> Not to be contrary (wait, yes I am), but many lefty historians have also
> disagreed with the "aimed more at the USSR" theory - Gar Alperowitz is
> nearly alone on that one.
Don't know as much about this as I'd like to. Which lefty historians would
you recommend?
>
> No one will ever know for certain, but what I find the most convincing is
> the theory that a combination of racism, hate and anger - mindsets that are
> understandable coming at the end of a war - kept Truman and others from
> realizing the other paths open to them, no matter how much evidence there
> was.
Well, it's hard to know what precise weight to assign to each of the factors that led the Truman administration to drop the atomic bomb. For some of those involved in making the decision, notably Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, over-awing the Soviets was clearly an important factor. I can't find my copy of Charles Mee's _Meeting at Potsdam_ (it's probably in storage somewhere), but I remember him quoting Byrnes to the effect that the Americans went to the Potsdam conference with a gun on their hip (meaning the a-bomb). Mee is not a professional historian, but as I recall he was very acute about the personalities of the policy-makers who made the decision.
For more on Byrnes see
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/bios/a_e/byrnesjames.htm
Of course, "racism, hate, and anger" should not by any means be discounted. There's an excellent book by my former teacher John Dower called _War Without Mercy_, which paints a convincing portrait of the Pacific theater war as a merciless "race war." This parallels the conduct of the Germans in Europe, who tended by and large to observe the "rules of war" vis-a-vis the French, but pursued the war on the eastern front with absolute savagery.
Jacob Conrad