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awful at least than other weapons already being used. More significantly, it suggests that there may have been reasons other than the quest for swift and sure victory why Truman decided to use bomb(s) anyway. Surely Stimson would have taken seriously the military judgment of his general (Japan was looking to surrender); surely he would have accepted Eisenhower’s logic that the atomic bomb was not necessary to win the war. That he apparently did neither of these things—that he did not refrain from recommending use of the bomb—must therefore mean that Stimson had other reasons to want his president to use it. Revisionist historians, indeed, have found in the Eisenhower quotations evidence that, for Stimson, Secretary of State James Byrnes, and Truman, the real target of the atomic bomb—Japan being, as Eisenhower said, all but defeated without it—was the Soviet Union. If atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the war would end more quickly, depriving the Soviets of much involvement in the war’s endgame and thus of a prominent place in the postwar occupation authority in Japan. And if the United States dropped atomic bombs, the Soviet leadership might be intimidated by American power and become more agreeable in negotiations on the political future of Germany and Eastern Europe, already a matter of friction between the Allies.4

One more statement, this from Stimson himself. Henry Stimson, who was 77 years old in 1945, was a dedicated public servant who played a critical role in the drama of the atomic bomb. It was he who told Truman, hours after Truman became President, of the existence of ‘a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power’ then under development, who chaired the secret Interim Committee that advised the President about how to use the bomb, and who removed the city of Kyoto from the bombs’ target list, overriding the objections of Leslie Groves. By early 1947, as the Cold War intensified, there were rumblings in US policy circles and in the American press that the bombs had been aimed primarily at the Soviets, not the Japanese, and had thus been militarily unnecessary. Stimson responded, in the February issue of Harper’s magazine, with ‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Weapon’, a piece meant to disarm critics by revealing the inside version of official deliberation in the months leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima. Why, then, did the United States drop the bomb?

My chief purpose [Stimson wrote] was to end the war in victory with the least cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.

The bomb, according to Stimson, was not used for some nefarious or secret reason, but because it promised to end the war sooner and thus save lives. It was American lives that Stimson cherished and mentioned in the passage, but in his following paragraph he noted that, by ending the war, the atomic bombs ended the firebombing of Japanese cities and the blockade of Japan by US ships and thus saved Japanese lives too. The atomic bomb was justified as the most humane way to prosecute, then terminate, the atrocious war.5

It will be noted that all four of these statements were made after the bombs had been dropped: Truman’s within a couple of days, Stimson’s over a year later, Eisenhower’s nearly two decades and Wilson’s a quarter of a century afterwards. Perhaps Truman had not had much time to think before sending a response to Samuel Cavert, but the others had had plenty of time, and were surely conscious that they were setting down their positions for posterity on a subject fraught with controversy. During the war itself, in the heat of battle, most scientists, generals, and statesmen had neither the time nor the inclination to ask themselves whether the atomic bombs