Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [95]
7. The dismissal of doubt
All these dissents, doubts, and inklings of doubt were overridden by the determination, among bomb-builders and policymakers, to use the new weapon as long as the enemy refused to surrender unconditionally, as the US government defined the adverb. The strenuous concerns of Szilard and Franck, along with the more qualified ones of Marshall, Grew, and Bard, could not match the combination of assumption and conviction on the part of those who saw no reason not to use the bomb and various and substantial benefits to using it. Franklin Roosevelt, typically cautious and non-committal about nearly anything not requiring an immediate decision, did apparently wonder to Vannevar Bush, in September 1944, whether the bomb ‘should actually be used against the Japanese or whether it should be used only as a threat with full-scale experimentation in this country’. He was thinking aloud, advocating for the devil, trying something new on for Bush—for otherwise there is nothing in the record to suggest that Roosevelt would have hesitated to use the weapon he himself had authorized and had discussed without reservation many times with Bush, Stimson, Churchill, and others. The assumption that the bomb would be used also governed the deliberations of Truman’s Interim Committee. Established in late April at the behest of the President, the committee was broadly charged by Stimson to ‘study and report on the whole problem of temporary war controls and later publicity, and to survey and make recommendations on postwar research, development and controls, as well as legislation necessary to effectuate them’. Its members were Stimson, in the chair (George Harrison served as chair when Stimson could not be present), Bard, Bush, Conant, Karl Compton, and Undersecretary of State William Clayton. Attached to the committee was a Scientific Panel, including Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, and Enrico Fermi. James Byrnes was added as the personal representative of the President.34
To some small extent, as Michael Sherry has pointed out, the Interim Committee’s discussion of how to use the atomic bomb ‘sometimes slipped over into pondering whether to use it all’. Bard, after all, concluded that the Japanese should be warned in advance about the bomb and offered a guarantee that the emperor would be retained, conditions that bore at least as much on the question of ‘whether’ as the matter of ‘how’. Even more striking is the speed with which the first formal discussion of the committee, on 31 May 1945, went in the direction of the future of nuclear power and prospects for its international control. The membership talked for over three hours that morning hardly mentioning Japan, though just before lunch there was a conversation about how to handle the Russians. When at last the subject of Japan came up, number eight on an agenda with eleven substantive items, it was encapsulated in the title ‘Effect of the Bombing on the Japanese and their Will to Fight’. The subsequent discussion concerned similarities and differences between the atomic bombing and ongoing non-nuclear strikes, possible targets, and whether to drop just one bomb at a time or several at once. (Groves, who was present, and was ultimately invited to every Interim Committee meeting, urged use of a single bomb, in part because the effect of a multiple strike ‘would not be sufficiently distinct from our regular bombing program’.) No one at