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By Root 1143 0

Truman’s ‘decision was one of non-interference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.’ Groves would subsequently liken Truman’s role to that of ‘a surgeon who comes in after the patient has been all opened up and the appendix is exposed and half cut off and he says, “yes I think he ought to have out the appendix—that’s my decision”.’ A kind of bureaucratic momentum impelled the bomb forward, from imagining to designing to building and then to using. It would have taken a president far more confident, far less in awe of his office and his predecessor, to reflect on the matter of whether the atomic bomb should be used. Even then, it is difficult to picture how the momentum toward dropping the bomb would have been stopped. Truman and his advisers saw no reason not to drop the bomb.60

That they did not had to do with their self-deception—the bomb would be used only on a military target, Stimson and Truman assured themselves—and much to do with the belief, by now hardened into assumption, that non-combatants were unfortunate but nevertheless legitimate targets of bombs. From the first decision by an Italian pilot to aim recklessly at a Turkish camp in Africa, through the clumsy zeppelin bombings and British retaliation for them in the First World War, the ‘air policing’ of British colonies during the 1920s, and the ever more deadly and indiscriminate attacks by the Germans, Japanese, British, and Americans, ethical erosion had long collapsed the once-narrow ledge that had prevented men from plunging into the abyss of heinous conduct during war. Civilians could and would be killed by bombs. To shift the analogy slightly, and, as Richard Frank has written: ‘The men who unanimously concurred with the description of the [atomic bombs’] target experienced no sensation that their choice vaulted over a great divide.’ Indeed, their ‘choice’ was only which Japanese cities should be struck, not whether any of them should be. Once heralded as ‘knights of the air’, American pilots and their crews were now more often regarded as ‘hooligans’, or worse. Still, they were doing their nation’s bidding: three days after Pearl Harbor, two-thirds of Americans polled said they supported the indiscriminate bombing ofcities in Japan, a sentiment sustained throughout the war. There was equally little compunction about civilians in Germany, where estimates showed that by 1945 Allied bombers had killed between 300,000 and nearly twice that many. Psychologically, yes, there was something horribly different about the atomic bomb, a single bomb, with what Oppenheimer called its ‘brilliant luminescence’ and its capacity to create such destruction by itself. Functionally, it was merely another step on a continuum of increasingly awful weapons delivered by airplanes.61

US policymakers believed that killing Japanese as quickly and efficiently as possible would save American lives. They were never sure how many, of course. An invasion of Kyushu was scheduled for 1 November 1945. Policymakers estimated how many Americans might be wounded or die in the invasion by extrapolating from losses sustained during recent campaigns in the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. They concluded that US losses ‘should not exceed the price we have paid for Luzon’—31,000 killed, wounded, and missing—during the first thirty days of the invasion of Kyushu. The figures were mentioned at the meeting between the Joint Chiefs, Stimson, Truman, and several others on 18 June 1945.

An acrimonious debate rages among historians over the extent to which policymakers made more precise estimates of possible American invasion casualties during the summer of 1945. In the end, it is unlikely that estimates, whatever they said and whoever made them, made much difference to Truman; he surely would be scornful of the debate over them were he alive now. For, if the President could save even a handful of American lives, he would not have hesitated to allow atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan. Intelligence indicated that Japanese plans for Ketsu-Go, the defence of the homeland, were