• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1124 0

lives, and believed that by using the bomb he had done so. ‘It was a terrible decision,’ he wrote to his sister Mary. ‘But I made it. And I made it to save 250,000 boys from the United States and I’d make it again under similar circumstances. It stopped the Jap war.’ Six years after the bombing, Truman recalled for an interviewer that he had been told that the population of Hiroshima in 1945 was 60,000—an underestimate of some 200,000—and that he thought it ‘far better to kill 60,000 Japanese than to have 250,000 Americans killed’. ‘No one at the time regarded the bomb’s use as an open question,’ according to Michael Sherry. The atomic bomb may have been ‘a transcendent form of power’, but it would be ‘conceived and used in the familiar ways’. Nor were the Americans alone in imagining without compunction the use of the weapon. ‘Indeed,’ writes Bernstein, ‘it is difficult to believe that any major World War II nation that had the bomb would have chosen not to use it in 1945 against the enemy.’ This is surely true. Had the British, Germans, Russians, or Japanese developed the bomb first—and that they did not had nothing to do with any ethical impediment to doing so—they would have dropped it on civilians with no more hesitation than the Americans showed.64

Like his boss, Truman aide George Elsey was interviewed years after the bombs had fallen and the war ended. Elsey understood that Truman had inherited the bomb from Roosevelt, and that the bomb had developed a logic and momentum of its own. ‘Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made,’ Elsey said. ‘He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It’s all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.’65

12. The threshold of horror: Poison gas

There remains one (at least) theoretical and historical problem to confront with respect to Elsey’s argument that use of the bomb was foreordained, that it formed not a break but a continuum with the recent past practice of killing civilians from the air. In his June 1945 plea to arrange a non-combat demonstration of the bomb on a deserted island, James Franck pointed out that the American public, apparently, believed there was a threshold of horror beyond which certain weapons ought to be prohibited for use, even against an enemy widely regarded as subhuman. The American people, Franck insisted, drew the line at using poison gas in East Asia. This was true, ‘even though gas warfare is in no way more “inhuman” than the war of bombs and bullets.’ A few military officials and those in charge of the government’s Chemical Warfare Services in fact urged that gas or other chemical or biological agents be used to rout the Japanese from their Pacific island strongholds or against the home islands. Following Iwo Jima, the CWS proposed to the Joint Chiefs the use of chemical weapons on Okinawa, but the matter ended there. The subsequent struggle made several of the generals reconsider. General Joseph W. Stilwell, who had fought the Japanese in China, wanted George Marshall to permit the use of chemicals should it come to an invasion of Japan, and General Douglas MacArthur and Brigadier General William A. Borden both offered qualified support for deploying poison gas. Marshall himself, a decent man who, it may be recalled, had private doubts about dropping atomic bombs, raised the subject on 29 May 1945, with Stimson and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. Shaken by the tenacity of Japanese units on Okinawa, the Chief of Staff suggested developing ‘new weapons and tactics’ to overcome the ‘last ditch defense tactics of the Japanese’. Marshall proposed the use of mustard gas, the specter of Ypres in 1917. McCloy was willing to study the proposal, with an eye toward a public growing daily more alarmed at rising American casualties. Stimson could not stomach it. Neither could William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Truman adviser, who pointed out that Roosevelt had made public statements against the use of chemicals