At 1:36 PM -0700 9/23/02, Michael Perelman wrote:
>Alperowitz says that the bomb had to be rushed because the Japanese were
>trying to surrender.
***** Gar Alperovitz, "Hiroshima: Historians Reassess," _Foreign Policy_ 99 (Summer 1995): 15-34.
. . . [S]o many World War II military leaders are on record as stating that the bomb was not needed. Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, reported in his 1963 _Mandate for Change_ that he had the following reaction when Secretary of War Stimson informed him the atomic bomb would be used:
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as measure to save American lives."
...Admiral William Leahy, President Truman's chief of staff and the top official who presided over meetings of both the JCS and the U.S.-U.K. Combined Chiefs of Staff, also minced few words in his 1950 memoirs _I Was There_: "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
. . . If the war could have been ended by clarifying the terms of surrender and/or allowing the shock of the Russian attack to set in, then no lives would have been lost in an invasion. . . . Little dispute remains about why the Russian option was discarded, however. Once the bomb was proven to work, the President reversed course entirely and attempted to stall a Red Army attack. A week after the Alamogordo test, for instance, Churchill observed that "it is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan." Similarly, the diary of Secretary of Navy James Forrestal indicates that by July 28 Secretary of State Byrnes was "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in." And the private journal of Byrnes' personal assistant, Walter Brown, confirms that Byrnes was now "hoping for time, believing [that] after [the] atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill, thereby being in a position to press claims against China." Meanwhile, every effort was made to speed up the production and delivery of the weapon. These efforts were successful: Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, two days before the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Nagasaki was bombed on 9th.
. . . Modern research findings . . . clearly demonstrate that from April 1945 on, top American officials calculated that using the atomic bomb would enormously bolster U.S. diplomacy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in negotiations over both postwar Europe and the Far East. . . . Stimson's argument for delaying diplomatic fights with the Soviet Union was also described in another mid-May diary entry after a conversation with Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy: "The time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic wayŠ.This [is] a place where we really held all the cards. I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn't be a fool about the way we play it. They can't get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique. Now the thing is not to get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves."
<http://www.ncesa.org/html/hiroshima.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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