However, one of Bohr's other pleas—for politicians not to view the bomb as "just another military weapon"—seems to have been heeded. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapon has been used again, but this is probably due to the immense destructive power demonstrated by these bombings rather than to Bohr's words or to the misgivings expressed by himself and other scientists after it had been dropped. The fact that Hiroshima was destroyed by a single weapon dropped from a single plane and that survivors could appear healthy but then succumb months or years later to radiation effects set Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart. Conventional bombings, such as the attacks on Dresden and Tokyo, although costly in human life and property, were inflicted by greater numbers of planes and their physical if not mental effects, however ghastly, were fully evident within a day or two.* The silent, unseen, and deadly effects of radiation, which may not appear for decades and can be passed to future generations, attract a unique revulsion.
Leo Szilard believed that General Groves had delayed the Manhattan Project significantly because of his obsessive desire for compartmentalization. Compartmentalization to protect security may have imposed small delays, but, to compensate, Groves had single-minded drive, great project management skills, and the ability to focus on essentials. Edward Teller recollected that "between 1943 and 1945 General Groves could have won almost any unpopularity contest in which the scientific community in Los Alamos voted." Nevertheless, most scientists who worked with him thought that without him the project would have been severely set back rather than advanced. Both Teller and Bethe agreed with James Chadwick's assessment that "without Groves the scientists would never have finished anything."
However, if we accept the Szilard view, we are left with the intriguing question: What if the bomb had been ready in, say, February 1945? Would Roosevelt and Churchill have used it against Germany? The answer is almost certainly yes. General Groves recalled, "Mr. Roosevelt told me to be ready to do it." Arguments about saving Allied lives would have been stronger. There would have been considerable political advantage in forestalling Soviet occupation of parts of eastern Europe, in addition to demonstrating to Stalin the West's military power. The Allies' agreed priority was to defeat Germany. They showed no compunction in bombing an untouched German city—Dresden—in February 1945. Knowledge of the effects of radioactive fallout did not deter the Trinity test from being carried out on the mainland of the United States and so would have been unlikely to have stopped a bomb being dropped on Europe. Knowledge of Germany's treatment of Jews and other minorities was already leaking out, following the Russian liberation of Auschwitz at the end of January 194c. Many of those involved in the bomb project had seen it as primarily directed at forestalling a German atomic attack, and there was at that time still a fear of final German vengeance weapons—for example, improved V-2s.
The only argument that the decision to drop a bomb on Germany may have been different assumes that racism was a factor in deciding to bomb Japan. In Allied countries there was certainly racism. It was generally acceptable to attribute characteristics to a whole race and to make judgments about individuals against these stereotypes, as in the case of the academic reference given to Oppenheimer that commented on his Jewish background. There was segregation in the southern states of America. Undeniably, there was racist sentiment against the Japanese in the United States. Japanese Americans were interned en masse; German Americans were not. Thirteen percent of the American public surveyed in a Gallup Poll in December 1944 favored the extermination of all Japanese. A U.S. Marine publication described the Japanese as lice and said that the Marine Corps had been "assigned the gigantic task of [their] extermination. . . . but before a complete cure may be effected the origin of the plague, the breeding-grounds around the Tokyo area must be completely annihilated." Life magazine carried a photo of the girlfriend of an American sailor gazing wistfully at a gift that he had sent her from the Pacific: a Japanese skull signed on the top by him and his friends. British and American journals regularly portrayed the Japanese as monkeys. The American admiral William Halsey spoke of the Japanese as "yellow monkeys" and before one operation publicly proclaimed he was "rarin' to go to get some more monkey meat."
President Roosevelt himself was not without prejudice, as a note by a British diplomat about a 1942 conversation with the president reveals: "It seemed to him [Roosevelt] that if we got the Japanese driven back within their islands, racial crossings might have interesting effects. For instance Dutch-Javanese crossings were good . . . Japanese-European thoroughly bad, Chinese-European not at all bad." The diplomat summed up, "As far as I could make it out, the line of the President's thought is that an Indo-Asian or Eurasian or (better) Eu-rindasian race could be developed which could be good and produce a good civilization and Far East order to the exclusion of the Japanese, languishing in Coventry within their original islands."
Churchill, too, had colonialist prejudices against Asian races and battled to retain Britain's right to rule over Indians and others.
However, there is no evidence that either adopted different military policies under the influence of such views; nor is there any evidence of any racist element in the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.
Another intriguing question is: What if the German chemist Ida Noddack's views on fission in 1934 had been taken seriously? As well as her previous failure to substantiate her claimed discovery of masurium, the reason they were not has something to do with antifeminism. It is easy to forget that when Marie Curie was making her discoveries, the only country in which women had the right to vote was Ernest Rutherford's homeland of New Zealand, where women's suffrage dated back to 1 893. (Perhaps this is one of the reasons he had a relatively enlightened attitude toward female students and supported Marie Curie.) Two years after Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize for Physics, former American president Grover Cleveland could still write that "sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours." The early years of Lise Meitner's career were held back by her gender, rather than by racism.* The frantic attacks on Marie Curie after the Affaire Langevin contained a strong line of antifeminism as well as of xenophobia. It is, perhaps, symptomatic of the predominance of males in the Manhattan Project that in agreeing on a series of code words relating to birth to report on the Trinity test, the birth of a boy was to stand for success, that of a girl for the failure of the bomb to detonate.
The sidelining of Ida Noddack also has something to do with the elitism of physicists. She was a chemist, and there was the perception among some physicists that physics was at the top of a hierarchy of science and that those lower down, such as chemists, could not be relied upon for original thought. Rutherford once said that "all science is either physics or stamp collecting." When the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli's wife left him for a chemist he told a friend, "Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood . . . but a chemist . . ." Both Otto Hahn and Bertrand Goldschmidt indicated that they too faced such prejudices, and, as late as the 1970s, entrants into the nuclear industry could be told, semihumorously, of a hierarchy with theoretical physicists at the top and engineers at the bottom.
If Ida Noddack's ideas had been followed up in 1934, fission might have been discovered a year later—four years earlier than it actually was. This does not mean that the nuclear bomb would have been available in 1941. It took wartime pressures for the Manhattan Project to receive the massive funding it required. However, the uses of fission would have been more wddely debated and information more widely pooled before the outbreak of wrar. For example, the use of graphite as an alternative moderator to heavy water might have been publicized and become known to the Germans. The German program would have gone into wartime isolation more advanced and posing much more immediate moral dilemmas for the scientists involved than was, in fact, the case. There might have been much more French information a
nd facilities for the Germans to capture. On the Allied side, the British might have begun to work harder on nuclear issues earlier as, in the late 1930s, arguments for rearmament made by Churchill began to be heeded. But, on balance, it was better for the world that the scientific community, including her fellow women, such as Lise Meitner, dismissed Ida Noddack's work as, in the words of Noddack's fellow chemist Otto Hahn, "really absurd."
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The "what if?" question that has most preoccupied historians is: What if the bomb had not been dropped? On the very big assumption that no new diplomatic initiative would have been launched, Russia would still have entered the war against Japan. Its plans to do so to secure a share of the spoils were highly advanced, and the bombing of Hiroshima brought them forward by only a week. As the Russians' initial progress in fighting the Japanese in Manchuria demonstrated, they would have advanced swiftly into China and occupied much of the country, perhaps hastening by a year or two the fall of Chiang Kai-shek and the communist takeover.
When Japan did surrender, the Russians would have played a greater part in determining the peace and might have asked for a role in the occupation of Japan, perhaps even seeking an occupation zone of their own. This would not have been to the Allies' liking. Truman wrote, "The experience at Potsdam now made me determined that I would not allow the Russians any part in the control of Japan." According to Secretary of State Byrnes, "In the days immediately preceding the dropping of that bomb his [Truman's] views were the same as mine—we wanted to get through with the Japanese phase of the war before the Russians came in." The Washington insider Walter Brown recorded that Byrnes believed, "After the atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill." Clearly, Truman and Byrnes preferred to end the war quickly without the added difficulties that full Soviet involvement would entail.
The Japanese would undoubtedly have continued to resist for some time. Their defeat would probably have required an invasion of their home islands, with the heavy loss of Allied lives so much feared by Truman and Churchill. This was despite the fact that, as Allied military leaders such as Marshall, LeMay, Arnold, Eisenhower, and the Briton Alanbrooke agreed, they were militarily already thoroughly beaten. Their cities were defenseless against U.S. air attack, and their supply routes to and from their homeland and between their armies severed. Admiral Leahy wrote that by the beginning of September 1944 "Japan was almost defeated through a practically complete sea and air blockade." There would have been further deaths of Allied airmen, of sailors in kamikaze attacks, and of soldiers fighting in Burma and elsewhere. More Japanese cities would have been destroyed and many lives lost. General LeMay told his superior, General Arnold, in June 1945 that by September or October of that year his pilots would have run out of industrial targets to bomb.
The argument made by Major Rittner to Otto Hahn that he did not care about 100,000 or 150,000 Japanese if a couple of Allied lives could be saved cannot be defended morally, even if one can understand how, in wartime, it might have been made. However, when the number of deaths reaches closer to parity, its force increases.
Some have argued that by dropping the bomb more Japanese lives were saved than lost. They claim that Hiroshima gave the peace faction in the Japanese government the grounds for pressing for a surrender. In the words of General Marshall, the bomb provided an opportunity "to shock them into action" and "out of their determination to sacrifice great numbers of their people in futile further defense." Keino Kido, the emperor's confidant, said in an interview in 1966, "There was also a plus aspect to the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war. I assumed at the time that if there had been no atomic bombs and the Soviet Union hadn't joined in, we might not have succeeded in [making peace]." A senior Japanese officer saw the same two events as "in a sense heaven-sent blessings. This way we didn't have to say we quit the war because of domestic circumstances." Even Taro Takemi, Japan's leading practitioner of nuclear medicine, who accompanied Professor Nishina to Hiroshima on 8 August to investigate the explosion, thought that the bomb might have had a beneficial effect. He later wrote, "When one considers the possibility that the Japanese military would have sacrificed the entire nation if it were not for the atomic bomb attack, then this bomb might be described as having saved Japan."
All the above discussion assumes that no change was made in the Allies' diplomatic position and, in particular, that they would have continued to insist on unconditional surrender. The reasoning behind their demand for unconditional surrender included avoiding any future claims (akin to those made by some Germans after the First World War) that Japan had not been defeated and thus allowing militarism to rise once more. Such fears were, however, a reason for insisting on occupation to make defeat unequivocal. They were not arguments against modifying the term unconditional surrender to make clear that the Japanese ruling house could be preserved in some form, as, in fact, happened.
The importance of the monarchy to the Japanese position was appreciated in Washington. Under-Secretary of State Joseph Grew, the U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo until Pearl Harbor, advised Truman on 28 May, "The greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne." His opinion was backed up by several other government members. In a memo to Truman on 2 July about the drafting of a statement on surrender terms for the Japanese, Stimson advised, "I person-allv think . . . we should add that we do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty. It would substantially add to the chances of acceptance."
Winston Churchill also suggested to Truman that he might consider whether unconditional surrender "might not be expressed in some other way, so that we got all the essentials for future peace and security, and yet left the Japanese some show of saving their military honor and some assurance of their national existence." The Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United Kingdom and the United States were also sympathetic to such a clarification, suggesting the inclusion in the Potsdam Declaration of the following addition: "Subject to suitable guarantees against further acts of aggression the Japanese people will be free to choose their own form of government," which, by implication, would include the continuation of the monarchy. Stimson had a final meeting on 24 July with Truman about the issue of the Potsdam Declaration and recorded the upshot in his diary: "I spoke of the importance which I attributed to the reassurance of the Japanese on the continuance of their dynasty and I had felt that the insertion of that in the formal warning was important and might be just the thing that would make or mar their acceptance. . . . I heard from Byrnes that they [Truman and Byrnes] preferred not to put it in."
Because so many of the key Japanese documents, including the diary Emperor Hirohito is said to have kept since the age of eleven and his family correspondence, are still kept secret by the Imperial Japanese Household Agency, it is somewhat opaque as to whether the Japanese liberal faction would have felt strong enough to promote surrender before the atom bomb was dropped. They were fearful of a military backlash against any premature initiative leading to their own murder and the virtual imprisonment of the emperor. At the same time they were concerned not to allowr domestic conditions to deteriorate to the extent there was a popular revolt against the throne.
Whether the Japanese accepted it or not, there seems no reason why, based on the knowledge they had at the time, the Allies should not have included in the Potsdam Declaration a concession on the ruling dynasty, if not the continuance of Hirohito's own rule. If the Japanese had rejected it, the case for the deployment of the bomb would have been strengthened, not weakened, at no cost in human life.
The available sources contain no substantive information as to why Byrnes and Truman chose not to include such a concession, although it seems clear that the strongest opponent of doing so was Byrnes. It may be that the two men feared public criticism if they did so. An unpublished Gallup Poll in June 1945 showed that 77 percent of the U.
S. public wanted the emperor severely punished. However, after the bombs were dropped, Truman and Byrnes were prepared to face the outcry at allowing the emperor to remain.
Perhaps conscious of the power of the new wreapon, the two men disregarded other options to end the war. The Manhattan Project had a momentum of its own. General Groves described Truman as "like a little boy on a toboggan." Some have suggested that the subsequent use of the bomb in combat validated in the minds of officials the amount of government resources spent on its development without specific congressional approval. They cite Stimson, who in 1947 wrote in Harper's Magazine, "At no time, from 1941 to 1945, did I ever hear it suggested by the President . . . that atomic energy should not be used in this war . . . on no other ground could the war-time expenditure of so much time and money be justified." Truman and Byrnes were certainly also both conscious of the diplomatic advantage that the deployment of the bomb would give them in their difficult relationship with the Soviet Union and that its deployment might prevent Russian involvement in the occupation of Japan and the dictation of peace terms. This suggests that both momentum and the strategic diplomatic benefits played a part.
Neither reason is, however, sufficient to explain fully why Truman and Byrnes took no action to prevent a second bomb from being dropped so quickly on Nagasaki. The Manhattan team and the U.S. Air Force personnel on Tinian brought the drop forward by two days for operational reasons. Fat Man fell on Nagasaki on 9 August before the Japanese had time to respond to the Soviet invasion launched about the same time that the B-29 Bock's Car carrying the bomb took off from Tinian. The American authorities in Washington, but presumably not the team on Tinian, had been aware of the Russian declaration of war issued at 5 p.m. (Moscow time) on 8 August and of the Soviet intention to invade Manchuria.
Before the Fallout Page 41