Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [80]
There was momentum behind the scientists’ decision to build the bomb. The momentum carried through construction of the test gadget, the test itself, and the decision to use the bomb against an opponent—or such is the implication of Wilson’s analogy. Once under way, the Manhattan Project became a means that required an end, a force of logic that could be satisfied only by resolution in the cause of battle—that is, against people.1
The second statement comes from a more familiar source: Harry S. Truman, who became President of the United States following Franklin Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945 and was in office when the bombs were dropped and the war against Japan ended. More than anyone, Truman made the decision to use atomic bombs, though a search for a particular document or statement by Truman actually authorizing the bombings is curiously unfulfilling. In any case, it was to his president that Samuel McCrea Cavert, the general secretary of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, wrote on 9 August, just after the second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Many Christians, Cavert wrote, were ‘deeply disturbed over [the] use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities’; the weapons were ‘indiscriminate’ and set an ‘extremely dangerous precedent’. Truman replied tersely on the 11th. ‘My dear Mr Cavert,’ he began:
Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was frankly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.
When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.
Vengeance, then, was part of Truman’s motive: the Japanese had attacked first, and treacherously, and had mistreated American prisoners. Evidently, too, the Japanese were impervious to reason, understanding only force, war’s lingua franca. And, most memorably, there is Truman’s description of the Japanese as ‘a beast’, vicious, violent, less than human. Atomic bombs were necessary, according to this logic, and they were legitimate, because no one cared that or how a beast was exterminated, least of all the beast.2
Statement three comes from Truman’s successor as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is actually two comments, combined as many other historians have combined them, but in fact recorded in two different places. In 1945 Eisenhower was commander of Allied Forces in Europe, and in this role he attended the conference at Potsdam, where the Big Three—Truman, Joseph Stalin, and (temporarily, as it turned out) Winston Churchill—discussed the fate of Central and Eastern Europe and the endgame of the war against Japan. In the first volume of his memoirs, published eighteen years later—that is, after his presidency—Eisenhower recounted that Secretary of War Henry Stimson had told him at Potsdam that the atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan. The general recalled his reaction:
I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’.
Then, the quotable coda, which appeared not in the memoirs but in Newsweek in November 1963: ‘It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’3
The passages suggest, in the first place, the possibility that a leading American general distinguished between the use of a nuclear weapon and other forms of warfare, judging the first ‘unnecessary’ and ‘awful’, more