Why the US dropped atom bombs on Japan (more Oppenheimer context)

in

Since watching Oppenheimer I’ve been thinking a lot about the factors that went into the US dropping two atomic bombs on Japan.

The official reason given by President Truman and Secretary of War Stimson is that doing so saved hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of US lives that would have been spent in making a land invasion of Japan.

In reality there there was no single decision made to drop the bomb based on the lives that would be saved (1). It’s simply that all the momentum of the wartime USA was pushing towards dropping the bomb.

Think of the various political factors going on:

  • The US had been calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan, and Truman felt the US public would not accept anything less - to an extent Americans felt angry and vengeful towards the Japanese. The bomb seemed that it would help convince Japan to unconditionally surrender

  • The US was eyeing post-war diplomacy and wanted to impress and shock the USSR with the weapon

  • The bomb had cost $2 billion to build. When an inevitable congressional inquiry into the project occured, everyone involved wanted to be able to show without a doubt that the money was well spent

  • As General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan project, said: “Knowing American politics…there would have been elections fought on the basis that every mother whose son was killed after [the date we could have dropped the bomb] the blood is on the head of the president”

Imagine you are a top decision-maker tasked with making decisions trying to win the worst war that has ever been fought. You are simply going to use every weapon you have. You would have to be a person of incredible moral conviction to say “we should not use this weapon because of the moral repercussions”.

Nobody in a decision-making position stood up like this - not Truman, not Secretary of War Stimson, not General Marshall.

The reason the US built and dropped and continued building bombs is because everything in the manner in which World War II was prosecuted, American sentiment towards Japan, and the way policymakers viewed the USSR, pushed towards dropping them.

For a lot of people who worked on the bomb, the original intention was to make sure the US built it before the Nazis did. But once the gears of government power-accumulation are kicked into motion, original intentions stop mattering. A chain reaction is started and is very difficult - maybe impossible - to stop (2).

—
I do not consider myself a leftist or someone who generally thinks that we need to tear down and rebuild the entire structure of American society and government. But I wonder: Maybe it is worth tearing it all down if that’s the price we have to pay for a system of government where political pressure doesn’t lead to dropping atomic bombs.

—

  1. In fact, Truman simply lied in his “estimate” of the number of lives that would have been lost. The actual estimate of lives lost given by the Joint War Planning Committee was 40,000.

  2. Ina similar vein, a major factor in the US building up its nuclear arsenal during the cold war was competition between different branches of the military for more influence and a larger share of the budget. Here is Richard Rhodes: "what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s is that the more targets, the more bombs. The more bombs, the more planes. The more planes, the biggest share of the budget. So by the mid 1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. So the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons. …And of course the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in total security…We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines. And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.”