Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [145]
1. The American response
Among leading American statesmen, reactions to the atomic bombings ranged widely. Secretary of State James Byrnes avoided any open remorse, continuing to treat the bomb as a happily found instrument of war and diplomacy. When, at a foreign ministers’ conference in London in September 1945, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov asked Byrnes whether he had ‘an atomic bomb in his side pocket’, Byrnes responded: ‘You don’t know southerners. We carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don’t cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.’ It was a bizarre reply, but one with a point—Byrnes did not see himself as treading on atomic eggshells. Henry Stimson, on the other hand, had long worried that the bomb would complicate, not clarify, the postwar situation. By his efforts the Japanese shrine city of Kyoto had been spared; he had gone forward with the decision to use the bomb willingly but with a sense of gravity and even occasional torment. On the day of the Nagasaki bombing, Stimson told a radio audience that American elation at having built the bomb ‘must be overshadowed by a deeper emotion. The result of the bomb is so terrific that the responsibility of its possession and its use must weigh heavier on our minds and on our hearts.’ Several weeks later, on the verge of retirement, the Secretary of War handed Truman a remarkable memorandum in which he urged that the bomb’s ‘secrets of production’ be shared with the Soviet Union: ‘The chief lesson I have learned in a long life’, he wrote, ‘is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show him your distrust.’ Truman himself remained publicly steadfast in his statements. The bomb(s) had been necessary to end the war quickly and save American lives, he said. Robert Oppenheimer may have detected blood on his hands, but the President impatiently reproved him and soon after complained about the ‘ “crybaby” scientist... wringing his hands’ in Truman’s office. Yet others sensed anguish in the President. There was the note to Senator Russell on 9 August, in which Truman said that he hoped he could avoid ‘wiping out’ the Japanese population. The next day, Truman told his cabinet, according to Vice President Henry Wallace, that he had decided to stop the atomic bombing while surrender negotiations proceeded. ‘He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,’ Wallace wrote in his diary. ‘He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids”.’ The vehemence with which Truman later asserted his lack of doubt about the bombings might well suggest an element of insecurity concerning the decision.7
Leading American military men also experienced a range of emotions concerning the use of the bomb. Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, would place the atomic bomb in the same category of opprobrium occupied by chemical and biological weapons, and concluded his 1950 memoir by declaring: ‘Employment of the atomic bomb in war will take us back in cruelty toward noncombatants to the days of Genghis Khan.’ Others escaped remorse. ‘Like taxes, radioactivity has long been with us and in increasing amounts,’ wrote Ralph Lapp of the Office of Naval Research. ‘It is not to be hated and feared, but... treated with respect, avoided when practicable, and accepted when inevitable.’ Curtis LeMay professed himself unbothered by the need to kill Japanese, by whatever means necessary, in order to end the war, and he made pointed comparison between the atomic bombings and the burning of Japanese cities by incendiaries. In early 1946 the Americans presented Japanese officials with a draft of the