Churchill and others watching the exchange, who reached similar conclusions, couldn’t have been more wrong. Kept up to date on the Manhattan Project by the British physicist and naturalized citizen Klaus Fuchs, Stalin understood that Truman’s report was the culmination of what the Americans had been working toward. In fact, Soviet scientists were also trying to build a bomb. But a lack of uranium oxide had limited their progress on Operation Borodino, the code name for their program. To speed production, Stalin had been determined to capture Berlin before the Americans or British—not only as a symbolic demonstration of Soviet military victory but also as a way to assure long-term Soviet presence in the German capital and the capture of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, in a suburb of Berlin, where German uranium was supposed to be stored.
When Stalin reported his exchange with Truman about the “new weapon” to Molotov, Gromyko, and Marshal Georgy Zhukov that evening, Molotov, who was in charge of the Soviet bomb project, said, “They’re raising their price.” Stalin replied, “Let them. We’ll have to talk it over with [the lead Soviet research scientist, physicist Igor] Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.” Stalin told Molotov and Gromyko that the Allies “are hoping that we won’t be able to develop the Bomb ourselves for some time” and “want to force us to accept their plans. Well that’s not going to happen.” Stalin then “cursed them in what Gromyko called ‘ripe language.’” He now replaced Molotov with Beria as the official responsible for accelerating Soviet progress.
The Anglo-American-Soviet discussions about the A-bomb were a mutual exercise in bad judgment; they may be described as the beginning of the Cold War. Churchill and Truman knew that Stalin had discussed sharing information on weapons development in 1942. And while the atom bomb was anything but a conventional armament, they surely understood, as Roosevelt had, that if and when Stalin learned of secret U.S.-British nuclear research, it would inflame his suspicions of them and make it more difficult to cooperate in a postwar world. Given how eager they were to deter him from considering a separate peace with their unconditional surrender declaration and their repeated assurances of a second front, how could they not understand how secretiveness about such a revolutionary weapon would revive prewar tensions? Moreover, they knew that physicists everywhere had been discussing atomic research for a number of years, and that all of the belligerents were aware of its potential use in a superweapon. Rather than believing that Stalin’s bland reaction signaled his ignorance of Anglo-American nuclear research, they should have been convinced that he knew of their work on a bomb and was posturing for political reasons.
How much better it might have been if Truman and Churchill had invited Stalin to a confidential meeting with only translators present and told him not only about the bomb but also of their eagerness to prevent a future nuclear arms race by strictly limiting scientific and technical information about the bomb.
Stalin might have then acted like a spurned suitor, who despite all his country’s sacrifices in the war was being treated more like a potential enemy than an ally. But if he had been capable of greater openness and stated his fears of Germany’s military revival, insisted on assurances against such a development, and promised self-determination for East European countries in return for a commitment to Germany’s permanent demilitarization, the march toward East-West conflict might have been averted. It’s even conceivable that Stalin’s candid insistence on pro-Soviet governments west of Russia’s immediate borders and expressions of support for representative governments in Greece, Turkey, and all of Western Europe, which he had no intention to make Soviet satellites, might have brought a vastly different result after 1945.
Of course, Stalin’s paranoia and his ideological conviction that conflicts with capitalist states were inevitable made accommodation unlikely. Moreover, any inclination he had to be more cooperative in dealings with the West were countered by his understanding that neither the United States nor Britain were about to start a war with him in 1945. Nonetheless, the A-bomb gave America a military advantage that he could imagine Washington using against the USSR, especially because it was the sort of action he himself might have taken if he had such an edge. Greater openness about the bomb would at least have given Washington and London a moral high ground, which they could have used in the developing battle for hearts and minds in the Third World. Such openness might have been dismissed by emerging nations as moral posturing, but nothing would have been lost by telling Moscow about the bomb—no one was suggesting helping Stalin build his own weapon—and it could have countered later recriminations in the United States about America’s part in causing the Cold War.
All this is to suggest that both sides might have been prepared to make commitments to words and deeds that could have altered traditional power politics. Not surprisingly, after so devastating a war, both sides were making rhetorical pronouncements, as they had after World War I, on their determination to move the world in a new direction toward lasting peace. But it was rhetoric devoid of firm conviction: the terrible losses in a global conflict had made the great powers more determined than ever to make their highest priority not world peace but the security of their respective nations. That is certainly understandable, but greater regard for each other’s safety from future attacks would not necessarily have translated into diminished national security.
It is not difficult to understand the different outlooks between East and West. Stalin and his Soviet cohorts genuinely saw capitalist countries as their devout enemies—no matter the collaboration in the war or their rhetoric about future joint efforts for peace. The desire to survive had propelled the wartime cooperation, but Western evangelism about economic and political freedom had made conflict with communism inevitable, or so Stalin firmly believed. Similarly, London and Washington found it difficult to imagine a benign Soviet Russia, which did not see itself as the center of world revolution against open societies across Europe and around the globe. Nor could they forget the appeasement of the dictators in the 1930s; the lesson learned was to stand firm when a totalitarian regime showed any signs of aggression. It was a prescription for the same old nationalistic rivalries under a different name, which was all too likely to lead to future wars.
“A sense of reality,” Canadian Liberal Party leader and former Harvard scholar Michael Ignatieff writes, “is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoof beats of the horse of history.”
The experience of the recent past, rather than the long-term future or “distant hoof beats,” also shaped decisions about ending the Pacific War. Forcing Japan’s unconditional surrender as quickly and inexpensively in the cost of American lives was Truman’s foremost priority.
Stalin told the president at Potsdam that Japanese officials had approached Moscow about mediating peace talks, but Truman had no interest. He assumed that Tokyo would insist on concessions to end the fighting, and this would have meant abandoning FDR’s unconditional surrender doctrine. Considerations of postwar peace in Asia and domestic politics deterred him from letting Tokyo make demands of any sort, especially now that atomic bombs seemed likely to compel Japanese capitulation without concessions. When Stalin indicated that he would give no encouragement to Japanese interest in talks, Truman agreed.
The Japanese in fact wanted a commitment to leave Emperor Hirohito on the throne. But in July 1945, the White House viewed this as unacceptable. The emperor was as much a symbol of Tokyo’s aggression and brutal war policies as any single Japanese, and the suggestion that he be left in power was seen as letting a leading war criminal escape punishment and remain in a position to stimulate future acts of national aggression. After all, everything the Japanese did in the war w
as supposedly in the service of their emperor. To fail to punish him, or at a minimum, dethrone him, which even without the war appealed to Americans with their antimonarchist tradition, was to abandon a commitment to making those responsible for all the suffering pay a price.
In a pronouncement from Potsdam on July 26, Britain, China, and the United States stated their intention “to prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist.” The alternative to surrender was the “complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and … the utter destruction of the Japanese homeland.” The declaration demanded the total elimination from power of those who had misled Japan in its quest for world conquest. “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals. We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces…. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
Tokyo’s response was “silent contempt” for what it feared would lead to the overthrow of an emperor they considered a God who bound them together as a people; his demise was tantamount to a loss of national identity. The declaration “appalled” MacArthur, who believed that the Japanese “would never submit to allied occupation unless he [the emperor] ordered it.”
Unless the Japanese surrendered at once, Truman felt compelled to go forward with plans to use atomic bombs against their homeland. As a consequence, on August 6, a single U.S. B-29 aircraft, the Enola Gay, bombed Hiroshima with devastating results. The city of 300,000 was turned into “a burning pyre.” Perhaps as many as eighty thousand people died instantly. They were the lucky ones: within days and weeks after the bombing another fifty to sixty thousand suffered agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning. On August 9, when Japan still had not surrendered, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, where seventy thousand Japanese lost their lives. Although both cities were described as military targets, it was mainly civilians who died.
Were the atomic bombings necessary? Would Japan have surrendered without them before an invasion that was planned for November 1? A debate has raged in recent years over the answer to this question. In 1946 journalist John Hersey’s description of the horrors caused by the Hiroshima bombing provoked national and international discussions of the need for such a devastating attack. The development of hydrogen bombs in the next decade added to the feeling that such weapons of mass destruction should be barred from use, as poison gas had been after World War I. In 1995, the fiftieth-anniversary remembrance of the Hiroshima attack, a planned Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., touched off a fierce argument over how to describe the necessity for the only use of nuclear weapons in history. The exhibit went forward with a sanitized commentary that avoided editorial content and simply described the dropping of the bomb.
Defenders of the decision to drop the bomb argued that because an invasion of Japan would have cost so many thousands of American and Japanese lives, it was right to have forced Tokyo’s surrender, which occurred on August 14 after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. Moreover, at the time, most on the Allied side saw the atomic bombings as essentially a more efficient way to strike at enemy cities than the earlier large-scale air raids that caused such massive damage to Berlin, Tokyo, and numerous other German and Japanese population centers.
Churchill recalled that there was never an actual decision to use the bomb. It was simply a given. With $2 billion invested in developing the weapon, and under the assumption that Roosevelt would have used it, Truman and his advisers could not imagine holding back on something that they assumed would spare the loss of American lives in what they believed would be a fiercely resisted invasion. “There never was a moment’s discussion of whether the atomic bomb should be used or not,” Churchill wrote later. “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands on its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.” Churchill never heard “the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”
Critics of the decisions to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki believe that Japan was on its last legs and that a blockade of its home islands, along with a demonstration of the bomb’s power, could have persuaded Tokyo to surrender. In October 1945 a special Truman envoy, sent to survey conditions in Japan, reported that some of the American officers he spoke to concluded that Japan’s disarray was so great prior to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks that the atomic bombs speeded Japanese surrender by only a few days. The postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of the Pacific fighting asserted that even without the atomic bombs or an invasion, Japan would have been compelled to surrender before the end of 1945 and “in all probability” before November 1. Since this was guesswork by the analysts, their conclusions are and will remain open to dispute.
Critics also argued that Truman missed a chance to bring the war to a prompt end by failing to seize upon Japanese peace feelers to the Russians earlier in the summer; this would have meant accepting a demand to drop unconditional surrender, and specifically the removal of Hirohito from power and the elimination of the monarchy. Given that Truman in fact made this concession in August, when he agreed that Hirohito could remain as head of state on the understanding that supreme command in Japan would rest with the occupation authorities, critics of the atomic bombings were convinced that Truman unnecessarily resorted to the sort of savagery that the Allies had been fighting.
On August 15, when the emperor spoke directly on the radio for the first time to the Japanese people, he tried to find words that could make capitulation and humiliation palatable. Without mentioning either surrender or defeat, he urged his subjects to “endure the unendurable,” and to view his decision to stop fighting as leading the world into a new era of peace. Making implicit reference to the devastation caused by the atomic bombings, he warned that a continuation of the fighting could mean “the extermination of our race,” which he then equated with “the destruction of all human civilization.” He put the best possible face on surrender by predicting that it would now “open the way for a great peace for thousands of generations to come.” The symbolic architect of Japan’s aggression, which had inflicted such terrible suffering across so much of Asia, paradoxically presented himself as an agent of world peace.
However absurd, Hirohito’s pronouncement foretold the great transformation that would now occur in response to Japan’s defeat and the American occupation. Unlike the Americans, British, and Russians, who saw their victories as an affirmation of their respective agendas, the thoroughly defeated Japanese felt compelled to move in a new direction. The worshipful attitude toward the armed forces that had dominated Japanese thinking throughout the war gave way to contempt for veterans at all ranks. Antagonism was especially reserved for returning soldiers and sailors from China and the Pacific Islands, as reminders of national defeat and embarrassment.
The defeat and total repudiation of the civilian and military chiefs who had been such false prophets served as a critical starting point for a sea change in Japan’s national outlook. Without such regrets, it would have been nearly impossible to chart a fundamental change of course in international affairs.
Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and now Truman and their respective countries, who had sacrificed so much in the fighting, saw every reason to believe that a continued assertion of national interest or of what each believed essential to their well-being served not only themselves but also the world. None of them—leaders or peoples—had the imagination to hear those “distant hoof beats of history” that could have persuaded them to make the compromises needed to avert the international tensions and nuclear arms race that have come to threaten the survival of all humanity.
It was not as if a benign course of action on atomic power, which might have helped reduce future tensions, hadn’t occurred to responsible Americans
. In the spring of 1945, even before the Alamogordo test, a group of University of Chicago scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project unsuccessfully tried to make the case to Truman against using the bomb on Japan. Once the United States dropped the bomb, they asserted, “it would be very difficult to persuade the world” that America was “to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.” Seventy-two percent of 150 scientists in the Manhattan Project favored a demonstration of the bomb to force Japan’s surrender rather than an attack without a warning of what was coming.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Chief of Staff George Marshall were not indifferent to such concerns. They told a group of atomic scientists that they were sympathetic to their worries. Stimson described the bomb as a potential “Frankenstein which would eat us up.” He favored a postwar “international control body” with power over atomic energy. Marshall supported the possibility of bringing two Russian scientists to New Mexico to witness the initial test.
Oppenheimer and some other scientists, who accepted the military’s decision to use the bombs against Japan, took solace in hoping that the demonstration of the atom’s destructiveness might shock the world into ending war. Future conflicts with atomic attacks would likely be seen as acts of mutual destruction or mutual national suicide. Even Stalin saw the use of the bomb as an act of “superbarbarity ” in a barbaric war. “There was no need to use it,” he said privately. “Japan was already doomed.” But instead of convincing him to abandon plans to build a Soviet bomb, it persuaded him that he had no choice: “A-bomb blackmail is American policy,” he declared.