Atomic Delusions

Were the Bombs Necessary, Ethical, or Wise?

As the world commemorates the dropping of the atomic bombs 81 years ago this week, I want to post a book review I wrote in 2023, first published in Discourse Magazine. Because it ran nearly 3,000 words long, I will break it into three parts and post them over the coming days. One message I hope you will take away from this essay is that those who insist that the bombs were necessary, just like those who insist that they weren’t, simply lack the facts and logic to support their beliefs. This long essay tries to take apart both sides’ claims.

Evan Thomas’s new book about the end of WWII is fortuitously timed. The blockbuster film Oppenheimer has reawakened interest in the decision to use the atom bomb on Japan. And while Thomas has provided a well-researched, engaging synthesis of the events surrounding Japan’s surrender, the book falls a bit short. The principal problem is that it is definitive about a subject riddled with uncertainty. As a popular history, Road to Surrender reads well. The author asserts his conclusions with conviction. Unfortunately, the more we learn about the questions involving surrender, the clearer it becomes how unclear the answers are.

Thomas employs a fast-paced style, often writing in the present tense. Secretary of War Henry Stimson “tosses fitfully in his bed …” or “wants to trust the Russians but is wary of them.” The style is meant to put us in the moment, enabling us to imagine we are there with the protagonists as they struggle with the weighty matters of war. This allows for swifter pacing, but it also leads the author to breeze by crucial questions, never having time to explore them fully.

The debate over the use of the bomb has lasted this long because most people dislike moral ambiguity. When all the rhetoric is stripped away, two main camps are left. One side says the bombs were necessary to compel Japan’s surrender. These people insist that an invasion was the only realistic alternative to the atomic bombs. They choose to believe in the high casualty estimates in an invasion, rather than the low estimates, which were also offered at the time. Given these assumptions, they reason that the bombs saved more lives than they cost. The other side argues that America’s actions were inhumane, criminal, or at least unnecessary. In sharp contrast to the first camp, these people assert that Japan was on the brink of collapse, and the war would have ended soon enough without an invasion or the bombs.

Both sides are deluding themselves. There was simply no way to know when or whether Japan would surrender. America’s leaders were stuck in one of the war’s worst moral dilemmas: murder unknown thousands of innocent Japanese civilians or risk the deaths of unknown thousands of Allied troops in an invasion. There were, however, other options. No one could know if they would have worked, but they should have been tried. America failed to pursue those alternatives not out of malice or incompetence, but rather from a combination of flawed thinking and bureaucratic barriers to information flow.

Thomas gives us character sketches of three important actors in this drama: the aforementioned Stimson, Army Air Forces General Carl Spaatz, and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Each played vital roles, and Thomas’s choice to focus on them is warranted, though naturally they were not the sole or always the most decisive figures. Too many others were just as essential, but these three men offer a window into the moral ambiguity of the world’s first nuclear strikes. Thomas’s most informed sketch is of Stimson, who left us ample records, including an almost daily diary, which he kept religiously for most of his long life.

Thomas is absolutely correct to observe that Stimson’s subordinates often kept their boss in the dark about crucial topics. They gave him the classic Washington runaround, hoarding information, ignoring his directives, and selectively parceling out data on key subjects. Stimson, being old and in ill health, did his best to run a War Department that included an army of 11 million men and the multibillion-dollar top secret Manhattan Project. His efforts were gallant, his character noble, and his moral dilemmas intense.

Stimson had no desire to kill unknown thousands of civilians with a new and terrible weapon. Yet he also could not stomach the idea of sending unknown thousands of American and Allied soldiers to their deaths in an invasion of the Japanese homeland. He therefore sought a third way: conditional surrender. By this solution, Japan would be permitted to retain its emperor in exchange for surrendering. Why didn’t that plan work? Because it was never tried. Why not?

The vast majority of top officials agreed with Stimson that conditional surrender made sense. Unlike with Hitler in Nazi Germany, the figure of Japan’s emperor played a unique and ancient role in Japanese society. Each emperor was seen as a divine being. The idea that the current emperor could be hanged as a war criminal was unacceptable to the key decision-makers in Japan’s regime. Everything had to be done to prevent that outcome. Grasping this fact, most American officials recognized that offering this one condition for Japan’s surrender was not an act of kindness to their enemy, but rather a self-serving act of prudent statecraft. If the offer were accepted, both the bombs and the invasion could be avoided, and the soldiers could finally come home with no more loss of life.

With the emperor still in place, the risk of ongoing resistance would be virtually eliminated because the emperor commanded his people’s obedience. If he told them to stand down and accept occupation, then U.S. occupiers would not have to contend with a protracted insurgency. For these reasons, Stimson and others wrote this condition into the Potsdam Declaration, the July 1945 agreement among the Allies that laid out the terms for Japan’s surrender. But President Harry S. Truman removed it in the end. We don’t know why exactly. Historians debate it still. Some say that newly appointed Secretary of State James Byrnes persuaded Truman against it for political reasons.

Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had pledged to pursue the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, and this was popular with the American public. Thomas adds that Truman disliked strongmen and had no fondness for the Japanese emperor. Often overlooked or discounted in the literature is Truman’s fear of unleashing a third world war. Reasoning by analogy, Truman wrote that the Allies had failed to obtain unconditional surrender of Germany after World War I, and World War II ensued. Failure to achieve unconditional surrender of Japan might, he likely believed, sow the seeds of yet another global fight, only one that would be fought with nuclear weapons. In other words, the fate of humanity itself would be at stake. He dared not get this decision wrong.

Unfortunately, the logic was flawed. Japan under the emperor was not Germany under the kaiser. The analogy did not hold. We have absolutely no way of knowing whether an offer of conditional surrender would have been accepted. The emperor and Foreign Minister Togo had been searching for a way to end the war that would preserve the throne. Joseph Grew, the acting secretary of state and former ambassador to Japan, insisted that protection of the emperor represented “irreducible terms” for Japan’s leaders. He was right. If the offer had been made, maybe the emperor would have overridden the adamant objections of the three ultra-hardliners on the six-man Supreme War Council. Thomas dismisses this as impossible. But he cannot know what would have happened. No one could then, and we cannot know now. And given that the American decision-makers could not have foreseen the outcome, it was certainly worth a try.

If the offer had been rejected, nothing would have been lost. The suggestion that this would have shown Allied weakness and led the Japanese to strengthen their resolve is absurd. They were already fighting for their survival with savage intensity, as the ferocious battle of Okinawa revealed. But if the offer had been accepted, the many people on all sides who died in the weeks before the bombs were dropped and the roughly 200,000 Japanese civilians who perished from the nuclear strikes would have been spared.

Perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of conditional surrender came too late. Even after the tremendous destruction wrought by two atomic bombs, Japan’s leaders still insisted on the preservation of the emperor in exchange for their surrender. It turned out that the bombs were not enough. Whether two cities were destroyed or 200, what mattered was the protection of the emperor. Many have wondered why it took two atomic bombs, not simply one, to convince Japan to surrender. The answer is that it did not take two bombs; it took the American guarantee of the emperor’s safety.

When, after both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed, Japanese leaders still refused to surrender without assurance of the emperor’s preservation, American officials were faced with a conundrum. They had only possessed two atomic bombs. More were in the works and could be available within a few weeks or months. But no one wanted the war to drag on. Then Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal provided an elegant solution: Let Japan retain the emperor just as the advocates of conditional surrender had previously proposed, but tell them that General Douglas MacArthur would have ultimate authority.

Japanese leaders accepted this offer, as did the American people. And thus, conditional surrender proved necessary in the end. If the same offer had been extended before the use of atomic bombs, maybe the emperor would have intervened sooner to end the war. But we can never know what would have happened. This must forever remain a historical might-have-been.

I’ll explain more about the decision to drop the bombs in Part 2, coming soon.