The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 7 | Number 0 | Jul 2007 The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative by Peter J. Kuznick The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, destroyed” by atomic bombs and stressed that the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative the future of mankind would be shaped by how such bombs were used and subsequently Peter J. Kuznick controlled or shared.[3] Truman recalled Stimson “gravely” expressing his uncertainty about I whether the U.S. should ever use the bomb, “because he was afraid it was so powerful that it In his personal narrative Atomic Quest, Nobel could end up destroying the whole world.” Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, Truman admitted that, listening to Stimson and Groves and reading Groves’s accompanying who directed atomic research at the University of memo, he “felt the same fear.”[4] Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory during the Second World War, tells of receiving an urgent visit from J. Robert Oppenheimer while vacationing in Michigan during the summer of 1942. Oppenheimer and the brain trust he assembled had just calculated the possibility that an atomic explosion could ignite all the hydrogen Truman and Byrnes en in the oceans or the nitrogen in the atmosphere. If route to Potsdam, July 11, 1945 such a possibility existed, Compton concluded, “these bombs must never be made.” As Compton Others would also draw, for Truman, the grave said, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis implications of using such hellish weapons. than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain Truman noted presciently in his diary on July 25, on mankind.”[1] Certainly, any reasonable 1945, after being fully briefed on the results of the human being could be expected to respond Trinity test, that the bomb “may be the fire similarly. destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.”[5] Three years later, with Hitler dead and the Nazis Leading atomic scientists cautioned that surprise defeated, President Harry Truman faced a use of the bomb against Japan could precipitate comparably weighty decision. He writes in his an uncontrollable arms race with the Soviet 1955 memoirs that, on the first full day of his Union that boded future disaster for mankind. presidency, James F. Byrnes told him the U.S. The warnings reached Truman’s closest advisors was building an explosive “great enough to if not the President himself. Truman nevertheless destroy the whole world.”[2] On April 25, 1945, authorized use of atomic bombs against Japan, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Brigadier always insisting he felt no “remorse” and even General Leslie Groves gave Truman a lengthy bragging that he “never lost any sleep over that briefing in which Stimson reiterated the warning decision.”[6] For over sixty years, historians and that “modern civilization might be completely other analysts have struggled to make sense of 1 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 Truman’s and his advisors’ actions and the lives to Stimson’s 1947 claim of over 1,000,000 relevance of his legacy for his successors in the casualties to George H.W. Bush’s 1991 defense of Oval Office. Truman’s “tough calculating decision, [which] spared millions of American lives,”[11] to the In an incisive and influential essay, historian 1995 estimate of a crew member on Bock’s Car, John Dower divides American interpretations of the plane that bombed Nagasaki, who asserted the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the bombing saved six million lives--one into two basic narratives--the “heroic” or million Americans and five million Japanese. The “triumphal” and the “tragic.”[7] The “heroic” recent inclusion of Japanese and other Asian narrative, shaped by wartime science casualties adds an intriguing dimension to the administrator James Conant and Stimson, and triumphal narrative, though one that played reaffirmed by all postwar American presidents little, if any, role in the wartime calculations of up to and including Bill Clinton, with only Truman and his top advisors. Eisenhower demurring, justifies the bombing as an ultimately humane, even merciful, way of To this triumphal narrative, Dower counterposes bringing the “good war” to a rapid conclusion a tragic one. Seen from the perspective of the and avoiding an American invasion against a bombs’ victims, the tragic narrative condemns barbaric and fanatically resistant foe. Although the wanton killing of hundreds of thousands of Truman initially emphasized revenge for Japan’s civilians and the inordinate suffering of the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor, subsequent survivors. Although Hiroshima had some justifications by Truman, Conant, Stimson, and military significance as a naval base and home of others stressed instead the tremendous number the Second General Army Headquarters, as of Americans who would have been killed and Truman insisted, American strategic planners wounded in an invasion.[8] As time passed, targeted the civilian part of the city, maximizing defenders of the bombing increasingly added the bomb’s destructive power and civilian generous estimates of the number of Japanese deaths. It produced limited military casualties. who the atomic bombings saved. While Admiral William Leahy angrily told an highlighting the decisive role of atomic bombs in interviewer in 1949 that although Truman told the final victory had the unfortunate consequence him they would “only…hit military of downplaying the heroic efforts and enormous objectives….they went ahead and killed as many sacrifices of millions of American soldiers, it women and children as they could which was served American propaganda needs by just what they wanted all the time.”[12] The diminishing the significance of Soviet entry into tragic narrative, in contrast to the heroic the Pacific War, discounting the Soviet narrative, rests on the conviction that the war contribution to defeating Japan, and showcasing could have been ended without use of the bombs the super weapon that the United States alone given U.S. awareness of Japan’s attempts to possessed.[9] secure acceptable surrender terms and of the crushing impact that the imminent Soviet This victor’s narrative privileges possible declaration of war against Japan would have. American deaths over actual Japanese ones.[10] As critics of the bombing have become more Each of these narratives has its own images. The vocal in recent years, projected American mushroom cloud, principal symbol for the casualty estimates have grown apace--from the triumphal narrative, has been almost ubiquitous War Department’s 1945 prediction of 46,000 dead in American culture from the moment that the to Truman’s 1955 insistence that General George bomb was dropped. Showing the impact of the Marshall feared losing a half million American bomb from a distance, it effectively masks the 2 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 death and suffering below.[13] Hiroshima close up near the hypocenter three hours after the bomb The Smithsonian’s ill-fated 1995 Enola Gay exhibit was doomed when Air Force Association and American Legion critics demanded the elimination of photos of Japanese bombing victims, particularly women and children, and insisted on removal of the charred lunch box containing carbonized rice and peas that belonged to a seventh-grade schoolgirl who The mushroom cloud above Nagasaki, the disappeared in the bombing. Resisting efforts to quintessential triumphal image humanize or personalize the Japanese, they objected strenuously to inclusion of photos or Survivors on the ground, however, unlike crew artifacts that would place human faces on the members flying above, vividly recall the flash bombs’ victims and recall their individual from the bomb (pika), which signifies the suffering. For them, the viewpoint should have beginning of the tragic narrative, and, when remained that of the bombers above the combined with the blast (don), left scores of mushroom cloud, not the victims below it. It is thousands dead and dying and two cities in worth noting that, prior to the change in military ruins. No wonder many Japanese refer to the policy in September 1943, U.S. publications were bomb as pikadon and the mushroom cloud that filled with photos of Japanese war dead, but no so pervades the American consciousness has U.S. publication carried photos of dead American been superseded in Japan by images of the soldiers.[14] destruction of the two cities and the dead and dying. For one who has confronted the still-smoldering hatred that some American veterans feel toward the Japanese six decades after the U.S. victory, it is stunning how little overt anti-Americanism one finds in Japanese discussions of the bombings. The Japanese, particularly the hibakusha (bomb-affected persons), have focused instead on their unique suffering. Drawing on the 3 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 moral authority gained, they have translated this suffering into a positive message of world peace and nuclear disarmament. In fact, a vigorous debate about Japan’s responsibility for its brutal treatment of other Asian peoples began in the early 1980s, picked up steam with the revelations by comfort women in the early 1990s, and has raged unabated, especially among Japanese intellectuals and politicians, since 1995, fueled, in part, by regular criticism from China and South Korea.[15] Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission examination In recent summers, I have been startled, during my annual study-abroad course in Hiroshima Adding insult to injury, the ABCC sent physical and Nagasaki, by the frequency with which some specimens, including human remains, back to the Japanese, particularly college students, justify the U.S. and did not share its research results with atomic bombings in light of Japan’s wartime Japanese scientists or physicians, results that butchery and the emperor’s culpability for could have been helpful in treating atomic bomb Japan’s colonialism and militarism. Perhaps this sufferers.[16] Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, should be expected given the multi-layered who spent three years studying weapons silence imposed on Japan in regard to atomic scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National matters--first by Japan’s own government, Laboratory, explains the process of humiliated by its defeat and inability to protect dehumanization whereby American scientists its citizens, then by official U.S. censorship, turned “the dead and injured bodies of the which banned publication of bomb-related Japanese into bodies of data” and then sought information, then by the political exigencies of additional American subjects for further Japanese dependence on the U.S. under the U.S.- experimentation. By turning human beings into Japan Security Treaty, which blunted criticism of dismembered body parts and fragments and U.S. policy, and finally by the silence of many calculating damage instead of wounds, coldly bomb victims, who faced discrimination in rational scientific discourse allowed Americans marriage and employment when they divulged to study Japanese victims without ever reckoning their backgrounds. with their pain and suffering. One scientist even got annoyed with Gusterson for saying the Many hibakusha remain incensed over their victims were “vaporized” when the correct term treatment by the Atomic Bomb Casualty was “carbonized.”[17] Commission (ABCC), which the U.S. set up in Hiroshima in 1947 and Nagasaki in 1948 to Although Dower is undoubtedly correct that the examine but not treat the bomb victims. heroic and tragic narratives, those of victors above and victims below the mushroom clouds, dominated the discussions surrounding the 50th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these two narratives by no means exhaust the range of interpretive possibilities. Missing from much of the debate has been consideration of what I call the apocalyptic narrative, a framework for 4 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 understanding U.S. actions that has even greater ominous and threatening, Truman and his relevance to today’s citizens who must continue collaborators were gambling with the future of to grapple with the long-term ramifications of life on the planet. Scientists at Chicago’s Met Lab nuclear war, particularly the threat of extinction had issued reports and circulated petitions of human life. While this third narrative has emphasizing just this point before the bombs important elements in common with the tragic were tested and used, warning against narrative, maintaining, as did much of America’s instigating a “race for nuclear armaments” that top military command, that surrender could have could lead to “total mutual destruction.”[19] been induced without the use of atomic bombs, it In order to force immediate surrender and save does not see the Japanese as the only victims and American lives by delivering a knockout blow to holds Truman, Byrnes, and Groves, among an already staggering Japan, or, as Gar others, to a much higher level of accountability Alperovitz alternatively argues, to brandish U.S. for knowingly putting at risk all human and might against and constrain the Soviet Union in animal existence. Europe and Asia, or, as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa contends, to exact revenge against Japan while Nor does the apocalyptic narrative have the kind limiting Soviet gains in Asia, Truman willingly of easily identifiable images associated with the risked the unthinkable. He did so without even other two narratives. Unlike the religious attempting other means to procure Japanese association with Armageddon or the images of surrender, such as clarifying the surrender terms alchemical transmutation in which destruction to insure the safety and continued “rule” of leads to rebirth and regeneration, nuclear Emperor Hirohito as Stimson and almost all of annihilation is random, senseless, final, and Truman’s other close advisors urged him to do, universal. As with the end-of-the-world images but which he and Byrnes resisted until after the associated with the existential crisis of 1929-1930, two atomic bombs had been dropped; allowing the post-apocalyptic nothingness resulting from Stalin to sign the Potsdam Proclamation, which nuclear annihilation is devoid of redemptive would have signaled imminent Soviet entry into possibilities. The late 1920s and early 1930s the war; or announcing and, if necessary, cosmological theories coupling the concept of demonstrating the existence of the bomb. What heat death with that of the expanding universe terrified many scientists from an early stage in anticipated, in the distant future, a barren, lifeless the process was the realization that the bombs planet drifting aimlessly through time and space that were used to wipe out Hiroshima and in a universe indifferent to human existence. Nagasaki were but the most rudimentary and Such a vision, popularized by British primitive prototypes of the incalculably more astronomers James Jeans and Arthur Eddington, powerful weapons on the horizon--mere first was reflected in the work of influential American steps in a process of maximizing destructive thinkers like Joseph Wood Krutch and Walter potential. Lippmann. Although the proximate causes differ, with nuclear annihilation resulting from human technological rather than natural destruction, the symbolism, once human life and consciousness have been expunged in Truman’s “fire destruction,” is in other respects similar.[18] By unleashing nuclear weapons on the world as the U.S. did in 1945, in a manner that Soviet leaders, as expected, immediately recognized as 5 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for the purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”[22] Arthur Compton observed, “It introduces the question of mass slaughter, really for the first time in history.”[23] Stimson, whose finest moment would come in his desperate postwar attempt to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, told the top decision makers, including Groves and Byrnes, on May 31, 1945, that the members of the Interim Committee did not view the bomb “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe...; that the project might even mean the doom of civilization or it might mean the perfection of civilization; Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves at Trinity test that it might be a Frankenstein which would eat site us up.”[24] Oppenheimer correctly pointed out to the participants in that same Interim Committee Physicist Edward Teller impressed this fact on meeting that within 3 years it might be possible the group of “luminaries” Oppenheimer to produce bombs with an explosive force assembled in the summer of 1942, looking past between 10 and 100 megatons of TNT -- the atomic bomb, which he considered as good as thousands of times more powerful than the bomb done, toward development of a hydrogen bomb, that would destroy Hiroshima.[25] thousands of times more powerful, which became the focus of most of their efforts that Hence, the apocalyptic narrative, applying an summer.[20] Not all scientists shared Teller’s ethical standard to which leaders of the time enthusiasm over this prospect. As Rossi could realistically be held, and an understanding Lomanitz recalled: “Many of us thought, ‘My of short-term and long-term consequences that God, what kind of a situation it’s going to be to should be expected of policymakers, indicts bring a weapon like that [into the world]; it Truman, Byrnes, and Groves not only for the might end up by blowing up the world.’ Some of wholesale slaughter of civilians in Hiroshima and us brought this up to Oppenheimer; and basically Nagasaki but for behaving recklessly and his answer was, ‘Look, what if the Nazis get it thoughtlessly in inflicting a reign of terror on the first?’”[21] rest of humankind. In 1942, Compton assessed the odds of blowing up the world and decided it In July 1945, physicist Leo Szilard drafted a was not worth the risk. In 1945, Truman petition signed by 155 Manhattan Project contemplated the prospect of future annihilation scientists urging the President not to act but apparently gave it little serious consideration. precipitously in using atomic bombs against To make matters worse, he did next to nothing to Japan, warning: “The atomic bombs at our make amends for his wartime shortsightedness disposal represent only the first step in this when the opportunity to control nuclear 6 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 weapons presented itself again during the first scientific advisors to the committee and, Truman year of the postwar era. insists, by not only British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but also by Truman’s own Throughout that first year, Henry Wallace, who “top military advisors.” But, Truman adds, “The Roosevelt had asked to stay on as Secretary of final decision of where and when to use the Commerce after Truman replaced him as Vice atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no President, struggled valiantly to avert an arms mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a race and ease the threat of nuclear war . When military weapon and never had any doubt that it Wallace persisted in criticizing administration should be used.”[27] Truman made the same policy toward the Soviet Union and the bomb, point in a 1948 letter to his sister Mary: “On that Truman ousted him from the Cabinet. In his trip coming home [from Potsdam] I ordered the address to a national radio audience on the night Atomic Bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and he submitted his letter of resignation, Wallace Nagasaki. It was a terrible decision. But I made again voiced the theme that provoked Truman’s it.”[28] ire, charging that the U.S. government’s present course may mean “the extinction of man and of Although Truman left office with abysmally low the world.”[26] That Truman bears so much approval ratings, he is now widely viewed as one responsibility for creating this perilous state of of America’s near great presidents and treated as affairs, regardless of his conscious intentions, a political and moral paragon by leaders of both justifies the application of such a harsh standard major political parties, including George W. of judgment and demands a closer look at the Bush. President Bush’s national security advisor man and his early presidency. For if Harry and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who Truman, a relatively decent man, could behave Bush credits with telling “me everything I know so irresponsibly, what assurance is there that about the Soviet Union,” named Truman her man future presidents, under comparable of the century to Time.[29] Some historians have circumstances, might not do the same? In fact, been equally impressed with the man and his several have already come frighteningly close. legacy, none more than David McCullough, whose lavishly praiseful and historiographically vapid biography won the Pulitzer Prize.[30] Truman did not learn of the atomic bomb project until Stimson told him, following the April 12 emergency Cabinet meeting, that the U.S. was working on “a new explosive of almost Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace unbelievable destructive power.”[31] Over the next few hours, days, and weeks, Truman made a II series of decisions that would set the course for his presidency and for the future of much of the Truman always accepted personal responsibility world. Whereas Roosevelt took counsel from for the bomb decision. In his memoirs, however, people of diverse views and ultimately exercised he states that the Interim Committee chaired by independent judgment on foreign affairs, Stimson recommended that “the bomb be used Truman, inexperienced in these areas, turned against the enemy as soon as it could be almost exclusively to more conservative thinkers done....without specific warning and against a who harbored animosity toward the Soviet target that would clearly show its devastating Union. Never comfortable with visionaries, strength.” This decision was supported by the idealists, or intellectuals, he sought advice from 7 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 people who confirmed his own parochial conducted on that basis. I didn’t go along with instincts. His dependence on segregationist the attitude of the country as a whole that Russia Byrnes, a man with considerably less formal was a gallant ally.”[35] education than even Truman himself, is a case in point. With the exception of Wallace, whose Not only did Truman rely on fervent proponents popularity and independent political base made of using the bomb, he ignored the entreaties of him temporarily untouchable, New Dealers and Stimson, State Department Japan expert and more progressive holdovers from the Roosevelt former Ambassador Joseph Grew, Admiral administration were quickly marginalized by the William Leahy, Secretary of the Navy James new president and, before long, either ousted or Forrestal, Assistant Secretary of War John pressured to leave the administration. McCloy, and other knowledgeable insiders who urged him to change the surrender terms and The fact that the bomb project had generated so inform the Japanese that they could keep the much momentum by the time Truman became emperor. Indeed, this is precisely what the U.S. president that it would have taken bold ultimately did—but only after dropping the two leadership on his part to avoid using these new atomic bombs in the US arsenal. Several scholars weapons has led some observers to minimize his have argued that such modifications of surrender personal responsibility. On several occasions, terms could have significantly expedited Groves insisted that Truman was swept along by Japanese surrender, saving numerous Japanese the tide of events. “As far as I was concerned,” and American lives, and obviating use of the Groves wrote, “his decision was one of non- bombs,[36] especially if combined with interference--basically, a decision not to upset the announcement of the impending Soviet existing plans....As time went on, and as we declaration of war, a development that Japanese poured more and more money and effort into the leaders dreaded. General Douglas MacArthur project, the government became increasingly told former President Herbert Hoover that, if committed to the ultimate use of the bomb...”[32] Truman had acted upon Hoover’s May 30, 1945 On another occasion, Groves commented, memo and changed the surrender terms, the war “Truman did not so much say ‘yes’ as not say would have ended months earlier. “That the ‘no.’ It would indeed have taken a lot of nerve to Japanese would have accepted it and gladly,” he say ‘no’ at that time.”[33] He saved his most averred, “I have no doubt.”[37] Hoover believed demeaning assessment for a 1963 article in Look the Japanese would have negotiated as early as Magazine, in which he described Truman as “a February.[38] little boy on a toboggan.”[34] Truman ordered the bombs dropped on Truman relied heavily upon the advice of Groves Hiroshima and Nagasaki despite the fact that he and Byrnes, both of whom were strongly and his top advisors were aware that the committed to using the bombs and both of whom Japanese had abandoned hope for military saw their use as a means of firing a warning shot victory and were seeking an end to the war. across the Soviet bow. Byrnes made his anti- Prince Konoe Fumimaro had affirmed the view Soviet motives abundantly clear at his May 28, held by many Japanese leaders when he 1945 meeting with scientists Leo Szilard, Harold informed Emperor Hirohito in February 1945 that Urey, and Walter Bartky. Groves reiterated this “defeat is inevitable.”[39] Japan’s military sentiment when he acknowledged: “There was desperation was apparent to Americans who never from about two weeks from the time I took analyzed the intercepted July exchanges between charge of this Project any illusion on my part but Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori in Tokyo and that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was Ambassador Sato Naotake in Moscow. The 8 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 Pacific Strategic Intelligence Summary for the not like the way things were going, he could pack week of Potsdam meeting reported: “it may be his bags and return home. said that Japan now, officially if not publicly, recognizes her defeat. Abandoning as unobtainable the long-cherished goal of victory, she has turned to the twin aims of (a) reconciling national pride with defeat, and (b) finding the best means of salvaging the wreckage of her ambitions.”[40] As Colonel Charles “Tick” Atlee, Truman and Stalin at Potsdam Bonesteel III, chief of the War Department Operations Division Policy Section, recalled: “the Truman also decided to issue the Potsdam poor damn Japanese were putting feelers out by Proclamation without Stalin’s signature, despite the ton so to speak, through Russia.”[41] OSS Stalin’s eagerness to sign and Truman’s official Allen Dulles briefed Stimson on Japanese understanding that Soviet entry into the war peace feelers at Potsdam. Dulles wrote in The would deeply demoralize Japan and end Japan’s Secret Surrender: “On July 20, 1945, under misguided hopes of securing better surrender instructions from Washington, I went to the terms through Soviet intercession.[46] Soviet Potsdam Conference and reported there to entry also destroyed the possibility that Japan’s Secretary Stimson on what I had learned from Ketsu-go strategy would succeed in inflicting Tokyo--they desired to surrender if they could heavy casualties on the Allied invading force, retain the Emperor and the constitution as a basis ultimately leaving the Japanese with little choice for maintaining discipline and order in Japan but surrender. Truman insisted that firming up after the devastating news of surrender became Soviet involvement was his principal reason for known to the Japanese people.”[42] That such going to Potsdam. Upon receiving Stalin’s indications of Japanese intentions were not lost confirmation, he exulted, Stalin will “be in the on Truman and Byrnes is apparent not only in Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that Truman’s July 18 diary entry referring to “the comes about.”[47] Several intelligence estimates telegram from the Jap Emperor asking for drew the same conclusion, including a June 30 peace“[43] but in the August 3 diary entry by War Department report that stated, “The entry of Byrnes’s assistant Walter Brown, who recorded, the Soviet Union into the war would finally “Aboard Augusta/ President, Leahy, JFB agrred convince the Japanese of the inevitability of [sic] Japas [sic] looking for peace.”[44] Byrnes complete defeat.”[48] publicly admitted as much when he spoke to the press on August 29. The New York Times In the end, the Soviet invasion proved a far more reported, “…Byrnes challenged today Japan’s powerful inducement to surrender than did the argument that the atomic bomb had knocked her atom bombs. Japanese leaders, many out of the war. He cited what he called Russian demonstrating little concern for the suffering of proof that the Japanese knew that they were their own people, had already witnessed U.S. beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped firebombing and often near-total destruction of on Hiroshima.”[45] Similar comments by 64 cities without ending the war. Forrestal, McCloy, and Stimson show how widespread this realization was. But, at Potsdam, when Stimson tried to persuade Truman to alter his approach and provide assurances on the emperor in the Potsdam Proclamation, Truman told his elderly Secretary of War that, if he did 9 APJ | JF 5 | 7 | 0 Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.”[50] Top U.S. military leaders recognized Japan’s growing desperation, prompting several to later insist that the use of atomic bombs was not needed to secure victory. Those who believed that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was morally repugnant and/or militarily unnecessary included Admiral William Leahy, General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas New York Times headlines Nagasaki bombing MacArthur, General Curtis LeMay, General and Soviet entry into Manchuria, August 9, 1945 Henry Arnold, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, Admiral Ernest King, General Carl Spaatz, The U.S. had shown it could level Japanese cities Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Admiral William almost at will in the months preceding “Bull” Halsey. Groves admitted that he Hiroshima. Whether the U.S. did so with circumvented the Joint Chiefs of Staff to avoid, in hundreds of bombers or with one plane and one part, “Admiral Leahy’s disbelief in the weapon bomb did not fundamentally alter the strategic and its hoped-for effectiveness; this would have situation in the eyes of Japanese leaders. Even made action by the Joint Chiefs quite Army Minister Korechika Anami’s startling difficult.”[51] In reflecting on his opposition, announcement on August 9 that he had Leahy, who chaired the meetings of the Joint intelligence indicating that the U.S. might have Chiefs of Staff and served as Truman’s personal more than 100 additional atomic bombs and that chief of staff, emphasized the barbaric nature of Tokyo would be the next target did not change the atomic bombs, not doubts about their the views of members of the War Cabinet who effectiveness, chillingly proclaiming, “It is my remained deadlocked 3-3 over whether to simply opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at demand retention of the emperor system or to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material add three additional conditions.[49] While assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese contradictory postwar statements by Emperor were already defeated and ready to Hirohito and other Japanese leaders about surrender....My own feeling was that in being the whether the atomic bombings or the Soviet first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard invasion ultimately proved decisive have common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”[52] provided ammunition for both sides in this debate, it seems clear that the powerful and Eisenhower was equally appalled, writing in his rapidly advancing Soviet invasion definitively 1963 Mandate for Change that when he learned undermined both the Japanese military and from Stimson at Potsdam that use of the bomb diplomatic strategies far more profoundly and was imminent, “I voiced to him my grave fundamentally than did the evisceration, misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that however total and horrific, of the 65th and 66th Japan was already defeated and that dropping destroyed Japanese cities. As Prime Minister the bomb was completely unnecessary, and Suzuki explained on August 13, when asked why secondly because I thought that our country they couldn’t delay surrender for a few days, “If should avoid shocking world opinion by the use we miss today, the Soviet Union will take not of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also no longer mandatory as a measure to save 10