Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [106]
(This explains the revisionists’ use of the 1963 Eisenhower quotation: ‘It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’) The Americans also knew that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria and north China, promised by Stalin for August, would destroy what remained of Japan’s will to fight on and in this way allow the Soviets to help shape the postwar Japanese political economy. Rather than permit this, and in the hopes of making the Russians more agreeable in negotiations elsewhere, the Americans dropped the atomic bombs, needlessly and perforce cruelly, on a prostrate nation.57
There is plenty of evidence that key US decisionmakers linked the bomb to their effort to intimidate the Soviet Union. Stimson, like Truman and Byrnes, thought of diplomacy as a poker game, in which the atomic bomb would prove part of‘a royal straight flush’ or the ‘master card’, and in midMay Stimson told Truman, regarding the proposed (and delayed) summit at Potsdam, that, when it finally convened, ‘we shall probably hold more cards in our hands... than now’, meaning a successfully tested bomb. Byrnes was troubled at the thought of the Russians ‘get[ting] in so much on the kill’, as he put it. He told Navy Secretary James Forrestal that he ‘was most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in, with particular reference to Dairen and Port Arthur. Once in there, he felt, it would not be easy to get them out.’ Byrnes later recalled wanting ‘to get through with the Japanese phase of the war before the Russians came in’. He also assured Special Ambassador Joseph Davies at Potsdam ‘that the atomic bomb assured ultimate success in negotiations’ with the Russians, over German reparations and presumably other things. And Truman’s sense of heightened confidence on learning of the Alamogordo test, his new assertiveness with Stalin, and his desire to rethink the matter of Soviet involvement in the war against Japan, all indicate the extent to which the bomb made an impression on the President and planted it firmly in the diplomatic realm.58
When they thought about the bomb, then, Truman and his advisers thought about what it might suggest for relations with the Soviets. But that does not mean that policymakers used the bombs primarily because they wished to manipulate the Russians. They did not know for certain that the Japanese were close to surrender before 6 August, that the addition to the battle of Soviet divisions, the withering American firebombings coupled with the strangling naval blockade, or even the threat of American invasion of the Japanese home islands, would bring speedy capitulation. They did want to end the Pacific War at the soonest possible moment, and one of the reasons they wished to do so was to keep Russian soldiers out of China and Soviet officials out of Japan once the war was over. All this was, however, best described, as Barton Bernstein has put it, as a ‘bonus’ added to the central reason why the Americans dropped the bombs. ‘It seems likely’, writes Michael Sherry, ‘that even had Russian entry been greeted with open arms, rather than accepted as a painful aid and inevitability, the bomb would have been used on the same timetable.’ As much as it mattered to US decisionmakers that the Russians be impressed and even cowed by the use of atomic bombs against cities, that the Russians become more tractable in negotiations, something else mattered more.59
What mattered more was the assumption, inherited by Truman from Roosevelt and never fundamentally questioned after 1942, that the atomic bomb was a weapon of war, built, at considerable expense, to be used against a fanatical Axis enemy. This was ‘a foregone conclusion’, as Leon Sigal has put it, ‘unanimous’ among those most intimately involved in wartime decisionmaking. ‘As far as I was concerned,’ wrote Groves,