and that the Kyushu assault was not scheduled until November—allowing three months for the wobbling nation to surrender. Japan was already beginning to press for peace through her emissary in Moscow, as Truman and the American high command also knew through the interception of Japanese cables. There was, therefore, no immediate need to use the bomb to save lives. Hanson Baldwin summarized the situation as follows:
The atomic bomb was dropped in August. Long before that month started our forces were securely based in Okinawa, the Marianas and Iwo Jima; Germany had been defeated; our fleet had been cruising off the Japanese coast with impunity bombarding Japan; even inter-island ferries had been attacked and sunk. Bombing, which started slowly in June, 1944, from China bases and from the Marianas in November, 1944, had been increased materially in 1945, and by August, 1945, more than 16,000 tons of bombs had ravaged Japanese cities. Food was short; mines and submarines and surface vessels and planes clamped an iron blockade around the main islands; raw materials were scarce. Blockade, bombing, and unsuccessful attempts at dispersion had reduced Japanese production capacity from 20 to 60 per cent. The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26.
Such, then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.
Confirmation of the argument against the Truman-Byrnes “only reasonable conclusion” thesis was supplied by an official government committee, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, established by Stimson in 1944 to study the results of the aerial attacks on Germany. After Japan surrendered, the survey committee interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders on many matters, including the effects of the atomic bombing. Its report concludes:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
Truman’s and Byrnes’s talk of saving lives in the future by destroying lives in the present has been the supreme defense of mass killing in modern war. As “humanitarian” rationale, it has been the most persuasive justification for the American depredations not only in World War II but in Korea and Vietnam. It is a rationale epitomized best by that quintessential liberal Woodrow Wilson when he described World War I, which cost ten million lives on the battle-field, as a war to “bring peace and safety to all nations.” In the 1950s the destruction of Korea and its people was justified by vague speculation about preventing some possible conflagration in the future. In the 1960s the continued American bombing of Indochina, with a million casualties, and millions more driven from their hamlets, was justified by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as necessary to prevent a larger war.
Truman’s other reason for dropping the bomb—that Hiroshima was a military base—is even more untenable than his talk of saving “half a million” American lives or Byrnes’s talk of preventing “a million casualties.” On August 9, the day on which the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and the Japanese were warned to surrender or be destroyed, Truman declared: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” In the face of the enormous toll of civilian life in the bombing of Hiroshima, Truman’s statement might seem to be one of the most mendacious uttered by any political leader in modern times. Not only were tens of thousands of civilians killed in this “military” bombing, but the official report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey said that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population.”
Truman’s statement, however, had to be made because of an important political fact: the American population needed such reassurance, and it depended for its information on the president and other government leaders. It is one of the ironies of modern “democracy” that the public, which is supposed to weigh the claims of its leaders, depends on its leaders for its information. In the Vietnam War, American political leaders continued to speak to the public, with considerable success, about bombing only military targets, as if American bombers pinpointed their loads on these targets with only occasional, accidental failures resulting in civilian casualties. Among themselves, military men spoke more frankly, as one naval officer did in a Naval Review article in 1969:
One naturally wonders why so many bombing sorties are required in order to destroy a bridge or other pinpoint target. … However, with even the most sophisticated computer system, bombing by any mode remains an inherently inaccurate process, as is evident from our results to date in Vietnam. Aiming errors, boresight errors, system computational errors and bomb dispersion errors all act to degrade the accuracy of the system. Unknown winds at altitudes below the release point and the “combat degradation” factor add more errors to the process. In short, it is impossible to hit a small target with bombs except by sheer luck. Bombing has proved most efficient for area targets such as supply dumps, build-up areas, and cities. (My emphasis.)
Hiroshima was not an unfortunate error in an otherwise glorious war. It revealed, in concentrated form, characteristics that the United States had in common with the other belligerents—whatever their political nomenclature. The first of these is the commission and easy justification of indiscriminate violence when it serves political aims. The second is the translation of the system’s basic power motives into whatever catchall ideology can mobilize the population—“socialism” for socialist states, “democracy” for capitalist states, “the master race” for Fascist states. The common denominator for all has been the survival of the system in power—whether socialist, Fascist, or capitalist. What dominated the motives for war among all the belligerents were political ends—power, privilege, expansion—rather than human ends—life, liberty, the pursuit of individual and social happiness.
This is not to deny that political ends—power, the survival and growth of particular social systems—have human consequences, and that the survival of certain social systems may be highly desirable in human terms. But the overlapping of political and human ends has been, so far, a matter of chance. And the reason why it has been a matter of chance is because no society in the world, including the American, has as yet reached the point where its political leaders are subject to the informed power of the people whose interests they claim to represent. As a result, the decisions of the leadership are motivated primarily by the aggrandizement of its own power and wealth, with token payments made in behalf of human rights when necessary to maintain control, and violations committed against such rights when they conflict with national political power.
The motivation behind dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, despite the death and suffering of the Japanese, and despite the consequences for the world of that atomic terror forecast by the Szilard petition, was political; the “humanitarian” aspect of the decision to drop the bomb is dubious. That political motive was to keep the Russians out of the Pacific war so that the United States would play the primary role in the peace settlement in Asia. The circumstantial evidence for this conclusion, Truman and Byrnes notwithstanding, is that the strictly military need to end the war did not require such instant use of the bomb. Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff; General Henry Arnold, commanding general of the air force; General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Strategic Air Force; as well as General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Pacific theater; and General Eisenhower, did not think use of the bomb was necessary.
The political motive was first pointed out by the British scientist P. M. S. Blackett in his book Fear, War, and the Bomb. Blackett wondered about the rush to drop the bombs, and concluded that it was to beat the Russian entrance into the war against Japan, which was scheduled for August 8. The Russians had promised at Yalta
