could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in back of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Yet, the Scientific Panel told the Interim Committee: “We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”
Early in July Leo Szilard, who had helped persuade Roosevelt to start the atomic-bomb project, circulated a petition among his fellow atomic scientists, which sixty-seven signed, including Ralph Lapp, asking Truman to withhold dropping the bomb while other steps were taken to induce the Japanese to surrender. According to Compton, the Scientific Panel, at the request of Brigadier General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project, then took a secret poll among scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, which had helped make the bomb. Compton, in an article published three years later, wrote of the poll: “There were a few who preferred not to use the bomb at all, but 87 per cent voted for its military use, at least if after other means were tried this was found necessary to bring surrender.” But it was precisely these “other means” that were not brought forth as alternatives by the Scientific Panel. The exact figures on the poll given in Compton’s article show that only 15 per cent of the 150 scientists surveyed were for full use of the bomb as dictated by military strategy. Forty-six per cent were for demonstrating the bomb in Japan in such a way as to give the Japanese a chance to surrender “before full use of the weapons,” and 26 per cent were for a demonstration in the United States, with Japanese representatives present.
The key to Compton’s interpretation of the polls is in what he said several years after his 1948 article:
One of the young men who had been with us at Chicago and had transferred to Los Alamos came into my Chicago office in a state of emotional stress. He said he had heard of an effort to prevent the use of the bomb. Two years earlier I had pursuaded this young man, as he was graduating with a major in physics, to cast his lot with our project. The chances are, I had told him, that you will be able to contribute more toward winning the war in this position than if you should accept the call to the Navy that you are considering. He had heeded my advice. Now he was sorely troubled. “I have buddies who have fought through the battle of Iwo Jima. Some of them have been killed, others wounded. We’ve got to give these men the best weapons we can produce.” Tears came to his eyes. “If one of these men should be killed because we didn’t let them use the bombs, I would have failed them. I just could not make myself feel that I had done my part.” Others, though less emotional, felt just as deeply.
Behind the polls, behind the panels, behind the committees, behind the advisers and the interpretations of advice, behind the decisionmakers, a persistent basic belief seemed to quash all doubt about using the bomb. This view is summed up by Compton’s young friend: “If one of these men should be killed,” the failure to drop the bomb would be damnable. Tears at the thought of even one American death. But what of the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of Japanese victims of the bomb?
The dispersion of responsibility for evil, Hiroshima proved, is as insidious in a liberal, capitalist state as in a socialist state or a Fascist state. The proliferation of advisers, committees, and polls on the use of the atomic bomb allowed for enough participants so that the entire procedure might deserve the honor of being termed “democratic.” But not all the participants were equals; as the Scientific Panel’s ignorance of military matters demonstrates, not all had equal access to information, which is fundamental to real democracy. Further, the liberal state in modern times, like the socialist or Fascist state, is limited in its thinking by national borders; its “democracy” excludes, without a thought, those outside its boundaries. There was no sounding of Japanese opinion on the question of the bomb; indeed, the question sounds absurd in the self-oriented atmosphere created by the nation-state. It seems absurd not just because America and Japan were at war—it would seem just as absurd to suggest that the Greeks should be polled before making a policy decision on whether or not to recognize the Papadopoulos military junta—but because the national limits of democracy are ingrained in our thinking.
Hiroshima showed us that the broad spread of participation in decisions, which presumably marks a “democratic” country like the United States, is also deceptive. Not only did some of the participants have access to information that others did not, some people in the configuration had immeasurably more power than others. Scientists who opposed the dropping of the bomb, like Szilard, who with Fermi had supervised the first controlled atomic chain reaction at the University of Chicago, did not have as powerful a voice as Groves, an army engineer who built the Pentagon and was in charge of building the bomb. The Szilard petition to the president never reached Truman; it was kept for two weeks by Groves. That Szilard’s statement and those of others against the immediate use of the bomb were held up by Groves and his staff did not become known until 1963, when the files of the Manhattan Project were opened.
The petition was a forecast of the postwar atomic race:
The development of atomic power will provide the nation with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this 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.
If after this war, a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation. Its prevention is at present the solemn responsibility of the United States—singled out by virtue of her lead in the field of atomic power. …
Hiroshima pulled all the elements of America’s decision-making process—including notions of right and wrong, nationalism, polling, secrecy, and absence of information—toward indiscriminate violence for national goals, without any conscious conspiracy or evil intent by individual leaders. As Groves said, after the war, it was not a matter of Truman’s making the decision to drop the bomb, but rather of his not altering a decision already made, of keeping a commitment hardened by the expenditure of money and men over years. Groves, who pictured Truman as “a little boy on a toboggan,” said of the president’s action: “As far as I was concerned, his decision was one of non-interference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans. … As time went on, and as we poured more and more money and effort into the project, the government became increasingly committed to the ultimate use of the bomb. …”
It was not that Americans at this point in their history lacked humanitarian feelings. They did not. That is why they needed explanations that showed lives were saved by dropping the bomb. But because the humanitarianism was vague, while the urge to national power was sharp, the explanations needed only to be made by national leaders in order to be accepted without question or scrutiny. Thus Truman could talk in his Memoirs of General George C. Marshall telling him “it might cost half a million American lives to force the enemy’s surrender on his home grounds.” (Marshall’s opposition to using the bomb without warning was not known until the Manhattan Project papers were unlocked; they disclosed that at a meeting in Stimson’s office May 29, 1945, Marshall had urged that the Japanese be advised about the bomb’s targets so people could be removed and only military installations obliterated.) Similarly, Byrnes could say that he had passed on to Truman the estimate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “our invasion would cost us a million casualties.” The president, Byrnes said, then “expressed the opinion that, regrettable as it might be, so far as he could see, the only reasonable conclusion was to use the bomb.”
That this was not “the only reasonable conclusion” is evident on the basis of only one additional fact, which Truman knew at the time he made the decision on the bomb. He knew that the first invasion of Japan
