There were no good options for the U.S. in August 1945
Somehow, the idea persists that American President Harry Truman’s decision to attack Imperial Japan with atomic bombs in August 1945 was obviously wrong — strategically and morally. The first nuclear use in anger, critics claim, was gratuitous, unnecessary and (according to some) driven by ulterior motives, to intimidate the Soviet Union by slaughtering civilians. The point of this article is not to relitigate the rights and wrongs. The bombing may indeed have been wrong. Rather, eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is useful to observe that there was nothing obvious about the choice. Dismissive judgements show little grasp of Truman’s predicament.
Consider the circumstances, and the counterfactuals.
Firstly, Japan in the final months of World War Two was not about to surrender. It was not even close. The assumption that the encircled, bombarded country was about to surrender lies at the heart of much criticism. It is the main inference behind the claim that Truman had ulterior motives in dropping the bomb. Since Japan was effectively already defeated and about to yield, critics reason, America must have dropped the bomb for other purposes.
But the fact that Japan didn’t surrender after the first atomic strike, and that it took a second strike in conjunction with the Soviet declaration of war, suggests it was not on the brink of capitulating. Japan’s detailed plan and buildup for a defence of the home islands (“Ketsu Go”) and the ferocity with which its military was fighting late into the war — see, for instance, Okinawa — also suggests so. Japan was reduced and ravaged by war, certainly, but it was not yet “defeated.” In fact, it planned around the hope that a robust defence could coerce a fragile America into favourable terms.
True, the idea of a mediated, negotiated settlement had been floated in June 1945 by Emperor Hirohito’s principle advisor Marquis Koichi Kido, and proposed tentatively by the Emperor. Yet the “Big Six” inner cabinet, the officers and ministers who wielded power, never even agreed on what the terms should be. Japan’s Ambassador to Moscow, Naotake Sato, scorned the suggestion that the Soviet Union would even agree to play peace broker. In his correspondence with Foreign Minister Togo, intercepted by U.S. intelligence at the time, he indicated that only a general surrender modified by a guarantee of the imperial institution had a chance at being accepted by Japan’s adversaries, but Togo (who was sympathetic with the idea of seeking terms) explicitly rejected that proposition. To be clear: until Japan suffered the double shock of nuclear attack and the Soviet declaration of war, from Japan’s point of view an early version of the terms it eventually accepted was not on the table.
What deal might Japan have accepted before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? As a minimal baseline, Japan would give up its conquests but its regime would endure. There would be no occupation by the Allied powers. There would be no war crimes trials. The order that had produced rapine and genocide across Asia would be left intact. Japan’s citizens would be left to live under it. This general proposal amounted to an imminent “surrender” in the same sense as a block of cheese amounts to being a car.
Second, if a negotiated settlement on terms acceptable to Japan was a non-starter before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, other alternatives to the atomic bombings were likely even more violent in their net effect than the nuclear strikes, not less. Simply not dropping the bomb and stepping back would have meant leaving Japanese forces stationed in territories across Asia, including in occupied China. And — often forgotten in the actuarial argument — those forces were still committing daily atrocities against noncombatants. If nuclear use, as critics maintain, was indefensible under those circumstances, or even any circumstances, then refusing to use the ultimate weapon would have come at a steep humanitarian price.
Refraining from nuclear escalation and stepping back would also have left the way open to Japan, depleted but still in the field, to regenerate itself and perhaps come into collision with the Soviet Union. Perhaps like Imperial Germany from 1919 onwards, Japan’s rulers could have convinced themselves and public opinion that by avoiding outright defeat, its armed forces had not been defeated, and that the wronged country could make another bid for dominance in its region. And that version of Japan would have come up against Stalin’s empire, one that had almost been destroyed by surprise attack in 1941, and therefore not minded to leave aggressors on the board. A Soviet-Japanese war would have been a devastating clash. Note that Stalin’s actual invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 killed people at a comparable rate to the incineration of Hiroshima.
At the more active end of the non-nuclear policy mix, the U.S. could have maintained and stepped up its campaign of blockade and bombing. This, in fact, was the preference of the U.S. Army Air Forces, who proposed to switch the targets to Japan’s railways, a move that may well have produced nationwide famine. At Yalta, the military advice to then-president Franklin Roosevelt was that the war on its current course, fought only with conventional weapons, would grind on into 1947. It is glib to say that, therefore, Japan’s surrender was just a matter of time. That time — the war’s greater longevity — would have meant increased lethality.
There was another non-nuclear alternative, the daunting prospect of direct invasion. Even pricing in the likelihood that military advisors inflated the casualty estimates in order to promote the atomic option, the only responsible assumption for Washington would be that Operation Olympic would have been devastating. A mobilised, determined population would likely have fought intensely against the invaders. The invaders would likely prevail, but it would be a pyrrhic victory, for both the attackers and the defenders. Urban warfare across the islands, as Truman feared, would have generated many Okinawas. Finding a way to defeat Japan that did not involve such a bloodbath was a morally serious exercise.
“Ideas are peaceful,” as Staff Sergeant Don Collier remarked in Fury, “but history is violent”
While we can never know with confidence the totality of Truman’s motives, and cannot rule out some element of anti-Soviet atomic diplomacy, the evidence (especially secret radio intelligence, declassified in the 1970’s) suggests that the main concern behind the policy was to end the war at acceptable cost. Historians Richard Frank and Wilson Miscamble have not yet been adequately rebutted on this point.
Lastly, there is a further overarching complaint about Truman’s choice, that it opened a dark future for the world, one of nuclear terror and the fear of annihilation. Yes, it did — but again, it is a question of relative evils. Thanks to the stalemating effects of nuclear weapons, which are hard to defend against and which empower weaker sides to inflict unacceptable harm on stronger adversaries, it became vastly more difficult to attempt adventures in genocidal expansionism as the Axis powers had done. It would have been better if international institutions, norms or economic interdependence had taken this effect. But they failed to do so for centuries before 1945. By demonstrating the deadliness of the new weapons, the U.S. objectively moved the world into a nuclear revolution that made major war significantly less likely. It is bleak that it took this technology, and the fears it spawns, to constrain the strongest states from further world wars. “Ideas are peaceful,” as Staff Sergeant Don Collier remarked in Fury, “but history is violent.”
