Tom Lewis has written a challenging article in these pages arguing that, as the headline accurately sums up his position, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was ‘necessary, and the most merciful option’ and that all the military, political, and moral critics of the nuclear bombing are simply denying the reality of the end-game of the war in the Pacific.

The article holds with the orthodox view that the only options on the table were either a swift, and thus ultimately more moral, conclusion to the war through atomic bombing or a protracted, meat-grinding invasion of the Japanese mainland by the US military.

It is my view that this oversimplifies matters.

Some argue that without Fat Man and Little Boy a continuation of the war would have cost ‘30 million lives – most of them Japanese’ but would also include many American servicemen (a Pacific D-Day which Japan was angling for would have cost ‘1.25 million’ American casualties alone, the article claims).

There is, however, a general reservation that the credibility of the claimed trade-off of ‘the 200,000 dead of the A-Bomb raids’ for ‘30 million dead’ from protracted conventional war and invasion is highly dependent on assumptions that the Japanese military-political elite was monolithic, as was the general population, who would all have been fanatical bitter-enders, like the remnant German Nazi zealots, and that it was only the use of nuclear weapons in Japan that could change the military and moral calculus at the end.

This assumption about the nature of the enemy is far from certain. The death-before-dishonour characteristic was ‘built into the [Japanese] DNA’, says the article, but this stereotype owes a fair amount to Hollywood propaganda, unless the argument is that the Japanese, unlike most other defeated nations, would have been immune to starvation and war-weariness and thus accept eventual surrender.

Although Japan’s war crimes and atrocities were especially horrific, they don’t necessarily provide the template for all Japanese people, then or now (Japan is famous for the charm and politeness of its people). There is always a clear distinction between the military-political leadership of an authoritarian, anti-democratic country and the people they rule, whether in Japan last century or Iran in this.

Alternatives to the Bomb?

It is my view that the article cursorily dispenses with the viability of the alternatives to The Bomb that were vigorously debated in-house as part of US war planning for Japan’s end-days. One of these was a demonstration bomb, as proposed by the Manhattan Project’s Targeting Committee, because, as argued by the article, Japan would have used Allied POWs as human shields on any targeted uninhabited islands. This is probably so, but there was a further option, one also rejected by President Truman, of inviting Japanese observers to the POW-free Nevada test site explosion in July which would have still effectively demonstrated the frightening power of a nuclear bomb (J. Robert Oppenheimer famously cited a line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’) – the total yield of all the non-nuclear bombs used in the second world war, by all combatant countries, was around two million tonnes of TNT, the yield of just one modern nuclear weapon.

Diplomatic negotiation was also a non-starter, the articles goes on, because the Japanese ‘were not seeking surrender.’ It cites one US official holding this view but there were, in fact, a number of official surrender overtures made to the US through back channels well before August 1945 but the dominant faction of nuclear hawks in the Truman administration did not want to pursue these.

The necessity of a US invasion of the Japanese mainland, sans the bomb, was also up for debate between the pro-bombing and anti-bombing advocates. The choice was not a binary one between invasion or the bomb. By August 1945, Japan had been virtually defeated. The bulk of the Imperial Navy had been sunk, its last operational forces destroyed in the battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, the Air Force was reduced to sporadic kamikaze attacks and American B-29 bombers were in range of Tokyo and met little resistance, losing only around 100 planes in 7,000 missions in the four months to June 1945, a rate of loss much lower than Germany was able to inflict on Allied bombing raids. Japan had no allies to turn to for support.

Japan was also cannibalising civilian industrial plant and machinery to convert it into scrap metal for arms production. The US naval blockade had strangled the Japanese war economy which had 30 per cent unemployment, real wages at just 10 per cent of pre-war levels and 22 million homeless from Allied bombing. Without a fully-fed civilian workforce, and without imported oil to run the economy, the country’s war machine would have continued to degrade and eventually collapse.

Russia

The target of the nuclear bombs was never an economically and militarily ruined Japan; rather, the real fear of Washington was Russia declaring war on and invading Japan. Stalin’s Red Army was no dysfunctional Tsarist military full of unmotivated conscripts and inept leaders as in its loss to Japan in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war but a fervent, nationalist Russian military, even amongst those who hated Stalin, which had just triumphed against the Bolshevik-exterminating and Slav-hating Nazis.

Russian encroachment in the Asia-Pacific region posed the threat of a similar geographical power-sharing arrangement to that which prevailed in Europe at the end of the war with Germany. As Truman wrote in his diary, however, once exploded in Japan, the atom bomb gave him ‘an entirely new feeling of confidence’ in his dealings with Stalin and ‘put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war’.

Secretary of War, Stimson, also saw the atomic bomb as a ‘master card’ of diplomacy. Secretary of State Byrnes sought to use it ‘to make Russia more manageable’. General Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, said that he had always understood that ‘Russia was our enemy and that the Project was conducted on that basis’. Edward Teller, a Manhattan Project physicist, ‘considered Russia as an enemy from the beginning’. General Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project saw that ‘Russia was our enemy and the [Manhattan] Project was conducted on that basis’.

US military dissidents

I am far from sure that the US military dissidents against the bomb were wrong. They have credentials: Chief of Staff Admiral Leahy (the bomb was of ‘no material assistance’ in ending the war), General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe (‘it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing’), General Curtis Le May, US Air Force commander (the bomb ‘had nothing to do with the end of the war’).

General MacArthur (supreme allied commander in the Pacific) and thus the US military leader with the most direct involvement in potential invasion plans, wrote that, as early as April 1945, ‘My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender. I even directed that plans be drawn up for a possible peaceful occupation without further military operations.’ Most accounts like these from within the US military brass are post-hoc, of course, and we can’t really know what their thinking was at the time, but reflection, review, and reappraisal are also part of responsible war planning and the dissidents’ post-war views must be taken into account.

The atomic bombing of Japan was not a military and ultimately merciful necessity but a mostly cynical, mushroom-cloud-shaped message to Moscow.