Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [4]
But, of course, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was not so simple, neither in 1945 nor today. That the dispute about its use remains bitter is evidence of that. The questions linger. Were the Japanese on their last legs by the summer of 1945? Did their leaders know it? Did the Americans think the Japanese leaders knew it? Was the bomb necessary to end the war? Were both bombs needed? In their absence, or with a decision not to use them, would it have taken a bloody American invasion of Japan itself to achieve surrender? Or would the war have ended, as the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in July 1946, ‘certainly’ before the end of 1945 ‘and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 ... even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated’?1 Would it have been enough for the United States to have modified its demand that Japan surrender unconditionally, perhaps by signaling that the imperial system, the kokutai, could be retained? Was the bomb used chiefly not for military reasons but to intimidate the Soviet Union?
And yet, even these difficult and complex questions, along with their fraught and complicated and necessarily qualified answers, frame the argument too simply. For the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was not merely a decision made by US policymakers in order to punish the Japanese, not just an issue in Japan-US relations, but instead the product of years of scientific experimentation, ethical debate within the scientific community, and significant changes in the conduct of war—all undertaken globally. Americans alone did not decide to build the bomb, and neither did they alone actually build it. The science that enabled the bomb was conducted internationally; Hungarian, British, and German scientists and mathematicians, for example, were among the bomb’s most important theoretical pioneers. Even after many of the world’s leading mathematicians, physicists, and chemists had gathered in the United States and had combined their talents in the top-secret Manhattan Project, other scientists remained in their home countries, contributing to fledgling atomic bomb programs.
Limited by doubting governments and scarce resources, these programs nevertheless sustained the international scope of the pursuit of nuclear power, and internationalized as well the scientific and ethical debates over the atomic bomb that emerged with new intensity after August 1945.
If the making of the atomic bomb and the discussion that surrounded it had international sources, so too did the bomb have implications that stretched beyond the territories of the United States and Japan and well beyond the sensibilities of Americans and Japanese. News of the Hiroshima bombing was greeted with profound shock everywhere. A Mexican newspaper likened it to an earthquake, while a Trinidadian paper chose a comparison to a volcano—both familiar yet potentially catastrophic occurrences that were beyond human responsibility or control. The bomb killed mostly Japanese, of course, but also many Koreans and Chinese, and (indirectly) a few Americans, none of whom was in Hiroshima that dreadful morning by choice. Otto Hahn, one of the Germans who had discovered fission in 1938, was badly shaken by news of Hiroshima and blamed himself for the hundreds