Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [217]
CHAPTER FIVE. THE UNITED STATES II: USING THE BOMB
While maintaining its determination to narrate the history of the atomic bomb, this chapter nevertheless finds itself engaged with the longstanding and bitter scholarly dispute over the reasons for its use. There is simply no avoiding it. The best recent summary of the argument, judicious and perceptive, is J. Samuel Walker, ‘Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground’, Diplomatic History, 29/2 (Apr. 2005), 311—34. Walker has also told the story himself, with economy and grace, in Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). The controversy, broadly speaking, has divided those who believe the atomic bombs were dropped for good and sufficient cause—that is, to save American and even Japanese lives—and those who claim that the bombs were unnecessary given Japan’s ruined state by the summer of 1945 and Japan’s willingness to surrender on reasonable terms, or that the bombs were less an effort to end the war than to intimidate the Soviet Union, or simply immoral weapons given their singular power and radioactive products. The ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the bombings has followed Henry L. Stimson’s essay ‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb’, Harper’s (Feb. 1947), 97—107, in which the former Secretary of War defended Truman’s decision. Atomic-bomb ‘revisionism’, generally to do with the theory that the bomb was directed more against the Russians than the beaten Japanese, began as early as 1946, with the publication of an essay by Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter, entitled ‘A Beginning for Sanity’, Saturday Review of Literature, 15 June 1946, 5—9, and a book published the following year by the British physicist P. M. S. Blackett: War and the Bomb: Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947). Submerged for a time, revisionism resurfaced fully in 1965 with the publication of Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (expanded and updated edn., New York: Penguin, 1985 [1965])—the most comprehensive argument to that date that Truman, James Byrnes, and key US policymakers saw the bomb as a diplomatic rather than a military tool. Alperovitz updated his argument and added some evidence in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995). The revisionist thesis received support from several quarters, including Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1995); and the introductory essay, written by the editors, to the useful collection of Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998). Ronald Takaki argues, in Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), that white American racism and Truman’s desire to prove himself tough explain the decision.
The backlash against the revisionists’ claims was almost immediate. Historians and other commentators, many of them with military experience, criticized Alperovitz for what they said was his selective use of evidence and tendentious arguments. ‘Thank God for the Atomic Bomb’ was the title of Paul Fussell’s 1991 article for the New Republic, repr. in Bird and Lifschultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow, 211— 22; Fussell had fought in Europe, and his division was scheduled to invade Honshu in early 1946. Other debunking efforts were Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later (Columbia, MO: University of