The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma - Essay Example

The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma The decision by President Harry S. Truman to use of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and then again on Nagasaki is today seen as one of the more controversial executive orders in twentieth century American history. The Hiroshima bombing of August 6, 1945 resulted in the death of some 140,000 people and the subsequent August 9 bombing of Nagasaki killed some 80,000 (Newman 1995, p. 33). They together stand as arguably the two single greatest and most destructive acts of war ever committed by one nation against another. It is the legacy of that decision which since 1945 has come to have a variety of interpretations among both average people and scholars alike. Shortly after the Hiroshima bombing President Truman addressed the American people regarding his decision and the implications it and nuclear weapons would have for the future of the country and the world. Sixteen Hours Ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base…The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces… But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy, nor its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by many men in different fields of science into a workable plan…It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. (Truman 1) The President in no uncertain terms sought to justify his decision as one which would prevent the costly use of manpower needed to carry out an amphibious invasion of Japan. Furthermore Truman endowed his decision and the onset of the age of atomic weapons with a particular historical significance made possible only with the help of American “scientific brains.” He made it clear that his decision stemmed from the sole desire to utterly destroy and annihilate Japan’s war-making capacity and shock that country into surrender. The decision therefore was a pragmatic one. This narrative, and the corresponding historical interpretation, was the one which the American public and armed services accepted as being true. This comes as little surprise given that by 1945 some “7,000 American families had already sacrificed two or more of their boys for freedom” (Fic 23). Many Americans had grown tired of the war, then in its fourth year. The death toll, the rationing of basic goods and services, and the absence of so many men had begun to have political implications. Truman after all was probably intent on seeking reelection in 1948 and surely did not want to be seen as having allowed the killing of American soldiers whose lives might have been saved. “By July 1945, American analysts realized that Tokyo had mobilized 5 million soldiers and stationed them exactly on [Operation] Downfall’s designated landing beaches. These factors foreshadowed 1 million GI deaths” (Fic 23). In contradistinction to this standard narrative stands the so-called Revisionist school. It has various ramifications which all center around the theme that the decision to use the atomic bomb was not justified and that the stated reasons for it were false and disingenuous. These revisionist historians’ claims are as varied as they are intriguing. They include, but are not limited to, the claim that it was a decision based out of racism against the Japanese, that the stated potential casualties of American soldiers as a result of an invasion of Japan were greatly exaggerated, that Japan was greatly weakened and would very soon surrender, and/or that Truman and the US military wanted to both demonstrate the existence and awesome power of the weapon to the Soviets as well intimidate them from trying to expand territorially into a weakened Europe and/or to challenge American hegemony. These claims all individually have something to add (even if it be very little) and thus warrant investigation. At the same time, an invasion of Japan, judging by the experience of American soldiers in ousting the Japanese from their other conquered Asian territories, would surely have resulted in the death of many, many soldiers. The likely truth lies somewhere in between these two interpretations and thus their synthesis is the most likely explanation for Truman’s decision. To properly understand the use and deployment of the atomic bomb against Japan, one must necessarily explore the human dimension of the question. It is must be recalled that President Franklin Roosevelt, a man who had been elected to an unprecedented fourth term and who had been president longer than many could remember, had died in April of 1945 leaving the inexperienced Truman at the helm. [Truman] enjoyed no power or reputation in American politics to speak of when he assumed the presidency on April 12. He possessed no experience in foreign affairs at all…He was therefore neither able nor willing when he became president to assume the kind of personal control that Roosevelt had wielded easily over the direction of American foreign policy…he became leader of the most powerful country on earth at the climax of the most devastating war the world had ever seen. He was faced immediately with decisions that would bear directly upon the future orientation of world power, the lives and limbs of millions, and the destiny of his own nation. (Craig 63) It must have a been a great burden for the new president to go from being a backroom political nobody to being thrown into the spotlight with nothing but momentous, history-making decisions to make. Though in the end Truman chose to maintain most of Roosevelt’s policies and cabinet appointments, there was a period of time during which many doubted his capacity to properly lead the country and make the “necessary” decisions. The point here is not to claim that Truman’s decision was a “hasty” one but rather that Roosevelt left him woefully unprepared and that the decisions that he did make did not derive from extensive foreign policy experience. Another major human factor in the lead up to the decision to deploy the atomic bomb centered on the Secretary of War at the time, Henry L. Stimson. Stimson’s career in politics “spanned four decades and included bipartisan service under six presidents.” A recent biography of Stimson by Sean L. Malloy claimed that Stimson took part in the most significant foreign policy decision of the twentieth century: “to use nuclear weapons against Japan and as a diplomatic tool against the Soviet Union” (Little 279). Many historians today look to Truman and Stimson as being the two biggest factors affecting the decision to use the bomb. They assert the president’s role by virtue of his office and Stimson’s role by virtue of his political influence with the president. Stimson [believed] in moral progress, a passion for social order and legal precedent, and faith in the power of the free market to solve the world’s problems...With a commitment to the ideals of public service and a paternalistic confidence derived from his elitist background…Stimson personified the patrician class…The atomic bomb was Stimson’s ultimate test as an exemplar of moral statesmanship. It was a test he ultimately failed. As Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Stimson seemed overwhelmed…Tragically, Stimson’s determination to influence the bomb’s use both as a weapon of war and as an instrument of diplomacy were too little and too late. (Little 279-280) Stimson supported both Truman’s reasoning and his decision. The fact that he saw the practical effects of the bomb for diplomatic and political ends after the war is not surprising. Given that the post-war world was shaping up to be one dominated by the US, a weakened Britain, and a war-ready and war-ravaged Soviet Union, men like Stimson (who had far more foreign policy experience than Truman) were well aware of the implications of atomic weaponry. Their role must be considered as having been enormously influential. The claim that the American decision to bomb Japan stemmed from racist and/or ethnocentric feelings and beliefs is probably the weakest arrow in the revisionist quiver. Admittedly, much of the wartime anti-Japanese propaganda in the US was racist in character. As well the US had a long history of discriminating against Japanese immigrants. And yet logic and the available evidence largely dispute this claim. The idea behind it is that if the decision was not motivated by racism, then why did not the US also use the bomb against Germany? Unfortunately, as will often prove to be the case with other revisionist claims, the timeline does not support the assertion. [T]he first [was] available only after Germany had surrendered, leaving Japan as the sole Axis power yet to be overwhelmed. What evidence anywhere implies that the United States would not have used atomic weapons on Germany had it been still a belligerent, when the bombs were developed precisely out of fear Germany would get them first, and when the Allies obliterated Dresden and several other towns as thoroughly as the atom destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The directive issued to Col. Paul Tibbets in September 1944 instructed him to train two bomber groups to make simultaneous drops on Germany and Japan. (Newman 29) There is documented evidence that the US military was preparing for possible uses of the weapon against both Japan and Germany. Circumstances dictated, however, that the bomb was not technologically available until after Germany had capitulated, and thus could only conceivably have been used against Japan, if at all. The war in the Pacific Theatre had been an especially sanguine one. This is not to say that the European Theatre was nothing to fret about, after all death and mayhem are, in the end, death and mayhem. Many accounts of American soldiers who fought in both Europe and the Pacific often detail the outright perseverance, refusal to surrender, fight-til-death mentality of the Japanese as being somehow more pronounced than in other armies’ soldiers. Japanese tenacity was well demonstrated and DOWNFALL (the code name for an invasion of the Japan) predicted a death toll of at least 500,000 and as much as 1 million. The unanimity of Japanese defense commanders is striking. Navy and air commanders presided over mere remnants of their forces, but the Japanese spirit, and their suicide devices, still gave them hope. The army, short as it was of fuel, was almost manic because of its powerful defense of Okinawa…Pride and Prejudice would mitigate against confessions of weakness. (Newman 24) The catastrophically high casualties that American forces had suffered after each tedious landing and invasion of the various islands and archipelagoes of the Pacific were well-known on the home front where the casualty lists were as long as they were heart-wrenching. And yet there are some discrepancies in the narratives and accounts of American leaders regarding the reasons for the use of the atomic bomb. They, in line with traditional historiography, pointed to the thousands and thousands of men who probably would have died in an invasion of mainland Japan. The Historian Robert Newman has written that “[t]he preponderance of evidence shows that at the time of decision the Truman administration believed, with good reason, that invasion plans threatened an unacceptable loss of life, to Japanese as much as to Americans” (21). Revisionists, however, dispute this by saying that “the claim of half million American lives was a post-war creation.” According to them, actual classified estimates of casualties were between 20,000 and 42,000 (Bernstein 130). Winston Churchill “declared that the atomic bombings had saved well over 1,200,000 Allied lives, including about a million American lives.” In answer to them, the revisionists point to Truman and the various casualty claims he made in speeches and writings. During Truman’s years in the White House, the president usually placed the number at about a quarter of a million lives, and occasionally at only 200,000. But after leaving the White House, he began raising this number. His memoir writers stated in their first draft, ‘half a million casualties with at least 300,000 dead.’ But by the time Truman’s book came out in 1955, they had increased the number to ‘half a million American lives’ saved and cited George C. Marshall, wartime army chief of staff, as having given that estimate to Truman shortly before Hiroshima. That is the number that Truman often used publicly in his post-presidential years. (Bernstein 130-131) The fact that Truman’s own publicly voiced claims regarding the casualty estimates varied so much lends some credence to the revisionist camp. As time passed and he (and the world) came to recognize the enormity of the loss of life at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it stands that he wanted the world to know what the alternative of bombing was: the immeasurable deaths of American soldiers. At the same time to assert that an invasion would not have been catastrophic for the Allied soldiers involved is not one made in good faith. The bomb was the ultimate decision. Trying to prove what would have happened otherwise becomes an impossible exercise since doing so constitutes an attempt to prove a negative and is thus a logical fallacy. The claim that Japan was very soon to surrender and thus the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary and even vindictive, is one which encounters serious resistance when measured by the available facts. The United States government of Truman had long maintained that the only possibility for peace with Japan short of outright annihilation was unconditional surrender. This later became modified to allow for the Japanese Emperor to remain on the throne. “Byrnes [a close presidential adviser] continually stressed to Truman that abandonment of unconditional surrender would be politically costly, and…that modification would simply [be seen] as a sign of American fatigue and a reason to hold out…” (Craig 69). It is possible then that when Truman decided on the bomb, political realities influenced him. But that is not enough in itself to support the revisionist claim for which simple intuition can be made to refute. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945. The destruction and power of the new weapon was immediately understandable to the Japanese authorities. And yet they did not surrender. It was not until the August 9 bombing of Nagasaki that the Japanese government offered its conditional surrender. If surrender had for some time been its intent, the Japanese government would surely have surrendered immediately after Hiroshima. The fact that it held out for another 3 days demonstrates that its policy was in fact to endure at all costs and was only changed after two such earth-shattering bombings provided the needed incentive to do so. The main and probably the most credible of the revisionist school’s claims concerns American distrust of, rivalry with, and fear of the Soviet Union and its plans for Europe and the world. The revisionists claim that the use of the atomic bomb was motivated by the desire to intimidate the Soviets’ advances in Europe and to generally check their power across the globe. A weapon of such magnitude would render meaningless any conventional weaponry disparities. The new bomb, if only in the hands of one country, could be used to prevent any further war. One must be careful, however, not to overly impose contemporary perceptions and memories on the past which are not warranted. [T]hough the two great powers were circling each other suspiciously, the cold war was still in the future. The Soviet hold on Eastern Europe, the terms of peace with Germany and Austria, the Soviet refusal to withdraw its forces from Iran – all of these situations would strain U.S.-Soviet relations later on. Frank Ninovich’s argument that until at least early 1946 ‘the American policy-makers felt more bewildered than beleaguered’ is widely accepted. (Tal 10) The Cold War had not yet officially started. The division of the world into two opposing ideological camps, though surely in the making, did not yet exist in the way that we today “remember it.” But anti-Soviet and anti-communist motives should not on the other hand be discounted. “President Truman, James Byrnes, Ambassador Averell Hariman, and a few others worried about the extension of Soviet power, and welcomed the clout that possession of nuclear weapons gave the United States” (Newman 29). Opportunism is a natural quality of most politicians. As such, many within Truman’s administration saw the potential for nuclear weaponry. The question, however, concerns the extent to which this desire to challenge and intimidate the Soviets was so strong that it superseded any actual desire to see the Japanese defeated and surrendered. After all, …an early Japanese surrender would preclude Russian entry into the war, stopping the Soviets not only from participating in the occupation of Japan but also from advancing through China on the way…and would allow the United States to avoid a ground invasion of Japan later in the year, and the tens of thousands of American casualties that would entail. (Craig 68) The potential benefits from knocking Japan out of the war were thus not limited to saving American lives. An earlier Japanese exit from the war would have kept the Soviets out of Asia and consequently would have gone a long way in furthering the American cause in the coming Cold War. But is it not likely that this desire, as strong as it was, could somehow obviate the probability of a high death toll after an amphibious invasion of Japan. The political and practical wish to see the end of the war cannot be denied. By 1945 Americans were ready for peace. There is still a great amount of evidence that Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified if one values Americans lives above Japanese ones. This is not intended in an ethnocentric way but rather to state the simple fact that the war placed America on one side and Japan on the other. War is something that a country must fight to win, a reality which results in the morally unsettling truth that one man’s death is another man’s life. Racism aside, not all of the revisionists claims are completely off the mark. The casualty estimates of the Truman administration, given that they changed with each passing moment, cannot be taken as the sole reason for dropping the bomb. As well, the influence of men like Stimson and others made sure that the practical effects of the bomb for geopolitics were known. Though many would have died, the avoidance of “a massive loss of life” has been shown by the revisionists to not be 100 percent true. On the other hand, given that the Japanese did not surrender after Hiroshima and only after Nagasaki demonstrates that they were prepared and preparing to fight on. Add to that the rise of the Soviet Union and the perceptions it provoked in Allied governments, it is well-nigh surprising that Truman did not drop a third bomb. The revisionists deserve their due credit; but the truth of the matter must not be obfuscated. Despite these other factors, Truman’s decision to deploy the bomb responded to a very real and practical military need: the complete and utter defeat of Imperial Japan. Works Cited Bernstein, Barton J. “A Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved.” Hiroshima’s Shadow. Ed. Kai Bird. Stoney Creek, CN: The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998. 130-134. Craig, Campbell and Sergey Radchenko. The Atomic Bomb and the origins of The Cold War. London: Yale University Press, 2008. Fic, Victor. “Revisiting the atomic bomb debate.” Washington Times 11 Nov. 2009: p.23. Little, Monroe H. “Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan.” Journal of American History 96:1 (2009): 279-280. Newman, Robert P. Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1995. Tal, David. The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, 1945-1963. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Truman, Harry S. “Statement by the President Announcing the Use of the A-Bomb at Hiroshima.” Essential Speeches 1 (2009). 1. Read More