In April, 1947 Lilienthal visited Los Alamos, as the new head of the A.E.C., he was not happy with what he found. At that time there were about 200,000 allied troops in Europe, facing 1.2 million Soviet troops.
I’m not suggesting anything, I’m pointing out the fact Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not satisfied with one (1) atomic bomb, in an un-assembled state, sitting in New Mexico as comprising an adequate defense against the Soviet threat in Europe. The deterrence was not some sort of proportionate thing, or deciding that 24 or 48 hours was plenty of time. They weren’t going to do that. The idea was to prevent them from even thinking about an invasion.
I’d argue that it was cold calculation, if I understand what you mean by that term in context of the situation.
The US was calculating that if they started vaporizing cities, the Japanese would surrender. They ultimately decised that destroying Kyoto may win the war but lose the peace.
The problem that the US was faced with in the summer of 1941 is similar in a way to the problem that the US has currently in 2026 in the war with Iran (with the obvious difference of who started the war, the reasons for the war, if the war itself was justified, etc.).
The question was the difficulty of getting the enemy to negotiate an end to the war on acceptable terms when you haven’t invaded the country and completely defeated their army. Germany surrendered when the Soviets and Western Allies had pushed their armies back from most of the occupied countries, then the Soviets and Western Allies overrun most of Germany and finally to Soviets had conqured Berlin.
The US was hoping Japan would surrender without and invasion and without having to fight them in China and the other occupied territies. It would be the equivalent of wanting Germany to surrender before D-Day.
Next, the US and Allies were adamant that they didn’t want to have to come back in 20 years and fight Japan again. That was a bitter lesson learned from how WWI ended.
The Allies had settled on unconditional surrender as a way of ensuring that the Axis governments would be changed and this was precisely the sticking point with the radical members of the Big Six, the “Inner Cabinet.”
The War Faction wanted to not only keep the Emperor, they wanted to maintain the 国体 kokutai , a concept that is really hard to translate into English.
The kokutai was the imperial/national system centered on the Emperor, but most importantly, it allowed the military to start wars essentially on their own. (Grossly simplified.) While the Emperor was the center of the nation, he was supposed to “receive the advice of his advisers” and wasn’t to make decisions on his own. The military reported to him and not to the civilian government.
Allowing the government to continue was a nonstarter for the US and Allies, of course.
Gar Alperovitz and his ilk have argued that that the Japanese government was ready to surrender, the US knew this but wanted to send a message to the USSR so they bombed anyway.
In his book and numerous articles, Alperovitz selectively quotes and misrepresents the intercepted Japanese diplomatic cables to argue that, but a careful look demonstrates that they were not attempting to surrender with terms that would be acceptable to the US and the Allies.
The Japanese ambassador to the USSR told Tokyo that the best they could hope for was accepting Potsdam with retaining the Emperor and Tokyo promptly rejected that proposal.
One of the best books to understand the problem is Eri Hotta’s Japan1941: Countdown to Infamy, which provides a deep dive into how Japan wound up attacking the largest industrial nation in the world.
Japanese decision making is maddening at best (as someone who has lived here for decades) and Hotta amply demonstrates how convaluted it was. People were saying one in meetings, another thing in public and something else to their associates.
They started a war with no idea of how to end it. There was this vague notion that somehow they could achieve a diplomatic solution, but the military leaders had no experience in diplomacy and they never had any concrete ideas, let alone any realistic ones.
In 1945, leaders were counting on the same magical solution. In their fantasy, the Soviets were going to negotiate a better deal for them, and this delusion continued until August 8th when the USSR announced they were entering the war.
For the “peace faction and the Emperor, it wasn’t clear if Gen. Anami, the Army Minister and one of the radical members of the Big Six, was going to go quietly. There were 5 million Japanese in uniform at the end of the war, and no guarantee that they would surrender.
Yeah, in general the very, most frenzied, fast-paced modern military advances have been in the 1-10 miles per day against opposition range. 25 miles a day is firmly within the “chasing a defeated enemy” realm.
My take on it is that it was very much a situation of crossed definitions. The scientists and the people close to the bombs were very aware of the way they went together, the time frames involved, and the safety/reliability aspects of the design, and counted them as “bombs” if we had everything to put them together in a short frame of time. Meanwhile, Truman and the JCS were probably thinking that “having bombs” meant ready to drop.
And… history points out that they didn’t have that tripwire style system until 1954 at the very earliest, as that’s when the US deployed nuclear weapons to the UK for the first time.
Meanwhile, the Mark IV bomb, which was the first nuclear weapon designed to be a mass-produced, practical piece of ordnance (as opposed to a bespoke, hand-made device) had already gone into service, been produced 550 times, and gone out of service by 1954. It is true that they did deploy the non-nuclear part of the bomb to Europe starting in 1950, but that’s without the fissile pit, which was stili in the US. So at the very least, they were expecting to have to scrounge one up, fly it to the UK, put it in the bomb, and then fly to the target and drop it. Certainly not a fast system by a long chalk. And probably by design; that slower pace gave them a lot of opportunity to negotiate.
The expectation was that the Soviets would not be able to achieve a bomb for many years (1960 was one agency’s prediction). The explosion of Joe-1 in 1949 alarmed everyone.
I’ve read that. But Johnny Von Neumann predicted 3 to 6 years, and they did it in 4. I don’t think there were too many illusions. Maybe misplaced hope, or something like that.
Hey, if you think it was hard to get them to surrender in 1945, you should have seen how hard it was before the war started!
Yes, 1945, of course.
In addition, the arguments against the bomb rely completely on the certainty of the surrender, something we now know wasn’t a given at all.
Jonathan Parshall argues that the alternatives to dropping the bombs would result in somewhere between 5 million and 20 million deaths, depending on the scenario. He shows the numbers, and the majority of the deaths are civilians, with a lot of those being Allied civilians.
Even those numbers assume that Japan surrenders as opposed to fighting to the last man, woman and child.
The person I really wish we knew more about was Gen. Anami, the Minister of the Army and the more important person in Japan, next to the Emperor. He was one of the hardlinders who insisted to the end that Japan should continue to fight.
Because of the Meiji Constitution and the laws at the time, the Minister of the Army and the Minister of the Navy would bring down the government by resigning and the services could prevent a new government from forming. With no “civilian” government, martial law would be declared and Anami would have been the dictator of Japan.
For most of Japanese history, the emperors were kept in gilded cages while shoguns or others actually ruled the country.
The Emperor had three brothers and the army could easily get one of them or another member of the imperial family to go along with them.
All Anami had to do was get up during one of these endless meeting, say that he was going for a piss and then continue to walk out to his staff car. That would trigger a coup and it would be successful.
We don’t know Anami’s motivation for not resigning and for signing the surrender docutment along with the other members of the cabinet. We’ll never know why because he committed seppuku the next morning.
There is a new book just out, which I haven’t read yet, but I’ve watched several interviews with the author.
