The Coming Of the A-Bomb.

 

"Road to Surrender

By Evan Thomas

(Random House, 314 pages, $28)

Unlike the physical shockwaves that immediately destroyed Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on Aug. 6, 1945, the bomb's psychic shockwaves took more than a year to hit America. John Hersey published his searing account of the event at the end of August 1946 -- taking up an entire issue of the New Yorker. After that, Americans began debating the bomb and never stopped.Were the atomic bombings of Japan justified? Could the war have been ended without them? Was the attack used to cow the Soviets as much as the Japanese? As Christopher Nolan's movie "Oppenheimer" shows, the shockwaves reverberate still.

The veteran biographer Evan Thomas now enters the debate. In "Road to Surrender," Mr. Thomas depicts the mind-sets and emotions of three men directly involved in the decision to drop the bomb and end the war in the Pacific: Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and Army Air Force Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz. Other key players figure prominently, especially President Harry Truman, Gen. George Marshall, Army Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves and the aforementioned J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the weapon's construction.

The crushing psychological pressure these men underwent forms the book's moral drama. Mr. Thomas is particularly good at limning the uncertainties they faced as they grappled with questions of timing, targets, peace conditions and domestic politics, showing how every decision was debated and agonized over.

If there was one certainty for the Americans, however, it was that the bomb would be used once operational. As Stimson asserted in his defense of the decision, published in Harper's magazine in 1947, "I cannot see how any person vested with such responsibilities as mine could have taken any other course" than to recommend the dropping of the bomb.Mr. Thomas shows how Stimson and his colleagues wrestled with the dilemma of targeting civilians with the terrible new weapon, convincing themselves that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were primarily military sites when they were not.

The history of the atomic bomb has been well covered, but Mr. Thomas's brisk narrative thrusts readers into the moral quandaries that bedeviled policy makers in both Japan and America. The focus on Togo and the tortuous impasse in Japan's Supreme War Council reveals a story far more complicated than the one most Americans are familiar with: that of a quick Japanese surrender after the obliteration of Nagasaki. The Gotterdammerung in Tokyo paralleled that in Berlin earlier in 1945. Mr. Thomas makes clear that the decision to surrender was a close-run thing, even after Emperor Hirohito made clear his wishes that the war end.

Similarly compelling, and likely new to manyreaders, is the brief but vital American struggle over civilian versus military control of the new weapon. Initially the military had sole authority. A third bomb was being prepared in the summer of 1945, most likely foruse on Tokyo in late August or September. After receiving a full description of the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including an account of the civilian death toll, President Truman ordered that further atomic bombs would be used only on his explicit order -- the first time in American history that a president had taken direct control of a military weapon. Nearly 80 years later, the question of a president's sole control over nuclear weapons has become a hot topic again, as the mental faculties of America's latest presidents are questioned by partisans on both sides.

One of the great controversies hanging over the atomic bombings is whether they were directed as much at Moscow as at Tokyo. Mr. Thomas briefly covers the revisionist argument that the bomb was used immorally against civilians to give Washington a leg up in the emerging Cold War. Geopolitics, as Mr. Thomas shows, was a factor, but far from the main one in Truman and Stimson's thinking.

Equally vexing, and critical for Stimson, was the question of national versus international control of atomic energy. The U.S. had a strong interest in maintaining sole control of atomic power. At the same time, however, other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, were sure to get their hands on this technology eventually. Best, argued Stimson and others, to establish a system of international governance at the outset. Thus the question of nonproliferation, like that of civilian control of atomic bombs, was born at the dawn of the atomic age. And Stimson's dream was fated to remain just that.

As for the necessity of dropping both bombs, Mr. Thomas, like most historians, is in no doubt. The projected American casualties for an invasion of Japan's home islands, scheduled to begin in November 1945, ran to the hundreds of thousands, not to mention millions of Japanese, including civilians, expected to perish. Even after Hiroshima, Hirohito's ministers could not agree to surrender. Only after Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on Aug.7 (the day after Hiroshima) could To go get a majority of the war council, though not the military leaders, to bear the unbearable.

Truman and his advisers initially assumed that the A-bomb, while uniquely powerful, would be used like any other weapon. After Hiroshima, however, they understood its revolutionary nature, and senior military leaders like Gen. Douglas MacArthur recognized that it changed warfare forever.

Nor could they ignore that the morality question cut both ways. For the several hundred thousand Japanese killed in the bombings, untold numbers on both sides were saved, including Mr. Thomas's father, a junior officer in the U.S. Navy awaiting orders to invade Japan.

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Mr. Auslin is a historian at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of "Asia's New Geopolitics."" [1]

 The atomic bomb ensures that we don't have World War III for so many years now. Those who can start such a war know that they will surely die from it. Great result.

1. The Coming Of the A-Bomb. Auslin, Michael. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 July 2023: A.15.