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well advanced by that summer. They included the use of as many suicide kamikazes in the first three hours of the invasion as had been deployed in Okinawa over three months. Two Japanese divisions and a smattering of other units had bled the Americans at Okinawa. Fourteen or more divisions, well dug into caves and bunkers, were expected to oppose the invaders on mountainous Kyushu. Near the end of the 18 June meeting, Truman told the Joint Chiefs to ‘proceed with the Kyushu operation’— after saying, recall, that he ‘hoped there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to another’. Victory without an invasion at all remained a wish to be cherished.62

11. Alternatives to the atomic bombs, and moral objections to attacking civilians

None of this is to say that there were not, in some metahistorical sense, possible alternatives to using the atomic bombs. Barton Bernstein has laid them out and assessed their likely efficacy. There was the ‘noncombat demonstration’ of the bomb, endorsed in the Franck Report of June 1945 (unlikely, in Bernstein’s view, to have achieved Japan’s surrender). Alternative II was to modify or redefine the demand for unconditional surrender, as Grew and Stimson wanted to do, by guaranteeing the position of the emperor (‘quite unlikely—but not impossible ... [to] have produced a Japanese surrender before 1 November on terms acceptable to the United States’). Another possibility was to follow up the Japanese ‘peace feelers’, extended by some Japanese officials through intermediaries in Switzerland that summer, and apparently indicating that peace might come about if (again) the United States offered to preserve the imperial system (only a ‘slim hope’ of success, in Bernstein’s view). Alternative IV was to rely on Soviet intervention to push Tokyo to its breaking point—but no American decisionmaker believed Soviet entry alone would quickly finish the job, and none in any case desired it. A final option was to continue the bombing of Japan’s cities and the naval blockade of the home islands. Bernstein thinks this alternative the most likely to have produced surrender by 1 November, the chances of success being ‘maybe 25-30 percent’. Bernstein does say that some combination of these alternatives might ‘very likely’ have done the job. And yet, as Bernstein recognizes, his analysis is doubly counterfactual: one cannot know what the divided Japanese war cabinet would have done had the Americans pursued one or several of these courses instead of dropping the bombs, and, more significantly, it is difficult to imagine the Truman administration deciding to depart from the course established by Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the Manhattan Project in the first place. Why not drop the atomic bombs?63

There were a few men and women, at the time, who remonstrated against what was, after the Nazi genocide, the crucial moral enormity of the war: bombing civilians. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain made the utilitarian argument that attacking cities from the air increased popular anger and resistance and thus, immorally, prolonged the conflict. In March 1944 an obscure American religious magazine called Fellowship ran an article by the English pacifist Vera Brittain condemning urban bombing. Pacifists A. J. Muste and Mohandas Gandhi criticized the atomic bomb as the worst excess of a war they had opposed more generally. But the vast majority, of officials and citizens, military men and civilians, in the United States and everywhere else, had by 1945 undergone a profound eclipse of conscience. They knew that the atomic bombing was by itself unprecedentedly powerful, yet even after the Trinity test they could not imagine destruction and horror beyond what they had already witnessed, and perpetrated. Most did not accept Maritain’s argument that mass bombing would prolong the war; instead they felt, as the air theorists had felt during the 1920s, that by increasing the horror they were shortening the war and therefore finally saving lives. Harry Truman was interested in saving American