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By “they” I take it you meant the military? So far as I know it was President Truman who authorized the first atomic bomb to be dropped.
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Did the military not get permission from President Truman to drop the second one?
Marc
According to McCullough’s book ** Truman**, the mood aboard the ship bringing Truman back from his “Big Three” conference was jubilation that the war was nearly at an end. The message gave no details about the bomb, except that it was a new sort that could destroy an entire city. I think any horror about the destructiveness of the new weapon would have been buried under the relief that the war the US didn’t ask for would, in all probability, be over soon.
I’ve read a lot in the past few about the question about whether to drop the bomb was a right one. My opinion is that a lot of it might seem obvious only in hindsight. There was still uncertainty about whether the bombs would work – I don’t think there was much doubt about the “Little Boy” Uranium Gun, but the “Fat Man” Plutonium Sphere had been demonstrated in a fixed test, not in a dropped bomb. One can talk about how poorly off Japan was, and about the readiness to surrender, but after the brutal battle for Iwo Jima, who could doubt their determination? If we had any doubt about how tough a guerilla war with an indigenous population could be, our experience in Vietnam should have erased that. Against conflicting signals from intelligence, would you gamble your own men’s lives, or would you use the atomic bomb?
As for the toll on civilian lives, that issue had been decided long before Hiroshima. The fire bombing of Tokyo was no more discreet. The bombing of Dresden was less defensible. Before the war, the Allies condemned the bombing of an “open city” like Guernica. During WWII, the Allies praised the effects of aerial bombardment, even when it was inaccurate enough to do great harm to civilian targets.