobilization, 88; evidence produced after, 141; Hirohito’s announcement of, 5, 9, 103, 108; and nuclear strategy, 126; number of atomic bombs needed to induce, 47–48; offer for conditional, 96; Potsdam Declaration call for, 9; as process, 105–6; and retention of emperor, 36–37, 96; and shock strategy, 17; signing of, 10; and Soviet entry into war, 119; and Soviet Union as counterweight to Americans, 155n.44; Stimson on, 104; as sudden, 7; as surprise to military planners, 120; terms for, 34, 35; and Third Shot procedures, 99; and Tokyo as target, 102; unconditional, 23, 24–25, 26, 29, 30, 31–34, 35, 36, 47–48, 85, 102, 113 Suzuki, Kantaro, 17, 105 Sweeney, Charles, 48, 93–94 target(s): for atomic bombs, 44–45, 74; for firebombing, 3, 21, 22, 35; and Handy order, 98; after Nagasaki bombing, 98; Tokyo as, 102 Target Committee, 44, 46, 53, 57 technicians, 71, 77, 79, 97 Teller, Edward, 6, 132 thermonuclear weapons, 124, 132, 133. See also hydrogen bomb(s) Thin Man, 42, 43 Third Shot, 6, 10, 11, 97–98, 100, 101–2, 103, 104, 108, 113, 131

320th Troop Carrier Squadron, 77 390th Air Service Group, 77 393rd Bombardment Squadron (VH), 77 three-plane formation, 80, 93–94, 98–99 Tibbets, Paul, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 90, 93, 106 Tinian, 132; airstrips on, 69, 70, 71; American conquest of, 20, 59–60, 63–68; atomic bombing from, 69; and atomic bombs as military weapons, 9–10; colonial history of, 61–62; and Fat Man testing, 91; firebombing from, 10, 60, 66, 69; importance of, 14; independent military operation on, 89; infrastructure of, 60–61, 68–71, 75–76; and Japan, 60, 62, 63, 75; Japanese defenses on, 64–65; and Manhattan Island, 71, 72; map of, 67, 73; physical features of, 61, 64; postNagasaki work on, 97; as Project Alberta operations site, 71–72, 75; strategic bombing from, 18; and Third Shot, 106; and Third Shot procedures, 99; as threat, 63; timetable for delivery to, 47; transport of U-235 to, 79 Tinian Joint Chiefs, 75 Tinian Town, 64, 65 Tojo, Hideki, 63 Tokyo, 11, 21, 22, 28, 61, 98, 102 Tokyo Bay, 44 Tokyo Rose, 53 traditionalism, 142 Trinity test, 8, 27, 46–47, 48, 51, 56, 72, 81, 89, 117. See also Manhattan Project Truman, Harry S., 139; and anticipated end of World War II, 57; on atomic bombing vs. firebombing, 102, 137; and atomic bomb as special weapon, 102, 137, 142; and

INDEX

207

Truman (continued) authorization for use of atomic bombs, 40, 51–52; conventional narrative concerning, 8–9; decisions of, about atomic bombs, 9, 49, 111, 115; and discussion of atomic bombs with Stalin, 117; fears of isolationism by, 121; and firebombing continuation, 102; and Grew, 29; and Handy order, 50, 51–52; and Hirohito, 32, 35; and Hiroshima bombing, 82; and hydrogen bomb, 132; intentions of, 10, 141–42; and invasion of Japan, 153n.30; and Japan Crowd, 30; and Kyoto as target, 45; lack of experience of, 17; and legislative control of atomic bombs, 108; Memoirs, 51; and military perspective, 7, 11; and number of atomic bombs needed, 84, 86; and ordinary military channels, 95; and postwar nuclear arsenal, 129; and postwar use of atomic bombs, 131; radio message on Hiroshima bombing by, 85–87, 89, 110, 118; and Roosevelt’s advisors, 17; and shock strategy, 17; and Soviet entry into Pacific War, 35; and Soviet Union, 17; and Soviet Union mediation for Japan, 25; Third Shot cancelled by, 100, 101–2, 131; and Trinity test, 46, 56; and two-bomb myth, 48; and unconditional surrender policy, 5, 24, 34, 85; and visual vs. radar drops, 95; and weapons development, 50 Truman, Margaret, 48 Twining, Nathan F., 98 two-bomb myth, 47–48. See also atomic bomb(s), number of needed Ullman, Harlan K., 138 Underhill, James L., 68

208 INDEX

United Kingdom, 17, 19, 22, 23, 28–29, 119, 147n.6, 159n.5 United Nations, 29, 115, 140 United States: and Asian vs. Pacific war, 136; end-of-war strategy of, 13; experience of World War II by, 7–8; Japan in Cold War strategy of, 136; and Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact, 26; and London Agreement, 22; nuclear arsenal of, 113, 116, 122, 125, 128–30; nuclear strategy of, 125–28, 131; and Soviet entry into Pacific War, 26–27; and sudden end of World War II, 5; unconditional surrender policy of, 23, 24; and use of atomic bombs to intimidate Soviets, 119, 142 United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), 107, 126 uranium fission, 8, 11, 41–42, 47, 132; U-235, 42, 79; U-238, 42 Ushi Point, 65 USS Augusta, 82 USS Charleston, 62 USS Colorado, 66 USS Indianapolis, 64, 79–80 USS Missouri, 104 USS Norman Scott, 66 Vasilevskii, A. M., 27 V-E Day, 26, 29 Versailles Treaty, 23 Vietnam War, 136, 137 V-J Day, 70, 103–4 V-1 and V-2 rockets, 40, 131 Wade, James P., 138 war crimes, 22, 108, 136, 143 War Department, 25, 29, 36. See also military War Department General Staff, 24 warfare, changing nature of, 112

weapons, development of, 50, 120 Wendover Field, Utah, 74, 78, 90 Werth, Alexander, 118 White Beaches, 64–65, 66 World War I, 23 World War II: American experience of, 7–8; anticipated end of, 56, 57, 88; atomic bombs as ending, 5–7, 10, 81, 113, 114, 116; and colonialism, 28–29; end of, 99, 103, 104, 141, 143; moral consid-

erations in, 7; sudden end of, 5, 76, 124 Yalta accords, 27 Yamaguchi, 44 Yawata, 44, 96 Yellow Beach, 64 Yokohama, 22, 44 Yokosuka, 98, 106 Zacharias, Ellis M., 33

INDEX

209