Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [92]
Two years after the war had ended, David Lilienthal, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, reflected on the end of the distinction between soldiers and civilians:
Then we burned Tokyo, not just military targets, but set out to wipe out the place, indiscriminately. The atomic bomb is the last word in this direction. All ethical limitations of warfare are gone, not because the means of destruction are more cruel or painful or otherwise hideous in their effect upon combatants, but because there are no individual combatants. The fences are gone.
The atomic bombs provided an exclamation point at the end of a continuous narrative of atrocity.26
And yet—again; the very subject of the atomic bomb inspires topic sentences that reverse the story’s course. The men and women who imagined then built the bomb thought they were doing something different from what other makers of weapons did, thought they were engaged in something special. No one recalls the names of those who developed napalm and other incendiaries. No other single weapon project received $2 billion in government funds. (Radar cost more, but it was not a weapon as such.) Knowing what they knew about the power of a nuclear chain reaction, and whatever they may have guessed about the impact of radioactivity beyond the perimeter of the blast, some scientists and some government policymakers felt a need to think especially hard about how, and against whom, the atomic bomb was used. Curtis LeMay was permitted by Air Force strategic doctrine to firebomb Tokyo with many tons of incendiaries, but he made the decision to launch the attack himself. There were no high-level meetings to discuss the use of napalm. The opposite, of course, was true for the atomic bomb.
6. Doubters
There was, as Robert Wilson suggested, an assumption in the air that, if a bomb became feasible while the enemy—any enemy—was still in the field, it should be used; it would have been, as Wilson put it, ‘unrealistic and unfair’ to have asked the scientists to stop their work and the United States to stop its fight. Roosevelt seems to have assumed this, and when, in late 1943, Leslie Groves began retrofitting a B-29, largely designated for use in the Pacific theater, to carry the bomb, it was clear that he, too, planned to use his weapon against any and all enemies. Roosevelt’s and Groves’s decisions were the ones that mattered most, and most of the scientists working on the bomb, like Robert Wilson, accepted this. But even before Germany had surrendered, several of those involved with the Manhattan Project, convinced that the great evil of Nazism had been subdued and the danger of a German atomic bomb had passed, argued that the bomb ought not to be used against Japan. In other words, the target of the bomb should be understood as having been defeated, and the bomb’s aiming point not merely shifted to another nation. It must be said that there was not much sympathy for the Japanese themselves—while the Jewish refugee scientists especially regarded them as less malignant than the Nazis, most also remembered Pearl Harbor, read the news of the ferocious island-hopping campaign, and shared the view, held by most white Americans, that the Japanese were not quite human. Instead, the scientists’ major concern was that combat use of the bomb against Japan would set a bad precedent for the rest of the world and would in particular antagonize the Soviet Union, which would feel threatened