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By Root 1214 0

(who found Stimson impressive). The bomb, Stimson jotted in notes to himself before his first meeting with the Interim Committee, ‘may destroy or perfect International Civilization’ and ‘may [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace’. But, if there was distress in these perceptions, so alien to the likes of Groves and Byrnes, there was also an unwillingness to allow them to prevent the bombs from being used. Stimson needed to discuss how and where the bomb(s) would be dropped, and he was genuinely concerned about the consequences of dropping the bombs on Japanese cities. He did not, however, question the need to drop them, never recognizing any ‘profound qualitative difference’ between them and nonnuclear weapons, as Martin Sherwin puts it. Stimson guided the Interim Committee to its decision that the bomb should be used as soon as it was ready, and it was he, along with Marshall, who formally authorized the 20th Air Force to ‘deliver’ the bombs to Japan. Perhaps he extinguished his doubts with his strenuous effort to keep Kyoto off the target list; having secured the safety of the Buddhist temples and shrines and the lives of the citizens of Kyoto, Stimson could tell himself that he had acted decently, even morally, or had gone as far as circumstances would allow. Perhaps instead, as Sherry argues, he deluded ‘himself that “precision” bombing remained American practice’ in 1945. In any event, to gain the surrender of Japan, Stimson wrote in 1947, it seemed necessary to administer a ‘tremendous shock which would carry convincing proof of our power to destroy’ Japan. That meant the bomb.41

Harry Truman relied on Stimson for guidance about the bomb, so it is no surprise that the President came to share his secretary’s self-delusion about its target. Overwhelmed by the job—on the first afternoon following Roosevelt’s death he told reporters that he ‘felt like the moon, the stars, and the planets had fallen’ on him—Truman exhibited on the atomic-bomb issue a combination of feigned indifference and zealous over-involvement characteristic of the insecure. There is little evidence that he saw the bomb as a moral matter, at least before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August. He nevertheless felt compelled to tell himself, like Stimson, that the atomic bombs whose use he authorized, or to whose use he acceded, were to be aimed at military targets. It was in a mid-May 1945 meeting with the President that Stimson declared that Air Force firebombings had targeted the Japanese military, and that ‘the same rule of sparing the civilian population should be applied as far as possible to the use of any new weapons’, like the atomic bomb. Two weeks later came the Interim Committee meeting that resolved, according to Stimson, that the ‘most desirable target’ of the bomb ‘would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses’. Truman accepted this recommendation. After conferring with Stimson about the bomb again at Potsdam, on 25 July, Truman wrote in his diary:

I have told the Sec[retary] of War, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.

Anyone who knew, as Stimson and Truman did, what the firebombs had done to Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, and what the test of the plutonium bomb in New Mexico had revealed nine days earlier, also knew that these weapons unleashed upon cities did not magically kill only their military inhabitants, or destroy factories and ‘workers’ houses’ while sparing tea shops, hospitals, and the homes of teachers. Here, again, was self-deception—undertaken at the highest level and on the most critical of issues. Probably, like Stimson, Truman told himself that sparing Kyoto (and, belatedly, Tokyo) absolved him of charges that