Revisiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the path not taken
i.]
When August rolls around every year it is once again the season, at least in America, for a sort of ritual to go over the rights and wrongs of the decision by President Truman to drop the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ending the war against Japan in 1945. In a Gallup poll at the end of last century, Americans indicated that three of the top five stories of the twentieth century were World War II, women gaining the right to vote in 1920, and dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945; rounding up the top five stories, the next two were the Nazi Holocaust during World War II and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.[1]
In the report that accompanied the polling result prepared by Frank Newport, David Moore and Lydia Saad of the Gallup News Service, they wrote, “following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Americans overwhelmingly approved of the action, by a margin of 85% to 10%. And by a margin of 69% to 17%, Americans also said it was a good thing rather than a bad thing that the bomb had been developed at all.” Five decades later on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing in 1995, American opinion had declined to 59% approving the use of the bomb and 35% disapproving. “Even more dramatically,” wrote Newport, Moore and Saad, “the 1995 Gallup poll showed that 61% of Americans now thought it was a bad idea that the atomic bomb had been developed in the first place, with just 36% saying it was a good idea.”[2]
The change in public opinion registered in nineteen-nineties about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite 89% of Americans maintaining the view that World War II was the most “just” of all the major wars fought by the United States in its history, reflected an evolving perspective over time that the use of A-bomb to compel Japan’s surrender was not necessary and, likely, was immoral. J. Samuel Walker, an American historian, in a historiographical essay published ahead of the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing wrote, “the subject has, over the period of nearly six decades, received a great deal of attention from scholars. It has also produced bitter and highly polarized controversy. The publication of an enormous body of literature has failed to resolve the differences over President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use atomic bombs; indeed, it has chronically fueled the debate between the opposing positions.”[3] The opposing positions, as Walker characterized them, are the traditional (or conservative, hence on the right) interpretation insisting “the bomb was necessary to avert an invasion of Japan” and “avoid the loss of huge numbers of American lives”; and the revisionist (or radical, hence on the left) interpretation suggesting “the use of the bomb was not necessary to win the war because Japan was teetering on the verge of defeat and close to surrender.”
Any debate over past events of such magnitude, as was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are snapshots of changing attitudes and, unavoidably, “presentism” sneaks into understanding past events, instead of understanding them frozen within their own context. And yet, it is equally unavoidable to acknowledge that circumstance in the present, of explaining how it has come about through mediation of decisions made in the past, provides the motive to search for answers in history and, in this process, “revisionism” either resulting from discovery of new evidence or from re-examining past records with questions made urgent in the present may assist in enrichening our reading of past events.
At the beginning of this year Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 90 seconds to midnight due to the war in Ukraine. This is the closest the hands on the Doomsday Clock have advanced alarmingly to warn of a global nuclear catastrophe. This year also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, in a coup as part of regime change orchestrated by the CIA and agents of the military-industrial complex. The war in Ukraine and the circumstantial evidence behind the murder of Kennedy have in common aspects pertaining to nuclear weapons, their likely use in the one instance and their disarmament in the other. It is this foreground of the present circumstance, which frames my motive here to reconsider the controversy surrounding the history of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
ii.]
Harry S. Truman was selected as the running mate of President Franklin Roosevelt for his fourth term in the election of 1944. The Democrat Senator from Missouri was considered a safe choice when Roosevelt was advised by party officials that Vice President Henry Wallace would likely hurt the ticket in November, and James Byrne as Roosevelt’s Director of the Office of War Mobilization would fuel uncalled for controversy since he was an outspoken segregationist and there would be opposition from union members because of his decisions as director of war mobilization. On the evening of April 12, 1945, Truman was sworn in as the 33rd president in the White House following the death of President Roosevelt earlier that day in Warm Springs, Georgia. Following his swearing-in Truman held a meeting with members of Roosevelt’s Cabinet present and solemnly expressed to them his commitment in adhering to Roosevelt’s program and policies, and he hoped they would all remain in their jobs. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s senior Cabinet member and Secretary of War, expressed for all present the urgency to close ranks behind Truman and when the meeting ended, he remained behind for a closed-door private words with the president. Stimson informed Truman as a matter of greatest urgency and secrecy about a new explosive “gadget” of incredulous power. This was all that Stimson let Truman know at that occasion, which meant the president learned very little, and he was no better informed than he had been before the secretary of war stayed behind with the president when others departed.
Truman was vice president for eighty-two days and during this period he met Roosevelt privately on only two occasions. According to his biographer, David McCullough, “Truman had no experience in relations with Britain or Russia, no firsthand knowledge of Churchill or Stalin. He didn’t know the right people. He didn’t know Harriman [Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow]. He didn’t know his own Secretary of State [Edward Stettinius Jr], more than to say hello. He had no background in foreign policy, no expert or experienced advisers of his own to call upon for help.”[4] To his daughter Margaret, Truman confided, “Roosevelt never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for peace after the war.”[5]
Historian Michael Dobbs described Truman as “the Neophyte.” Dobbs wrote,
Precisely why Roosevelt chose Truman to be his vice president in 1944—over better-known politicians like Henry Wallace and Jimmy Byrnes—remained a mystery. The most plausible explanation was that he wanted someone who could unite rival wings of the Democratic Party. Representing a border state, Truman was neither a northern progressive nor a southern conservative. He revered FDR as the leader who had rescued America from the Great Depression and triumphed over Nazi Germany and Japan but was also aware of his faults. “He was the coldest man I ever met,” Truman recalled later. “He didn’t give a damn personally for me or for anyone else in the world as far as I could see. But he was a great president. He brought his country into the twentieth century.[6]
By the time Roosevelt died he had endeared himself to ordinary Americans whom he referred to during his first presidential campaign in 1932 as “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” and they, in turn, voted him into office four times. Mario Cuomo, elected governor of New York three times, in his keynote speech to the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, California, recalled Roosevelt, “He lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees.” Roosevelt’s biographer, Jean Edward Smith, wrote,
Three Presidents dominate American history: George Washington, who founded the country; Abraham Lincoln, who preserved it; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who rescued it from economic collapse and then led it to victory in the greatest war of all time. Elected for an unprecedented four terms, Roosevelt proved the most gifted American statesman of the twentieth century.[7]
And Seymour Martin Lipset in his study of American politics observed,
The saga of American history puts into sharp relief the controversies about the role of individual greatness in history. But however one comes to this debate, there can be little question that the hand of providence has been on a nation which finds a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt when it needs him.[8]
Truman’s immediate challenge in stepping into the Oval Office of Roosevelt, the man who saved capitalism and turned America into the “arsenal of democracy” during the war, was how well to steer the ship of state in keeping with Roosevelt’s masterplan for bringing an end to the war. According to Dobbs, “Roosevelt got his way through stealth and calculation, rarely revealing what was on his mind.”[9] Truman being in no position to fathom his predecessor’s mind recognized he would be greatly dependent on the counsel of Roosevelt’s team, yet he needed to avoid becoming a putty in their hands. The war in Europe ended in less than a month after Roosevelt’s death on May 8, 1945. But without Roosevelt it was unclear how to bring about Japan’s surrender, except by invading the country as was done in Europe in June 1944.
Two days after Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration on January 20, 1945, he departed on board the cruiser Quincy for Malta in the Mediterranean and then by aircraft to Yalta, Crimea, for the Big Three meeting with Stalin and Churchill. The Yalta Conference, February 4-11, was the last of several conferences Roosevelt traveled to attend overseas during the war. At the Tehran Conference of the Big Three in November-December 1943, the significant decision reached was the agreement that the Allied invasion of Europe by cross-channel landing in France would be sometime in May 1944, which Stalin had been asking for to bring some relief for the Red Army on the eastern front in Russia.
By the time the leaders began their plenary sessions in Yalta, the Russian army had entered Germany and reached the Oder River. The Soviet losses in three weeks between January 12 and February 4 when the Yalta Conference opened, exceeded more than three hundred thousand fatalities that were about the same as the total number of American battlefield losses in Europe and North Africa together through the entire war. Roosevelt and Churchill knew all along that the war in Europe would be decided in the east. Hitler had deployed during 1943-44 between 180 and 190 divisions in the east, while about a third as many German divisions were deployed in France and Italy. The simple arithmetic of the armies deployed by the Allied and the Axis powers in the European theatre reflected the emerging reality of what would be the balance of postwar power in Europe. As Dobbs explained,
Roosevelt’s relationship with Stalin was based on a harsh political calculation: to defeat one dictator, FDR had to ally himself with another. His White House files included a “military-strategic estimate,” dated August 1943, that Russia would occupy a “dominant position” in the anti-Hitler alliance even after the United States and Britain opened their long-awaited “second front” in France. The estimate stated bluntly that “without Russia in the war, the Axis cannot be defeated in Europe.” It went on to predict that Russia would dominate postwar Europe. “With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces.” The inescapable conclusion was that Russia “must be given every assistance, and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship.”[10]
Roosevelt’s priority for the Yalta Conference was to get from Stalin firm commitment that once the war against Germany was over, Russia would declare war against Japan and deploy his forces in the Pacific region. Again, the similar logic Roosevelt’s military planners had set forth for the European theatre applied against Japan. Dobbs wrote,
From Roosevelt’s perspective, there was an inverse relationship between Russian sacrifices and American sacrifices. The political calculation was brutally cynical and realistic: more dead Russians against fewer dead Americans. As the military planners had concluded in 1943, “with Russia an ally in the war against Japan, the war can be terminated in less time and at less expense in life and resources than if the reverse were the case. Should the war in the Pacific have to be carried on with an unfriendly or negative attitude on the part of Russia, the difficulties will be immeasurably increased.” The question was the price Stalin would exact in return for committing his country against Japan.”[11]
Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s ambassador in Moscow, laid before the president what price Stalin would ask for. This likely would be the return of the southern half of the Sakhalin island lost in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, the Kurile Islands to the north of Japan, the ports of Dairen and Port Arthur, and restoration of Russian rights over Manchuria. Roosevelt agreed. Stalin in return confirmed once Germany surrendered Russia would set aside the nonaggression pact with Japan by declaring war, and within three months of the end of the war in Europe the Russian army would invade Imperial Japan in the east.
Roosevelt was the architect and helmsman of the Grand Alliance he pulled together to defeat the Axis powers. At Yalta he got Stalin’s commitment on bringing Russia into the war against Japan, and his acceptance of Soviet participation in his scheme for the United Nations to replace the discredited League of Nations. These commitments from Stalin made the journey to Yalta worthwhile for Roosevelt. To his Treasury Secretary and Hyde Park neighbour, Henry Morgenthau Jr, Roosevelt had remarked that he was a juggler. “I never let my right hand know what my left hand does,” and that he was “perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.”[12]
Roosevelt departed by plane from Yalta on February 12 for Washington with a stopover in Cairo to board the cruiser Quincy waiting in the Suez Canal to take him back home. On board Quincy he took turns in meeting with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, King Farouk of Egypt, and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt had a cordial meeting with the Saudi king to whom he presented one of his wheelchairs and a DC-3 passenger airplane that sealed a friendship between America and Saudi Arabia that has lasted to the present.
It was visible to people around Roosevelt that he had worn himself out through the final phase of the 1944 election campaign and his travels before and after. The battle of Iwo Jima had begun on February 19 while Roosevelt was at sea. It ended with Japanese surrender on March 26. The battle of Okinawa began on April 1 and lasted until June 22. Roosevelt did not live to see the victory of American forces in taking Okinawa from Japanese army. They were both grim battles with heavy losses for American and Japanese forces. And as Truman mulled over the plans for the invasion of Japan set for November 1 at the earliest, the main concern for him and his Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was what would be the cost in American lives.
On returning home from Yalta Roosevelt told Daisy Suckley, his cousin, the “conference turned out better than he dared hoped for,” and to Adolf Berle, an early member of his “brain trust” and ambassador to Brazil, he mentioned, “I didn’t say the result was good. I said it was the best I could do.”[13] Roosevelt had in mind the situation in Eastern Europe, as Stalin’s Red Army overran Poland. He knew there was nothing that could be done in altering the overwhelming reality of Moscow gaining control of Eastern Europe and how important this was, when considered from Stalin’s perspective, for the strategic security of the Soviet Union in the context of Russian history that Poland had been the gateway thrice beginning with Napoleon in the invasion of Russia. It was also why Roosevelt worked tirelessly to build a relationship with Stalin so that regardless of difficulties ahead the relationship of the Big Three, in particular that between the Soviet Union as a landpower and the United States as a seapower, was essential in his mind for peace in postwar Europe and the Pacific.
Roosevelt gave his last speech to a joint session of Congress on March 1. Frail and failing in health, Roosevelt spoke while seated. He said,
The conference in Crimea was a turning point, I hope, in our history and therefore in the history of the world…
For the second time in the lives of most of us, this generation is face to face with the objective of preventing wars… The groundwork of a plan has now been furnished, and has been submitted to humanity for discussion and decision. No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been…
Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed them then. We cannot fail them again.[14]
Roosevelt did not mention the commitment Stalin had made with him to enter the Pacific war, so as not to tip-off the Japanese. But his senior most commanders knew what this meant in ending the war with Japan. And when Roosevelt left Washington for the last time for Warm Springs, Georgia, on March 29, there was yet no word for him from the leaders of the secret Manhattan Project on the “gadget” and none came before the president died two weeks later.
iii.]
Stimson received in the evening of July 16 a telegram from Washington informing him of the successful “Trinity” test of the “gadget”, the world’s first nuclear explosion in the plains of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Stimson was in Potsdam, as was Truman, for the Big Three meeting, and he immediately proceeded to inform the president of the news. The following day, July 17, at noon Stalin visited Truman ahead of the formal opening of the meeting at 5.00pm. The two leaders had lunch together and Stalin told Truman he intended, as promised to Roosevelt in Yalta, to declare war on Japan and invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Truman recorded in his diary later that night, “Most of the big points are settled. He'll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.”[15]
Churchill, Truman and Stalin at Potsdam, July 1945
Between that first meeting with Stalin and the end of the Potsdam meeting on August 1, Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. One of the finest accounts of this period is provided by Gar Alperovitz in his book The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, published in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversdary of the bombing. Both Roosevelt and Truman together with their team of civilian and military leaders knew of Japanese “peace feelers” from intercepted cable messages – U.S. intelligence had broken Japanese code early in the war – following Yalta conference in February. While heading for the Potsdam meeting on board the cruiser Augusta, Truman was given on July 12 the intercepted cable of Japan’s Foreign Minister Togo to Ambassador Sato in Moscow, which read, “We are now secretly giving consideration to the termination of the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan both at home and abroad.” A second “very urgent” cable intercepted the following day from Togo to Sato read,
His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated.
The cable then stated the main obstacle to peace being
so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on with all its strength for the honor and the existence of the Motherland.[16]
The insistence on unconditional surrender of the Axis powers in ending the war, which Roosevelt had announced in a press conference at the end of the Casablanca meeting with Churchill in January 1943, became moot after Germany’s surrender. Truman understood, as most members of his team considered the need for clarifying for Japan the terms of surrender, that he might be required to issue a revised statement. On May 8, Truman approved a statement released that was somewhat nuanced directed at Japan’s warlords. It read,
Our blows will not cease until the Japanese military and naval forces lay down their arms in unconditional surrender.
Just what does the unconditional surrender of the armed forces mean for the Japanese people?
It means the end of the war.
It means the termination of the influence of the military leaders who have brought Japan to the present brink of disaster…
Unconditional surrender does not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.[17]
There was no mention of the Emperor. In the intercepted cables of July when Truman was in mid-Atlantic headed for the Big Three meeting, Japan’s leaders took unconditional surrender to mean, unless clarified, the permanent removal of the Emperor and liquidation of the Throne. And General George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army under Roosevelt and Truman, during discussions in Potsdam cautioned any move to oust the Emperor would lead to a last-ditch defense by the Japanese.[18]
The news of the successful “Trinity” test shifted the focus away for Truman from the urgency to clarify the meaning of unconditional surrender for Japan to a hardening of position in dealing with Stalin in regard to Poland, the division of Germany, and reparation to Russia agreed in Yalta. According to Gar Alperovitz, “The advent of the atomic bomb was a truly extraordinary event, one which affected attitudes on virtually every issue.”[19] Now the president had a decision to make given the choice of using the A-bomb to end the war with unconditional surrender as he defined what it meant in line with his approved statement of May 8, or await Japan surrendering on or ahead of Russia’s entrance into the Pacific war.
Personality being politics, Truman’s decision to bring James Byrnes into his cabinet as Secretary of State would become a critical factor in the decision on the use of A-bomb. Byrnes had served as congressman and senator from South Carolina, and was nominated by Roosevelt as Associate Justice to the Supreme Court. With the war on hand Roosevelt requested Byrnes to step down from the Court and join his administration in managing the entire domestic economy, while the president devoted his full attention to overseeing the direction of the war. Byrnes relationship with Truman went back to the period when both were together in the Senate, and Byrnes became a sort of mentor to the junior Senator from Missouri. Byrnes was miffed when Roosevelt did not take him as his running mate in the 1944 election, and felt he was more deserving and policy-wise better equipped for the job than was Truman. Byrnes was sworn into office as Secretary on July 3 and accompanied Truman to Potsdam. In the Interim Committee (precursor of the National Security Council) set up on the recommendation of Stimson in early May to study the development and recommend application of the A-bomb for the president, Truman placed Byrnes as one of eight members on the committee. Byrnes role in the Interim Committee, then as Secretary of State, and his prior relationship with Truman that made for off-the-record private discussions during the period between the “Trinity” test and the Potsdam meeting helped shape the president’s eventual decision.
In the period immediately after Germany’s surrender a significant segment of scientists at work on the Manhattan Project raised concerns about the use of A-bomb. Many of them had gone to work on the project fearing Germany might build the bomb and Hitler use it. That fear did not materialize and questions arose on the implications of their work going forward. Leo Szilard, Hungarian-born physicist who had convinced Einstein in 1939 to sign a letter addressed to Roosevelt he drafted to initiate effort that eventually became the Manhattan Project, was among those scientists concerned on the use of A-bomb against Japan as unjustified, unless the terms of surrender was made public and Japan given an opportunity to surrender. There were concerns that the use of A-bomb would set up an arms race between Russia and America, and its use against Japan would weaken the moral position of America in the eyes of most nations of the world. In late May Szilard with two other scientists met with Byrnes to express their views and left the meeting dejected.
Byrnes let it be known to Szilard and his companions that the A-bomb was not needed for Japanese surrender, but to make Russia more “manageable” in Europe. This was a view Byrnes also discussed with Truman, that the A-bomb would position the United States to dictate terms after the war. And similarly, at the meeting of the Interim Committee on May 31 Byrnes opposed General Marshall’s suggestion of inviting Russian scientists to witness the atomic test, strongly opposed any prior disclosure of the A-bomb’s existence, and made modification of the Interim Committee’s recommendation of June 1 meeting to read that “the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible.”[20]
In a White House military planning meeting for June 18, Truman was briefed by General Marshall on the basis of intercepted cables. General Marshall informed the president,
An important point about Russian participation in the war is that the impact of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them into capitulation at that time or shortly thereafter if we land in Japan.[21]
The “if” in General Marshall’s brief was indicative that no decision on invading Japan had been made before Truman departed Washington for the Big Three meeting. A month later in Potsdam Truman noted in his diary Stalin confirming with him the Soviet entrance in the Pacific war by mid-August. The JCS knew by then the use of the A-bomb was not required, nor an invasion of the Japanese home islands was needed to obtain Japanese surrender. The Pacific war was about to end.
General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, was not included in the American delegation for the Potsdam meeting. But Eisenhower visited Potsdam frequently to consult with General Marshall, Stimson and President Truman. It was from Stimson, the cabinet officer responsible for the development of the A-bomb, that Eisenhower first learned of the “Trinity” test and that the government was prepared to drop the bomb on Japan unless the surrender came quickly. Eisenhower felt depressed listening to Stimson. He recalled,
So I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.[22]
Eisenhower made his view about the use of A-bomb known to Stimson, Secretary of War, and told Truman “there was no question but that Japan was already thoroughly beaten.”[23] Eisenhower remained consistent in his view regarding Japan and the use of the A-bomb in later years but, more importantly, as president he was twice recommended by his National Security Council and the JCS that the A-bomb be used; first, in Vietnam in protecting the French at Dien Bien Phu and, for the second time, against China during the crisis in the Strait of Formosa. Both times Eisenhower refused.
iv.]
In the middle of the Big Three meeting Churchill returned to London on July 25 to learn the result of the British general election called after V-E day in Europe. At the end of the previous day plenary session, July 24, Truman had walked over to Stalin and mentioned, as recorded in his memoir Year of Decisions “that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.”[24] Stalin masked his knowledge that atomic spies – such as Klaus Fuch, the German physicist with British citizenship, and Ted Hall, “a precociously brilliant nineteen-year-old with a Harvard B.S. in physics” – while at work in the Manhattan Project had provided valuable information to the Soviets.[25]
Before Churchill returned after losing his premiership accompanied by the new British prime minister, Clement Attlee, and the new foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, the American delegation released on July 26 the Potsdam Declaration signed by Truman, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese nationalist president. The terms of surrender were spelled out, the Cairo Declaration of December 1943 was mentioned, and the final paragraph read,
We call upon the Government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.[26]
There was no mention about the Emperor, hence no clarification provided on the meaning of unconditional surrender that Japanese were seeking regarding the future of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne. Instead, the Potsdam Declaration stated, “There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest,” which the Japanese government reasonably could not avoid taking to mean also the Emperor.
Moreover, prior to the release of the Potsdam Declaration there was no discussion by Americans with their Russian counterparts and when the Soviet foreign minister Molotov called on Byrnes and raised the subject of Stalin’s exclusion in the proclamation, he was told since Russia was not at war with Japan, “We [Americans] did not want to embarrass you.”[27] The crack in the unity of the Big Three had become discernible, and it would begin to widen.
The Potsdam meeting wrapped up on August 1 and Truman departed early next morning for Portsmouth, England, to board the cruiser Augusta for the journey back home. Stimson had left earlier for Washington and cabled the president that preparations for atomic bombing of Japan were complete. The Japanese government had decided to ignore the Allied ultimatum set forth in the Potsdam Declaration. Truman replied to Stimson, “Release when ready but not sooner than August 2.”
The decision to use the A-bomb was reached by Truman, according to his biographer David McCullough, “in the morning of Tuesday, July 24, when, at 11.30, the combined American and British Chiefs of Staff convened with Truman and Churchill in the dining room. This was the one time when Truman, Churchill, and their military advisers were all around a table, in Churchill’s phrase. From this point it was settled: barring some unforeseen development, the bomb would be used within a few weeks. Truman later told… the day of the decision was the same day he informed Stalin [of a new weapon], and that occurred late the afternoon of the 24th.”[28] Truman stated later,
The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used. The top military advisers to the President recommended its use, and when I talked to Churchill he unhesitatingly told me that he favored the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war.[29]
What went unstated by Truman was the influence James Byrne, Secretary of State, had in the making of his decision.
A day’s journey away from reaching home port, Truman received cable around noon on August 6 that an A-bomb was dropped sixteen hours earlier on Hiroshima at 08.16 in the morning local time. Three days later in the predawn hours of August 9 the Soviet Red Army poured across the Japanese-occupied borders of Manchuria ahead of August 15, the date which Stalin had indicated to Truman in Potsdam he would launch Russia’s war against Japan. Ten hours after Russian forces swept into Manchuria, a second A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Six days later on August 15 Emperor Hirohito announced over radio Japan’s unconditional surrender. The Second World War had finally ended.[30]
v.]
Truman’s recollection of the decision to use the atomic bomb was at best half-truth. But it was the half that got the frontpage news in the press in the immediate period following the end of the war, as the president’s popularity soared. In the middle of June before Truman headed for the Potsdam meeting a Gallup poll reported 87% of the public approved of his presidency.[31] And later Truman’s popularity was buttressed by the view which became widely held, that his decision for using the A-bomb saved thousands of American lives otherwise lost if the invasion of Japanese homeland had been required for ending the war. This was the story line in editorial opinions of most newspapers and magazine across America that took hold of the public mind about the Pacific war.
It would take time for memoirs, autobiographies, biographies and oral history of the senior most American military, naval and air force commanders to appear before the first impression of the necessity in using the A-bomb, as recalled by Truman, began to be reappraised and revised as official war records were made available. Once the official documents became open to historians then reassessment of war decisions became unavoidable.
The record of intercepted Japanese cables through spring and summer of 1945 indicated Japan’s rapidly deteriorating military and economic situation, revealed “peace-feelers” sent out through third parties to Washington for clarification of requirements for the unconditional surrender, and made known the readiness in Tokyo to surrender provided removal of the Emperor and the destruction of the institution of the Throne were not required. The intercepted cable of July 12, for instance, from Japan’s Foreign Minister Togo to Ambassador Sato in Moscow made amply clear to Truman and the JCS that Japan was teetering at the edge of defeat and surrender, but the president chose not to modify the meaning of “unconditional surrender” with reference to the Emperor. The army officer responsible for preparing summaries of intercepted cables for the president in 1945, Brigadier-General Carter W. Clarke, went on record after the war to state,
we brought them [the Japanese] down to an abject surrender through the accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone, and when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.[32]
Eisenhower had made known his view to Stimson and Truman in Potsdam on the unnecessity of the use of A-bomb, “since Japan was already thoroughly beaten.” His view was not considered. General Douglas MacArthur, appointed the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific theatre on August 14, was the senior army commander in the Pacific war and his view was not sought, nor was he informed of the atomic bomb’s existence until briefed on August 1 ahead of the preparation needed for the bombing. MacArthur repeatedly stated after the war that in his military judgment the bombing was unnecessary.[33]
The view of General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, as Alperovitz discussed in some detail, was enigmatic and complex. In strictly adhering to the military protocol of the chain of command in following orders of the president being the commander-in-chief, Marshall was extremely discreet and drew the line between military matters for him to consider and political matters that were for the president to decide. As army chief, the Manhattan Project was under his command authority and funds for the highly secret “gadget” appropriated as part of the congressional approved military budget. At a JCS meeting in Washington in mid-June he indicated Russian entry would be decisive in bringing about Japan’s surrender and this meant, though it went unmentioned as the “Trinity” test had not occurred, there would therefore be no need for atomic bombing. During the Potsdam meeting on July 18 the Chiefs led by General Marshall recommended the president modify the terms of surrender. According to Alperovitz,
Perhaps the simplest explanation is the most obvious. Although Marshall had ardently sought to change the surrender formula, once Truman rejected his advice and decided not to offer assurances concerning the Emperor, then the only plausible way to achieve the commander in chief’s stated objective of “unconditional surrender” was, indeed, to use the atomic bomb.[34]
The senior most army air force commanders in the war were united in expressing their view in public after the war that atomic bombing was unnecessary. The air force was under the U.S. army command at the time and its chief, General Henry “Hap” Arnold though a member of the Joint Chiefs was subordinate to General Marshall, and in agreement with Marshall that if commanded to use the bomb his officers would obey orders. He remained in public discreet on the subject, as Marshall was his superior officer.
But Arnold’s subordinate commanders of the army air force, such as Generals Curtis LeMay, Claire Chennault and George C. Kenney, went on record saying, as Kenney did, “we had the Japs licked anyhow. I think they would have quit probably within a week or so of when they did quit.”[35] LeMay was sent by Arnold to brief the JCS that due to the effectiveness of the air force’s massive fire bombings of Japan in mid-summer there would be no more targets left by September to bomb. After retirement LeMay mentioned in an interview, “We went ahead and dropped the bombs because President Truman told me to do it…All the atomic bomb did was, in all probability, save a few days.”[36]
Similarly, all the senior naval commanders, including Admirals William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, shared the view that Japan was near defeat and atomic bombing was unnecessary. Leahy was Fleet Admiral and senior most officer in the U.S. armed forces during the war, and served as chief of staff to Roosevelt and Truman. On June 18 Leahy adviced Truman to clarify the surrender formula. When he got the word of the Hiroshima bombing, Leahy told his secretary, Dorothy Rinquist, “Dorothy, we will regret this day. The United States will suffer, for war is not to be waged on women and children.”[37]
vi.]
The counterfactual question that hangs over Truman’s decision to use the A-bomb is if Roosevelt had lived would he have decided similarly. David McCullough in his biography of Truman writes that no one doubted Roosevelt would use it. McCullough quotes from Stimson’s diary, “At no time, from 1941 to 1945, did I ever hear it suggested by the President, or by any other responsible member of the government, that atomic energy should not be used in the war.”[38] And Leahy is quoted saying, “I know FDR would have used it in a minute to prove that he hadn’t wasted two billion dollars [i.e., at present rate in excess of $20 billion].”[39]
But, as the historical record shows, there was near unanimity among the senior most commanders of the U.S. armed forces in June-July 1945 that atomic bombing of an exhausted Japan teetering at the edge of defeat was unnecessary. There was also near unanimity among them that the term “unconditional surrender” pertaining to the Emperor be clarified. And Truman was informed by Stalin in Potsdam that he would keep his promise made to Roosevelt at Yalta to declare war on Japan and, accordingly, Truman made note of it in his diary the same evening adding the words “Fini Japs.” Roosevelt would have on hand the same intelligence that Truman did from intercepted cables, same concerns about the use of atomic bombing addressed to him by his commanders, and the knowledge that Stalin was committed to declare war on Japan, and thus when the entire context of decision-making is taken into account the question whether Roosevelt would decide similarly as Truman did, or not, becomes moot. According to Alperovitz,
We can only speculate for instance, as to what Roosevelt’s response would have been to the Emperor’s July 13 intervention. FDR’s general approach to the Soviet Union also was both more subtle and more oriented to cooperation—and it is reasonable to assume that arguments against surprising and thereby indirectly threatening the Soviet ally might well have been more favorably received.[40]
Roosevelt signed with Churchill the Hyde Park Agreement of September 19, 1944, on the use of the bomb that gets mentioned in support of Truman’s decision. The language of the Agreement, however, was tentative and cautious, for it read as follows:
The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a “bomb” is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.[41]
The availability of the A-bomb would require, as noted, “mature consideration” of the intelligence available and “warning” given to Japan prior to its use. By the time Potsdam meeting wrapped up, the decision made by Truman was lacking the sort of “mature consideration” the Agreement mentioned and no consideration was given of “warning” Japan of the new weapon on hand that would be used if surrender was not forthcoming. And then, instead of any arrangement made for private confidential session with Stalin, the Soviet delegation was not consulted prior to the release of the Potsdam Declaration. Truman could not have been unsure after having received full de-briefing of intercepted cables that once the Red Army invaded Manchuria by mid-August Japanese capitulation would follow without the necessity of using the A-bomb, or launching an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Why then the rush to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This question was not asked in the euphoria following the V-J day, and if asked it would have been muzzled in the deluge of newspaper editorials in support of Truman’s decision having saved American lives by bringing an end to the war. The tone of the editorials was of the sort found in The New York Times of August 12, three days after the bombing of Nagasaki and three days before the Emperor’s announcement of surrender on August 15, “By their own cruelty and treachery our enemies had invited the worst we could do to them.”[42]
But the question “why the rush” was unavoidable, as reports came from Hiroshima and Nagasaki describing the destruction wrought and some 200,000 Japanese incinerated by the bombings. P.M.S. Blackett, British Nobel Prize winning physicist, wrote, “The dropping of the atomic bomb was not so much the last military act of the second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.”[43] Einstein, in an interview published August 18, 1946 in London’s Sunday Express, said the use of the atomic bomb “was precipitated by a desire to end the war in the Pacific by any means before Russia’s participation. I am sure that if President Roosevelt had still been there, none of that would have been possible.”[44]
vii.]
The road not taken mistakeningly or deliberately by Truman that Roosevelt had painstakingly marked out during the war would have the most deleterious of unintended consequences for America and the world. It might be said that Roosevelt’s unique four-term presidency when it came to foreign policy was shaped at its beginning by his recognition in November 1933 of the Soviet Union, which ended sixteen years of its non-recognition by Washington when full diplomatic relationship with Moscow was established. This relationship was then nurtured by Roosevelt with the understanding that regardless of difficulties during the war it would be the mainstay for peace in Europe, Asia, and the emergent postcolonial world after the war.
Elliott Roosevelt, one of the four surviving sons of the president, published a year after the death of his father in 1946 an account of his father during the war titled As He Saw It. Elliott had volunteered to join the Army Air Forces in 1940 ahead of the war he saw coming, rose in rank to become brigadier-general, and accompanied on occasions his father as an aide to a few of the war-time conferences the president attended during which time he heard his father confide privately to him how he saw the war unfolding, his relations with Churchill and Stalin, and the nature of postwar peace he conceived for the good of all countries. In Yalta, Elliott wrote,
Wisely, solemnly, and truly, the Three set it down as their belief that: “Only with the continuing and growing cooperation and understanding among our three countries and among all the peace-loving nations can… be realized a secure and lasting peace. …” The first word of that quotation deserves attention. So does the number: Three.
Harry Hopkins is my witness for the statement that the unity of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt was a firmer and more tangible thing at Yalta than at Teheran. And it was evident that Father’s role, even more than at earlier conferences, was that of leader. It is not by chance that he sat in the middle, when the pictures were taken. He dominated Winston Churchill more completely than before; Joseph Stalin was likewise prepared to heed Father’s counsel, to accept Father’s solutions.[45]
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, February 1945
Elliott Roosevelt’s account provided an intimate perspective of Roosevelt’s thinking and approach in what has come to be known since as confidence-building measures in diplomacy and peacemaking. Roosevelt by all account was a statesman par excellence. He would not have precipitated an act of using the atomic bomb on Japan at that moment in the Pacific war, as he would have known, when it had become unnecessary for ending it and that in doing so, without taking Stalin into confidence, it would damage the relationship most vital for both countries in building trust upon which would rest as he had conceived the structure of world peace.
Truman failed to intuit Roosevelt’s masterplan, the United Nations, required of both Washington and Moscow to work in tandem, not at cross-purpose. This is why Roosevelt insisted on unanimity of the Big Three by providing for veto so that decisions would not be engineered to subvert the interest of any one of them. Elliott Roosevelt distilled his father’s thinking in his own words, as follows:
At Yalta… Father and Stalin approved the concept of the veto power for the Big Three, basing their arguments on the simple, crystal-clear fact that if the peace is to be maintained it can be maintained only if all the world’s greatest powers concur. If two of them fall out with the third, if one falls out with the other two, the peace is in danger. Only unity and integrity of purpose can save the peace. …
Father was categorically insistent on the need for maintaining the utmost integrity among the nations, and especially among the Big Three. And this approach to the veto principle preserved that integrity.[46]
But Elliott Roosevelt also noticed the effort of those seeking to undermine the promise of peace for which his father had worked until death.
These saboteurs of international unity are headed by the men who insist that the principle of the veto power is wrong. These are the men who either through ignorance or cupidity blink the fact that in a world dominated by three powers, the U.S.A, the U.S.S.R., and the U.K., all three must work in concert if the peace is to be maintained. Nor is it enough to contend that the Soviets are so stubborn and so greedy that no self-respecting power can maintain unity with them, without—horrid word!—appeasing them.[47]
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart from being the opening shots of the Cold War also got the nuclear arms race to begin in full throttle. Stalin demanded from Igor Kurchatov, the scientist in charge of the Soviet atomic bomb program to hasten the delivery of the nuclear weapon. Kurchatov delivered in August 1949 what Stalin had demanded of him after Hiroshima.
viii.]
Between the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and four years later the test of the Soviet nuclear weapon, the former partners in the military alliance that defeated the Axis powers, as if by the flip of a switch, became enemies in an armed peace with nuclear weapons pointed at each other. Four days after the V-E day, Churchill sent an alarming telegram on May 12 to Truman. The message read,
I am profoundly concerned about the European situation… I learn that half the American Air Force in Europe has already begun to move to the Pacific theatre… Our Armies also are under previous arrangements likely to undergo a marked reduction. The Canadian Army will certainly leave… What will be the position in a year or two, when the British and American Armies have melted and the French has not yet been formed on any major scale, when we may have a handful of divisions mostly French, and when Russia may choose to keep two or three hundred on active service? An iron curtain is drawn upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of the line Lubeck – Trieste – Corfu will soon be completely in their hands.[48]
We read in Elliott Roosevelt’s book about his father as he might have seen it, the following in response to Churchill,
Iron curtains do not simply grow. There are reasons for their existence. If a Churchill could talk about an iron curtain in Europe, a Stalin could point to the reasons for its necessity… In my effort to get back to first and underlying causes for our critical present, I note only that it was the United States and Great Britain who first shook the mailed fist, who first abrogated the collective decisions.
And it should be noted, too, that in the world shakedown that followed the end of the shooting, we vacated the vitally important role of operating as mediator between Great Britain and the Soviet Union, the only two nations whose security interests clash today. Rather than arbitrating those differences, as Father had always been careful to do, we chose sides; worse than that, we did not simply line up beside Britain, we lined up in back of her.[49]
The acrimony that set in among the Big Three became the backdrop in the turning of America into national security state. After the euphoria of the end of war dissolved a miasma of fear spread. Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in March 1933 had said, “my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and he made this the prominent theme of his presidency in dealing with domestic and foreign challenges Americans confronted during his time in office.
But fear, or the “red scare” over communism and communists, which gripped Americans soon after the war ironically provided the impetus to the Truman administration in the building of “national security” apparatus to confront real or imagined threats the Soviet Union appeared to pose for America as self-proclaimed leader of the “free world.”
Under Truman the Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, set up the Department of Defense, the National Security Council to assist the president, unified the armed forces under secretary of defense, and created the CIA and the National Security Agency. These were the “dragon seeds” of what together became the unelected “fourth branch” of the government not provided for in the constitution, a self-perpetuating “national security” bureaucracy running the multiplicity of intelligence and federal policing agencies that would come to include FBI, ATF, DEA, DHS, under the president’s authority, their funds congressionally provided for the protection of America, and whose operations remain veiled in secrecy. It was the making of what David Wise and Thomas B. Ross described in their book The Invisible Government, published in the early nineteen-sixties. And the irony that would come to haunt Americans was how did their constitutional republic incrementally drifted in operational term as national security state in the direction of its dreaded opponent. Political scientists Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington in the early nineteen-sixties collaborated in offering a “theory of convergence” to explain why “the Soviet Union and the United States are becoming more alike.”[50]
The nineteen-thirties of the depression years, and the war that followed, greatly changed society and politics in America. It was not “scarcity” but “glut” that brought about the crash of the Wall Street, job losses and the rise in spread of unemployed workers. The remedy worked out in the New Deal policies pushed by Roosevelt was to raise overall demand in the economy through public spending by the government. The size of government as a result began to expand. And then it was the demonstration effect in the use of the atomic bomb that profoundly altered the meaning of warfare with massed armies in the new age of nuclear weapons. In an essay published in October 1945, George Orwell predicted the A-bomb would likely “put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’”.[51] To manage the cold war situation in a constant state of nuclear preparedness a permanent bureaucracy of civilian technocrats and military personnel arose. The Truman presidency was the inflection point, following the president’s decision to use the atomic bomb, in the eventual make over of the national security state into what the 45th president, Donald J. Trump, came to call “the Deep State.”
General Eisenhower succeeded Truman in the White House in 1953 and like General Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president after the Civil War, he was a commanding officer who led his his country’s army to victory in a great war. During his presidency Eisenhower kept America out of war, and on the eve of his departure from the White House warned Americans of the looming peril from within. In his farewell address broadcast on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower said,
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. But… we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to
this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all the United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in American experience…
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative… As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.[52]
ix.]
John F. Kennedy came into the White House in January 1961, like Roosevelt before him, with a vision of a New Frontier to explore and master. It was a vision of an optimist. And according to John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard professor in economics who had worked in the Roosevelt administration, that despite the cold war fears America had become The Affluent Society he described in his best-selling book published in 1958. But no sooner Kennedy took his inaugural oath, he got entangled in the policy devised by the CIA to overthrow the regime that had seized power in Cuba under the leadership of Fidel Castro in January 1959.
Following the planned failure of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, Kennedy refused to authorize the JCS despatch support from the regular army in assisting mercenaries from the Cuban exile community in the CIA-directed operation. Kennedy, as a result, became the detested leader of the principals in the “invisible government” for being soft on Cuba.
In turning Cuba communist, Fidel Castro had made it a Soviet outpost barely a hundred miles off the coast of Florida. This was a breach of the Monroe Doctrine to keep the western hemisphere secure and off-limit to any foreign powers, which would be viewed as a hostile act by the United States. When it became known in October 1962 that the Soviet Union had prepared to install missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, the Cuban missile crisis broke out that brought Washington and Moscow eye-ball to eye-ball in a “game of chicken” armed with nuclear bombs. Seventeen years after the atomic bombing of Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States had brought the world to the edge of nuclear armageddon. The crisis was resolved through public diplomacy and back-channel communications between Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Premier Khrushchev. The Soviet leader withdrew the missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy ordered the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey.
The lesson from the Cuban missile crisis taken by both Kennedy and Khrushchev was peaceful coexistence between the two nuclear-armed countries regardless of their ideological differences demanded nuclear disarmament. Kennedy spelled out his view in the commencement address he gave at the American University in Washington in June 1963. He reached out to the Soviet people and government with an understanding of their history and their wartime losses in magnitude greater than that of any other nation in the war against the Axis powers that was unprecedented. He proposed nuclear disarmament beginning with atmospheric test-ban of nuclear weapons, and it became the basis for the Limited Test Ban Treaty ratified in October 1963.[53]
In a world frightened over the hair-trigger possibility of nuclear war, the partnership of Kennedy and Khruschev in together signing the first ever disarmament treaty in the nuclear era showed the pathway out of what Orwell had described as “a permanent state of ‘cold war’.” [54] But it did not go well with those who ran the “invisible government” of, by, and for the military-industrial complex. Kennedy had become for them a marked man for assassination as he pushed back on members of the unelected cabal, like the CIA Director Allen Dulles, of the national security establishment with their thinking and policies of how to keep running “perpetual war for perpetual peace” against which Eisenhower had warned. Kennedy’s last act was to sign on October 11, 1963 the secret order for withdrawal of the first batch of one thousand U.S. personnel from Vietnam by the end of the year in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #263, as a prelude of “all out by ’65.” According to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (USAF), who had served as a staff officer with the JCS and became a critic of the CIA after retirement,
[I]ntimate groups of High Cabal principals quietly discussed this new policy and what it would do to their carefully planned, twenty-year objective: the “Saigon Solution.” With NSAM #263 and related policy actions, such as changes in military procurement methods, it was clear that President Kennedy stood between them and their own goals.
It was also clear that this latest “all out by ’65” policy was going to assure JFK’s reelection. He had to go.[55]
Kennedy was gunned down in broad daylight on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn the same evening as president in the flight returning the slain president to the nation’s capital. Four days later Johnson signed NSAM #273 to reverse Kennedy’s policy initiated with NSAM #263. Johnson followed in March 1964 with NSAM #288 that, as Prouty noted, “marked the full escalation of the Vietam War that involved 2,600,000 Americans directly, with 8,744,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during that period.”[56]
By “Saigon Solution” was meant, as discussed by Prouty, in the context of nuclear stalemate that came about with the Soviet Union acquiring atomic bomb the war profiteers would find the means to wage wars of choice as wars of necessity. Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler of the U.S. Marine Corp and one of the most decorated military officers of the pre-World War II era, after more than three decades of service in Central America, Philippines and China wrote his memoir titled War is a Racket. The Korean war became a testing-ground of the “Saigon Solution” as proxy wars in the peripheries of the two nuclear armed military superpowers.
The killing of Kennedy and the deep-dive by Johnson into the making of the Vietnam war transitioned the military-industrial complex into the full blown Deep State in which the government in Washington morphed into a criminal-rogue enterprise behind the façade of constitutional republic. The mask of republican democracy came off with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. With the mask removed, “war as racket” being business of the Deep State came to be unapologetically displayed in promoting color revolutions abroad accompanied with regime change operations, proxy wars, rigged elections at home, financing thuggish bands of non-state actors, such as the Contras in Central America, Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East as “freedom fighters”, laundering money, and having vassals, such as the member states of NATO and Israel, readily performing their roles assigned by Washington, as in keeping the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia on the burner.
x.]
It might be said that nothing is preordained in human affairs. Political leaders have choices made available to them from which to choose how to act, as do individuals. And once decision is made the consequences of the decision take a life of their own. Robert Oppenheimer reciting from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu scripture, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” following the Trinity test was expressing his awakening to what unearthly power of destruction with unimaginable consequences he had a hand in unlocking; and similarly, Admiral William Leahy on hearing of the bombing of Hiroshima telling Dorothy Rinquist, his secretary, that “we will regret this day” for what was done was not only unnecessary but also immoral in waging “war on women and children.”
Truman in the summer of 1945 at Potsdam had a choice to make which of two paths to take in ending the Pacific war. The path not taken has made all the difference for Americans and for the rest of the world.
_______________________________________
Notes:
1. Frank Newport, David W. Moore and Lydia Saad, “The Most Important Events of the Century From the Viewpoint of the People,” Gallup News Service, December 6, 1999.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/3427/most-important-events-century-from-viewpoint-people.aspx
2. Ibid.
3. J. Samuel Walker, “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 29, No. 2, April 2005), pp. 311-334.
4. D. McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 355.
5. Ibid.
6. M. Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman: From World War to Cold War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), pp. 162-163.
7. J.E. Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007), p. ix.
8. S.M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), p. 14.
9. Dobbs, Six Months in 1945, p. 163.
10. Ibid., p. 18.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., p. 79.
13. Smith, FDR, p. 632.
14. H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Random House, Inc., 2008), p. 808.
15. “Excerpts from Truman’s diary from the Potsdam conference (Dated entries from July 17 to August 10, 1945)”. https://hsi.wm.edu/cases/bomb/bomb_documents.html
16. G. Alperovitz, The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 232-234.
17. Ibid., p. 39.
18. Ibid., 292.
19. Ibid., p. 249.
20. Ibid., p. 213.
21. Ibid., p. 123.
22. Cited in J.E. Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 450.
23. Alperovitz, op.cit., p. 353.
24. See Robert C. Williams & Philip L. Cantelon (editors), The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present 1939-1984 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), p. 55.
25. See Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 285-287.
26. See the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv02/d1382
27. Dobbs, op.cit., p. 338.
28. McCullough, op.cit., p. 442.
29. Ibid.
30. See timeline of Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombing and Japan’s unconditional surrender:
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-bombing-timeline/
31. McCullough, op. cit., p. 398.
32. Alperovitz, op. cit., p. 359.
33. Ibid., p. 350.
34. Ibid., p. 365.
35. Ibid., p. 336.
36. Ibid., p. 340.
37. Ibid., p. 326.
38. McCullough, op. cit., p. 440.
39. Ibid.
40. Alperovitz, op.cit., p. 663.
41. R.C. Williams & P.L. Cantelon, The American Atom (op.cit.), p. 45.
42. Cited in Alperovitz, op.cit., p. 427.
43. P.M.S. Blackett, Fear, War, and the Bomb: Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949), p. 139.
44. Cited in Alperovitz, op.cit., p. 663.
45. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), pp. 240-241.
46. Ibid., p. 239.
47. Ibid.., pp. 251-252.
48. See Churchill’s telegram to Truman: https://www.churchillarchiveforschools.com/themes_key-questions_churchill-and-the-cold-war_the-sources_source-3
49. Elliott Roosevelt, op. cit., pp. 254-255.
50. Z. Brzezinski and S.P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), p. 9.
51. George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Tribune (London), 19 October 1945.
http://www.george-orwell.org/You_and_the_Atomic_Bomb/o.html
52. Eisenhower’s farewell address:
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
53. See my essay, “Blessed are the peacemaker: Recalling JFK”:
https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/blessed-are-the-peacemakers-recalling
54. Orwell, op.cit.
55. L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (New York: A Citadel Press Book, 1996), p. xxxiv.
56. Ibid.