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By Root 1021 0

in his name when the bomb was dropped. In his eyes, all that now mattered was that the Japanese government refused to respond positively to the Potsdam Declaration. Indeed, the earlier Magic intercepts between Sato and Togo had made Tokyo’s rejection certain, since the foreign minister explicitly ruled out unconditional surrender. For weeks past, use of the bomb had been almost inevitable. It now became absolutely so.

Many people of later generations and all nationalities have viewed the dropping of atomic weapons on Japan as events which, in their unique horror, towered over the war as a dark mountain bestrides the plain. In one sense this perception is correct, because the initiation of the nuclear age provided mankind with unprecedented power to destroy itself. Until the bombs had exploded, however, full understanding of their significance was confined to a few score scientists. To grasp the context in which the commitment to bomb Hiroshima was made, it seems necessary to acknowledge the cacophony amidst which all those involved, the political and military leaders of the U.S., were obliged to do their business. These were men in their fifties and sixties, weary after years of perpetual crisis such as world war imposes, bombarded daily with huge dilemmas.

Europe was in ruins and chaos, the Western Allies striving to contend with Stalin’s ruthlessness and greed, Britain’s bankruptcy, the starvation of millions. Each day brought to the desks of Truman, Stimson, Marshall and their staffs projections relating to the invasion of the Japanese homeland. The U.S. found itself obliged to arbitrate upon the future of half the world, while being implored to save as much as possible of the other half from the Soviets, even as war with Japan continued and mankind recoiled in horror from newsreel films of Hitler’s death camps. What could be done about Poland, about millions of displaced persons? About escaping Nazi war criminals and civil war in Greece? Could power in China be shared? Might the rise of the Communists in Italy and France be checked? Japan’s beleaguered Pacific garrisons continued to resist even though the Allies initiated no major operations against Hirohito’s armies overseas after June 1945. The British were preparing to land in Malaya. Almost every day, LeMay’s Superfortresses set forth from Guam and Saipan to incinerate more Japanese cities. Carrier aircraft strafed and bombed the home islands. Casualty lists broadcast grief to homes all over the U.S. and Britain. Apprehension overhung the fate of many thousands of Allied prisoners in Japanese hands.

In judging the behaviour of those responsible for ordering the atomic attacks, it seems necessary to acknowledge all this. The bomb was only the foremost of many huge issues with which these mortal men, movingly conscious of their own limitations, strove to grapple. In the course of directing a struggle for national survival, all had been obliged to make decisions which had cost lives, millions of lives, of both Allied servicemen and enemy soldiers and civilians. Most would have said wryly that this was what they were paid for. The direction of war is never a task for the squeamish. The U.S. had already participated in bombing campaigns which killed around three-quarters of a million German and Japanese civilians, and to which public opinion had raised little objection. It is much easier to justify the decision to drop the atomic bombs than the continued fire-raising offensive of the Twentieth Air Force. “The preoccupation845 of the historians’ debate with the necessity of using the bomb,” Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dockrill have written wisely, “has meant that it has been judged strategically against the prospective invasion [of Japan], rather than the actual air bombardment under way at the time and with which it was unavoidably linked in the minds of policy-makers.”

Poison gas was the only significant weapon available to the wartime Allies which was not employed against the Axis. Roosevelt opposed this for moral, or rather propagandistic, reasons; the British chiefly