Was it Right to drop the Atom Bomb?

Oppie, Harry S and Big Boy.

Was it Right to drop the Atom Bomb?

The Royal Shakespeare Company has recently produced “Oppenheimer,” a play about the Atom Bomb Manhattan Project and the life of its director, Robert Oppenheimer. The play emphasises the tensions between the work of theoretical physicists and the pragmatic requirements of the military who funded the Manhattan Project. It recites a number of old chestnuts, for example the notion that representatives of the Japanese government should have been given a demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb to force a surrender before the Big Boy was dropped in earnest. The play seeks to balance the arguments but fails to mention that after Hiroshima, the Japanese did not surrender. It took a second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki to achieve the desired result.

The play prompted discussions in my home on whether the Americans should have used the Bomb when they knew that it would result in countless deaths of innocent people. There are the strongest of moral arguments to support this position. During the Cold War, there were serious risks of a nuclear onslaught, which would have destroyed large parts of the world, the Cuban Missile Crisis a case in point. Fortunately, political leaders recognised that nuclear war was not a real option and cooler heads prevailed. Indeed the Bomb has been used only twice and the last occasion was almost seventy years ago.

So, why did Harry Truman authorise the Bomb’s use to end the war against Japan, in the face of protests by its inventors and when he knew the untold death and destruction which would result? First, it is necessary to judge by the times, i.e. August, 1945. America had suffered terrible losses in more than four years of warfare. The Japanese were hated by the American public. The internment of the Japanese-American community in California went through without challenge or protest.

Second, at Potsdam, Truman told Stalin and Attlee in general terms that he now possessed the mightiest weapon of war available to man. His administration wanted Russia to stay out of the Japanese war so it would be an American preserve. Use of the Bomb would probably bring the war to a quick conclusion, avoiding Soviet participation.

Third, and most important, Truman was under advice from military chiefs that without the A-bomb, the war in Japan would continue for another 12-18 months with an estimated further 250,000 American casualties.

There is a fourth issue, namely impeachment. Let us assume that in 1945, Truman decided, on humanitarian and moral grounds, not to use the Bomb, the war continued for more than a year and that there were some additional 200,000 American dead and wounded as a result. Had the American media then gone public that Truman had the Bomb at his disposal in 1945 but had refused to use it, the pressure to impeach the President would have been extreme. How could Truman have successfully defended himself against a charge that a Commander-in-Chief had effectively sentenced tens of thousands of American soldiers to death? In 1946, a Republican-controlled Congress would have been unmerciful to Truman and rightly so. He would have broken his oath of office to preserve the Constitution by failing to defend the people.

Tangentially, the play mentions the concerns expressed by scientists, including Albert Einstein, to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and their senior administration officials, arguing that the Bomb should not be used. The physicists’ conflict was between theories and practice: science resulting in a chain reaction to wreak untold destruction. Western philosophy determines that it is for scientists to discover the secrets of life but it is for politicians to apply such discoveries. In any event, the concerns of the Manhattan scientists were ignored by the politicians.

The play ends with words of Vishnu from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I am sure such sentiments rested heavily with Oppenheimer and his colleagues as the results of their work became apparent. Whether Truman and his cabinet colleagues, not the mention senior members of Congress, felt the same way is another matter.