Educate yourself!
Satisfy your curiosity to the fullest.
Go to your local library and ask the reference desk for help in finding books published in the late forties about the atomic bomb project. Actually termed The Manhattan Project for histories of the bomb, its development, testing, and actual use to bring the war in the western Pacific to an early life saving end. Had it been necessary to invade the islands of Japan the loss of life for soldiers and civilians alike would have eclipesed those dying from the bomb by far. There are waiting lists, interlibrary loans and other options to persue. Persistence will pay off.
You will learn a lot more by reading the histories than from a few responses on SDMB which is more of a starting point. The SDMB will provide sources to seek out for the full story.
Thanks, bonzer for the correction. I knew it was Henry Stimson, but as my brain is now down to only 512K of memory, these errors occur. Just wait until you get to my age!
Well, as reluctant as I am to disagree with a contributor to Alperovitz I will note that the postwar utterings of military men need to be taken with a lump of salt and leave it at that since this isn’t GD.
While I applaud the intent of your message, why do you suggest that he look for books published in the forties about the bomb project? Much of the information about the project would have still been classified at that point. More recent books would have benefited from much more information being available.
Has all of the information surrounding the bomb project and subsequent decision to bomb Japan been de-classified at this point? My guess there will be futher relevations about the whys and wherefores in the future.
And when Truman issued the stop order, preventing any further bombs from being dropped, he said he did so because he “couldn’t stand the thought of any more kids being killed.”
At this point, everybody, including the Japanese, knew that the war was over, it was just a question of whether or not the Japanese were willing to admit it. Indeed, in the hours leading up to the Emperor’s announcement of Japan’s surrender, there was a coup attempt by members of the Japanese military to stop the Emperor’s announcement from being played. One of the reasons the attempt failed was because there was coincidentally a conventional bombing raid going on at the time, and it disrupted events such that those who were in favor of the surrender were able to keep the recordings of the Emperor safe, until they could be played in the morning.
I suspect most people don’t realise quite how much of the Manhattan project documentation is still classified. This however doesn’t mean it isn’t accessible to researchers.
The basic sensitivity is that the questions that the project was addressing are, more or less, exactly those matters that are sensitive in nuclear proliferation these days. There’s an awful lot of material that has become public over the years about the technical solutions it developed, but there are plenty of areas where what’s public fades out. To take an obvious example, the external characteristics of both the Little Boy and Fat Man designs have long since become public, but relatively little is available about their internal details.
Such information was always laid open to the various official historians who produced multiple rather fat volumes in the decades after the war. They could construct narratives and interpretations using this classied data, provided that the final books did not actually reveal the more crucial details. While the postwar ideal of “official histories” has fallen out of fashion, the current system is not that different. Specialist academic researchers are given permission to scour the classified archives, but the final results of their work have to be cleared before publication. Recentish examples of this sort of research are Critical Assembly, Lillian Hoddeson’s technical history of designing the actual bombs at Los Alamos, and, in the UK, Lorna Arnold’s Britain and the H-Bomb. Both are excellent, though deliberately aimed at a specialist audience.
Such research does keep revealing a massive amount of fascinating minor details and there’s plenty of academic debate on these details, but there are relatively few startlingly big secrets to unearth.
But it’s true of all historical research that the advances come from researchers slogging through masses of minor details to come up with a fresh interpretation. As much progress in recent years in the field has come from researchers digging into sets of US archival material that have been declassified for years. Then you have the whole additional question of material turning up in foreign archives. The sheer volume of available documents that might be relevant and the details that were never recorded in the first place are always bigger obstacles to answering the interesting historical questions than the technical minutia that remain classified.
I will note that the postwar utterings of military men need to be taken with a lump of salt and leave it at that since this isn’t GD.