by J. Van

Created on: March 05, 2009

The dispute between orthodox and so-called "revisionist" versions of the Hiroshima decision has been going on for six decades. Military, political, moral and scientific arguments have been made both supporting and condemning the Truman administration's decision.

The official rationale for dropping the atomic bomb was a simple military objective: in the words of President Truman, to "shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans." According to Truman's public statement, the Allies had given Japan an opportunity to spare themselves at Potsdam, but the leaders of Japan had "promptly rejected that ultimatum." The United States had therefore taken a harsh but necessary step in order to prevent the prolonged and horrifying bloodshed of a full-scale invasion.

There has been much debate over the validity of this argument, on many different grounds. Did the Truman administration believe that the use of the bomb would save over a million soldiers' lives, or was the number more like 30,000? Were they really concerned about the possibility of a lengthy conflict, or, with the Soviets poised to enter the war effort, was victory only a few days away? Was the deployment of the atomic bomb the only way to secure a Japanese surrender, or was Japan already on the verge of conceding defeat? With much of the argument on both sides making use of 20/20 hindsight, and many of the original actors dead, the debate over these points may never be settled satisfactorily. It is clear that the continuation of the war would surely have resulted in some further loss of American life and military resources, and that this waste was prevented by the United States' decision to make use of its deadly new weapon. It is also clear that the decision was not born out of necessity: there were several other options available.

The military expediency of the atomic bomb is not the only argument put forward to explain its use; politics may have also played a role. The Soviets had agreed to enter the conflict, and the American administration wanted to strengthen its position by ending the war in its own way and demonstrating the power of its new weapon to a potential enemy. According to this view, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been the first casualties of the embryonic Cold War. The idea that the Hiroshima decision was politically motivated, particularly by anxieties over the Soviet Union, would become a cornerstone of "revisionist" accounts.

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