Historians tend to write about the causes of events, not about whether those events should have happened. They don’t usually ask if the American colonists should have declared war against Britain or whether Robert E. Lee should have decided to lead the Confederate army.
But some subjects are so momentous that historians have difficulty avoiding moral questions. That is the case with Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, a decision that continues to be controversial.
According to Tsoyushi Hasegawa, there has long been a debate between orthodox historians and revisionists. The former argue that it was necessary in order to avoid the loss of thousands of lives in an invasion of Japan. The latter say it should not have been used because Japan was essentially defeated already and the actual purpose of the bombings was to send a message to Stalin.[1]
In this and two following posts I want to look afresh at some of the elements that fed into Truman’s decision. I do not attempt to decide whether Truman should have authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although I may help some readers think about it. Continue reading “A President’s Troubling Surprise: The Manhattan Project”