The Decision to Drop the Bomb

The decision to drop the bomb

Source: Martin Sherwin’s A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its legacies

September 1944:

Roosevelt: “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.”

--Secretary of state Edward Stettinus didn’t even know about the Manhattan Project—he was informed by Roosevelt on December 30, 1944. By this time “plans were underway for training the crews of the 509th composite Group for their mission against Japan.”

--Roosevelt and Churchill and a few in the French Government were country leaders privy to the atomic bomb project. Roosevelt and Churchill often discussed telling Stalin, leader of the SU. But Roosevelt wanted “assurance of cooperation with the soviets before the soviets were told anything about the bomb.” The question of postwar control of atomic energy was the main issue (as it is today). finally, someone was grasping the full magnitude of the problem of the atomic bomb after the war.

--In the Spring of 1945, scientists were coming closer and closer to having a test bomb ready and things within the government seemed to be getting out of hand. “On April 3 stimson resolved to be the voice of moderation and restraint within the administration. Just 10 days after that decision was made Roosevelt was dead. Relations with the SU had deteriorated even further. Truman did not inherit the question of whether that certainty ought to be fixed (using the bomb); he inherited the answer.” The decision to use the bomb to end the war could no longer be distringuished from “the desire to use it to stabilize the peace.”

--As Truman prepares for the potsdam conference, Lt. Groves issued this notice to Truman: “’At 0530, 16 July 1945, in a remote section of the Alamogordo Air Base, NM, the first full scale test was made of the implosion type atomic fission bomb…the test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone. based on the data which it has been possible to work up to date, I estimate the energy generated to be in excess of the equivalent of 15000-20000 tons of tnt; and this is a conservative estimate.’ a mushroom cloud shot 41,000 feet, a crash that broke a window 125 miles away, a crater 1200 feet and a 40 ton steel tower ½ mile away was destroyed.” As a side note he added, “The pentagon was not a safe shelter from such a bomb.”

--As early as May 1945, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew had urged the president to modify the insistence on “unconditional surrender. The Japanese would never give up,” he argued. But this surrender had “embodied for the American public what the sacrifices of war seemed to be all about.”

--Truman went to Potsdam to secure a Soviet declaration of war against Japan but that quickly changed at Potsdam when Stalin demanded much—including most of Eastern Europe. Churchill had decided by Potsdam to tell the Soiets of the bomb to help negotiate peace after the war. Truman did not agree. On July 24, at Potsdam, Truman said to stalin: “we have a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin’s reply was unexpectedly brief: “He was glad to hear it and hoped we could make good use of it against the Japanese.” Unfortunately, Stalin had taken Truman’s information as a threat and the stage for the cold war was set.

--Decision Time. The tokyo firebombings were to “weaken the will of the people and government to continue war.” Manhatten Project scientiests met in May 1945 to discuss using the bomb. The scientists included Robert Oppenheimer and Lt. GRoves. They agreed that the bomb should only be used for “1. obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and 2. making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized.”

--Two weeks after trinity test shot (July 1945) Hiroshima was destroyed:

“’The gun type uranium bomb was ready at Tinian on 31 July awaiting the first favorable weather’ reported groves to general Marshall on August 6, 1945. The daily 24 hour advance forecasts kept indicating unsatisfactory conditions until 3 august when there was a predition for possible good weather over the targets for 4 august at 2200. Later predictions delayed this a day. At 5 August 0415 Gen. LeMay finalized a take-off time, final assembly of the bomb proceeded and take-off actually occurred on schedule at 1645 5 August.’” The initial report on the attack was Unambiguous: “Target at Hiroshima attacked visually 1/10th cloud. No fighters to flak. The results were clear cut. The visible effects were greater than in the NM test, ‘the crew reported. ‘The city was totally destroyed. Perhaps 100,000 of its citizens were killed immediately, and tens of thousands more left dying of radiation poisoning-among them 12 US Navy fliers imprisoned in the city jail.’”

--Two days later, Ambassader Naotake Sato entered Foreign Minister Molotov’s study in the Kremlin. Having arrived hoping to enlist the Soviets as mediators between the US and Japanese governments, he was unprepared for the message he received: a state of war would exist between the SU and Japan on the following day.

--“Unconditional surrender had to be accepted immediately or, as Truman announced, the Japanese may ‘expect a rain of ruim from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth…’ By August 9, the decision to sue for surrender had become inevitable, though the tragedy’s Japanese protagonists needed time to recite their lines. If Washington had maintained closer control over the scheduling of the atomic bomb raids, the annihilation of Nagasaki could have been avoided.”

“Our original schedule called for take off on the morning of 11 august local time. However, on the evening of 7 August we concluded that we could safely advance the date to 10 August. When we Proposed this to Col. Paul Tibbets he said it was too bad we could not advance the date still another day since good weather was forcast for 9 August with at least five days of bad weather to follow. We agreed to try with the understanding we might miss our schedule since we were unwilling to speed any operation which might conceivably affect either safety or reliability. Finally at 11pm on 8 August the unit was in the plane and completely and thoroughly checked out. Take off was at about 3am. We all aged 10 years until the plane cleared the island. We were scheduled to receive a strike report at 1030am on 9 August but all we heard until 1230 was the very worried query from the fastax ship, ‘did the strike plane abort?’ Finally we received the message that the secondary target had been bombed largely by radar and that at least technically the unit functioned even better than Hiroshima although there was some doubt as to the location of the bomb.”

--What effect did this second holocaust delivered only 3 days after the 1st have on the decision of the Japanese to surrender? “The rapid succession of crises blurred the significance of each. ‘the machinery of the Japanese government had ground to a halt not because it had been damaged but because it had been thrown off balance. The factors which should have urged speedy and smooth operation had engednered exactly the opposite results.’”

--on 10 August premier Kantaro Suzuki startled his divided colleagues with the announcement, ‘Your Imperial Majesty’s decision is requested to accept the Allied proclamation on the basis outlined by the Foreign Minister’ brought the war to its conclusion-on the condition that the US guarantee the survival of dynasty and Emperor. That unconditional surrender remained an obstacle to peace in the wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war-until the government of the US offered the necessary assurance that neither Emperor nor throne would be destroyed—suggests the possibility, that NEITHER bomb may have been necessary; and certainly that the second one was not.”

--What effect did the bomb have on American wartime diplomacy?

-we thought the SU would ‘surrender important geographical, political and ideological objectives in exchange for the neutralization of the new weapon.’ this did not happen. We became too confident, too certain “that through the accomplishment of American science, technology, and industry we could alone make the “new world” into one better than the old.“The Soviets chose not to cooperate. It was becoming “increasingly clear that instead of promoting American postwar aims, wartime atomic energy policies had made them more difficult. Hiroshima and Nagasaki rose as symbols of a new American barbarism, and as explanations for the origins of the cold war.

‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all felt that one way or another. ‘
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of Manhattan Project at Los Alamos