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Harry Truman and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
Harry Truman
Peter Robinson expressed his opinion on Twitter today that President Truman did not approve the use of the nuclear bomb. “Truman never approved the use of the bomb–or disapproved it,” He wrote. “The military considered it one more weapon, like a new submarine or aircraft. They kept Truman informed. But they did not ask his approval.”
That’s not my memory from reading David McCollough’s Truman, so I decided to look it up, as best I could.
Here’s what Truman himself said of the matter, as quoted by McCollough on page 442 of the paperback edition:
The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.
McCollough continues on the same page:
Though nothing was recorded on paper, the critical moment appears to have occurred at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse later in the morning of Tuesday, July 24, when, at 11:30, the combined American and British Chiefs of Staff convened with Truman and Churcheill in the dinning room. This was the one time when Truman, Churchill, and their military advisers were all around a table, in Churchill’s phrase. From this point it was settled: barring some unforeseen development, the bomb would be used with a few weeks.
Peter followed up by saying that Truman authorized the release of a “document explaining the bomb, not the bomb itself.”
Page 435-437:
With the start of his second week at Potsdam, Truman knew that decisions on the bomb could wait no longer. At 10:00 Sunday morning, July 22, he attended Protestant services led by a chaplain from the 2nd Armored Division. …
[Secretary of War] Stimson had appeared at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse shortly after breakfast with messages from Washington saying all was about5 ready for the “final operation” and that a decision on the target cities was needed. Stimson wanted Kyoto removed from the list, and having heard the reasons, Truman agreed. Kyoto would be spared. “Although it was a target of considerable military importance,” Stimson would write, “it had been the capital of Japan and was a shrine of Japanese art and culture…” First on the list of approved targets was Hiroshima, southern headquarters and depot for Japan’s homeland army. …
Tuesday, July 24, was almost certainly the fateful day.
At 9:20A.M Stimson again climbed the stairs to Truman’s office, where he found the President seated behind the heavy carved desk, “alone with his work.” Stimson had brought another message:
Washington, July 23, 1945
Top Secret
Operational Priority
War 36792 Secretary of War Eyes Only top secret from Harrison.Operation may be possible any time from August 1 depending on state of preparation of patient and condition of atmosphere. From point of view of patient only, some chance August 1 to 3, good chance August 4 to 5 and barring unexpected relapse almost certain before August 10.
Truman “said that was just what he wanted,” Stimson wrote in his diary,” that he was highly delighted….”
Page 448:
Late on Monday, July 30, another urgent top-secret cable to Truman was received and decoded…
The time schedule on Groves’ project is progressing so rapidly that it is now essential that statement for release by you be available not later than Wednesday, 1 August….
The time had come for Truman to give the final go-ahead for the bomb. This was the moment, the decision only he could make.
The message was delivered at 7:48 A.M., Berlin time, Tuesday, July 31. Writing large and clear with a lead pencil on the back of the pink message, Truman gave his answer, which he handed to Lieutenant Elsey for Transmission:
Suggestion approved. Release when ready but not sooner than August 2.
On July 25, Truman had written in his journal, McCollough quotes on pages 443-444:
We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world… This weapon will be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo, where the Imperial Palace had been spared thus far].
He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them a chance.
McCollough notes that Truman knew that it was “only partly true” that the bomb would be used only against military targets. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the sites of military installations, so they were legitimate military targets, but of course we know that many civilians perished. The morality of the atomic bomb is not the subject of this post, but I’d like to mention that at this point more than 50,000 American soldiers had been killed in just four months of island hopping and that 100,000 Japanese had died in a single night of firebombing.
On page 457:
On August 9, the papers carried still more stupendous news. A million Russian troops had crossed into Manchuria–Russia was in the war against Japan–and a second atomic bomb had been dropped on the major Japanese seaport of Nagasaki.
No high-level meeting had been held concerning this second bomb. Truman had made no additional decision. There was no order issued beyond the military directive for the first bomb, which had been sent on July 25 by Marshall’s deputy, General Thomas T. Handy, to the responsible commander in the Pacific, General Carl A. Spaatz of the Twentieth Air Force. Paragraph 2 of that directive had stipulated: “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff.” A second bomb–a plutonium bomb nicknamed “Fat Man”–being ready, it was “delivered” from Tinian, and two days ahead of schedule, in view of weather conditions.
There are no doubt additional relevant quotes, but I’ll limit it to these. Does anyone else have insight into this momentous decision?
Published in General
True:
The range of the Lancaster is given as 2500 miles. Is that one way or both ways? Tokyo was 1500 miles from Tinian.
We produce weapons and munitions in and around cities too. You haven’t had the experience of your grandmother or children being blown to bits because they live in that city.
The Brits and Germans experienced those things in WWII whether or not there were strategic industries nearby.
There’s been speculation that FDR would not have used the bomb against Japan; after all, the panic rush behind us and the British making the bomb was the likelihood that Germany would get one first. But the only targeting discussion he ever participated in vaguely considered its use against a Japanese naval base.
By the time we were a year away from a bomb, the summer of 1944, the (over optimistic) belief was that Germany would be defeated by the end of the year. So there is no trace of a plan for European “delivery” (a nice euphemism for incinerating Berlin).
So, tell Japan not to start a war. Problem solved, Catholic Ethicists placated, everybody wins!
Sorry dude. Took a class on it. The gun-type weapon was not tested because we knew it would work. The implosion type was tested at Trinity and used on Nagasaki.
I saw it. Thanks. I’m not going to argue there were better courses of action. Some of what they argued (Miscamble and LiVeche, especially LiVeche) was indeed consequestionalist argument. There is nothing in “the Way” of Jesus Christ and as articulated by His greatest exponent, St. Paul (see Romans 3:8) that can support the bombing of innocents. Perhaps one has to suffer to avoid doing so, but that is what is meant to be a Christian. Language used to rationalize evil are words right out of Lucifer’s mouth. I can also point to the cold war. It ended after 40 something years without dropping an atomic bomb. If the solution was to wait Japan out, then maybe that was the only Christian solution. Arguing that the Japanese were killing innocents, and so we had to stop it, is again not a valid argument. The Japanese were committing the evil acts and they would have to answer to God for it. Stopping them from doing it required a non-evil act.
Yes. The bombing of innocents, which became a 20th century norm, is immoral.
OK, I will.
And when you’re done using your time machine, there might be a few other things it could be used for.
OK I found it. But that’s a side argument. Whether a negotiated peace was possible or not is not the point of the morality of consequentialism. The morality of an evil act does not hinge on alternatives. That’s the fundamental point in all this.
Okay, so, if I kill someone who has killed before and will kill again, maybe is about to kill right at the moment where they get killed first instead, that’s an evil that I will be held accountable for, apparently to the same degree as the killer that was stopped?
Got it.
Wow, that’s some God you have there.
I am confused – are you actually saying that it was more Christian to allow tens of thousands of innocent people to die rather than use any means to stop the deaths? Something in on the order of ten thousand civilians were dying every week in CHINA (minimum estimate) and that does not include the Philippine Islands, Burma, the Malay Peninsula or even in the Japanese Islands. Seems to me that it would be immoral to let that continue when you had the means to end it because of scruples or something. The most moral route is to END the deaths as quickly as possible. Period. Anything else is easy if you aren’t the one dying.
Thousands of Asian civilians and Allied soldiers were dying every day.
I think the actual choice was the rapid death of 10’s or 100’s of thousands civilians or a much larger number of dead civilians over a longer period of time accompanied by 10’s or 100’s of thousand American dead. Prosecuting the war required one of the other. Prosecuting the war was itself a morally correct decision. Hiroshima would have been an objective in a landing and would have been bombed to rubble in the process. To claim that the latter (non-nuclear) choice did not entail a conscious choice to effect mass death of civilians all over Japan is delusional or disingenuous.
I agree consequential arguments are a slippery slope but all the alternatives available to Truman would lead to many more deaths than the atomic bombings and he was well aware of that fact. So he was faced with choosing the least evil option and that isn’t consequentialism.
But according to Catholic Ethicists, it was still evil.
Whatever. They can have their perfect world as soon as they find it, or somehow manage to create it from what we have.
@Manny: I pulled those quotes DIRECTLY from the article you linked to, copied and pasted into my comment. And I was responding to HIS “consequentialist” argument, that the consequences would have been better if we had negotiated a peace with Germany at the end of WW1. I thought that he got the consequences exactly backwards.
The just-war doctrine tenet that I quoted from the article: “The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” is a consequentialist argument. I claimed that the evil we eliminated was greater than the “evils and disorders” the bombing produced, so was acceptable under this doctrine.
Some people seem to think that ending a war “too quickly” is somehow automatically bad.
Manny, with all due respect, you are begging the question with respect to the dropping of the bombs, by presuming it settled that it was evil, then saying “we must not do evil”. You are skipping the step of making the case that it was in fact an evil act. Your arguments elsewhere above and below read more like a justification for personal non-violent pacifism, rather than addressing the bombing within the context of just war theory and nation states. Under your applications, even the civilian police would be hindered from any act to defend innocent lives, if even one bystander might be injured in the process. Unworkable, outside the freshman college dorm room philosophizing, or conclaves of certain Catholic ethicists. And certainly not applicable when facing the true evils of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union. Your stated position on ethics would have left the ovens of Treblinka and Auschwitz working overtime for years longer, for fear that Allied troops might have hurt a German civilian on the way toward liberation. In Japan, ending the war with the “special” bombs was an unsure proposition, but one that offered by far the best chance at the time for saving millions of lives. Evil it was not.
That book is peddling the same discredited narrative that has been trotted out over the decades to cast doubt on the correctness of the decision to use the atomic bomb, but tries to quickly slip past a key point about the importance of the nature of a surrender, not just blind reliance on the vague offer of one. Unconditional surrender is the only acceptable outcome of a war with the cost in lives that we suffered against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. And my gosh, have we not learned that lesson over and over again in the three-quarters of a century since?
Another key point being missed: it does not matter what conditions we might have set in place after the unconditional surrender, because those were made from the strong position of already having the unconditional surrender. Any narrative that does not acknowledge this, or gives it short shrift, is simply unserious. We could afford a measure of magnanimity at that point. Much as Lincoln was able to call for “malice toward none; with charity for all . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” But this was only possible after unconditional surrender.
Many think that General Douglas MacArthur was a pompous ass, but his post war leadership in Japan followed Lincoln’s wisdom.
Yeah. I have American Caesar somewhere on my bookshelf.
Found it:
Actually, it wasn’t truly an unconditional surrender-we let it be known that we would allow the emperor to remain as a ceremonial position. But we were adamant that occupation & regime change were required (mainly d/t the results of WW1 where, while, regime change occurred there was no widespread occupation).
But that was a condition that we saw as beneficial to OUR side, and thus not a condition we were forced into accepting at all. It’s like providing cable TV to inmates in the day room: don’t think of it as a benefit to the prisoners, it is a big benefit to the guards to have the inmates preoccupied and not causing trouble. We reasoned that keeping the emperor in place (while beginning to sever the Japanese belief in his divinity) would prevent a more troublesome occupation. We were correct.
Wasn’t the emperor also required to stop claiming divinity? That’s what I seem to remember.
I’m pretty sure you are correct.
I believe that the emperor made a statement about that at some point afterward, but not at the same time as the surrender. But not long after.