International Socialist Review, August–September 2000

Mikki Smith

“Hiroshima was no longer a city”

From International Socialist Review, Issue 13, August–September 2000.
Downloaded with thanks from the ISR Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the ETOL.

Fifty-five years ago in August, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here Mikki Smith looks at how President Harry S. Truman reached his deadly decision.

AT 5:29 a.m., July 16, 1945, a team of scientists and engineers on the Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico unleashed a top-secret man-made destructive force several thousand times greater than any in existence. In a flash of light equivalent to “several suns at midday,” the first nuclear bomb exploded with the force of 15 to 20 thousand tons of TNT. The flash of light at the bomb’s detonation was visible for 20 miles, temporarily blinding those who looked into it. A ball of fire from the blast mushroomed and rose more than 10,000 feet in the air. The blast left a crater six feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter. Assistant Secretary of War John L. McCloy wrote in his diary a few days after the explosion: “[T]he description of it leaves little doubt that we are on the edge of a new world – that of atomic force. It is probably of greater significance than the discovery of electricity.” [1]

In that blinding flash of light in the New Mexico desert during the Second World War, the fate of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians was sealed. In less than a month’s time, these civilians were to become the victims of this new atomic force – irrespective of well-documented peace feelers put out by high-ranking Japanese officials in the months before the bombing. These officials indicated numerous times to multiple sources in the international diplomatic community that surrender would be acceptable on the condition that the Emperor’s position could be maintained. Not only were Allied officials informed of this interest on Japan’s part in negotiating a peace settlement, but the record is clear that the U.S. had intercepted a number of these messages regarding a desire for negotiations directly.

On August 6, 1945, a single uranium bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later – and despite the likelihood of an immediate surrender by Japan – a plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Now the whole world – in particular, Russia, the other main contender for postwar dominance – could see the devastating power of these new kinds of weapons. The United States had demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that it would not hesitate to annihilate countless civilian men, women, and children in order to accomplish its aims. The U.S. hoped that such “atomic diplomacy” would secure its position as world superpower in the postwar period.

“The greatest thing in history”

As President Harry S. Truman ate lunch on the Augusta, returning home from his meeting at Potsdam with British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill and USSR Premier Joseph Stalin, he was given the news of the bombing of Hiroshima. Elated, he told the group of sailors around him, “This is the greatest thing in history.” [2] The cause for his celebration was the incineration of Hiroshima’s infrastructure and tens of thousands of its inhabitants.

According to the August 6 diary entry of the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, “Hiroshima was no longer a city, but a burnt-over prairie. To the east and to the west everything was flattened. The distant mountains seemed nearer than I could ever remember ... How small Hiroshima was with its houses gone.” [3] Descriptions of the human toll of the bombings are almost too horrible to comprehend. One Hiroshima grocer described the people he saw in the street immediately after the blast:

They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from the front or in back ... If there had been only one or two such people ... perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people ... Many of them died along the road ... They didn’t look like people of this world.

Another woman recalled, “A man with his eyes sticking out about two inches called me by name and I felt sick ... People’s bodies were tremendously swollen – you can’t imagine how big a human body can swell up.” A boy in the fifth grade at the time of the Hiroshima blast explained:

The river became not a stream of flowing water but rather a stream of drifting dead bodies. No matter how much I might exaggerate the stories of the burned people who died shrieking and of how the city of Hiroshima was burned to the ground, the facts would still be clearly more terrible. [4]

Truman was so unmoved by the devastation in Hiroshima that he gave the order August 9 for Nagasaki to be bombed. Apparently Truman saw no reason to deviate from the plan of General Leslie R. Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project (the name given to the top-secret development of the atom bomb in the U.S.). The plan was to demonstrate both the uranium and plutonium bombs before the war was over. [5] Once this goal was accomplished, on August 10 Truman ordered an end to the atomic bombing of Japan. “The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace wrote in his diary. “[Truman] didn’t like the idea of killing as he said, ‘all those kids.’” [6] Given that Truman later claimed he “never lost any sleep over [his] decision” to drop the bombs, Wallace’s explanation of Truman’s motives rings hollow. [7] Though he declined to drop a third bomb technicians were preparing for the occasion, Truman ordered the resumption of incendiary bombing, which destroyed half of one town, a sixth of another and killed thousands of Japanese people the day before Japan formally surrendered on August 14.

The exact number of people who were murdered by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs – both immediately and in the months following – is difficult to determine. The Hiroshima International Council for Health Care of the Radiation-exposed estimates the population of Hiroshima at the time of the bombing to have been between 340,000 and 350,000. By the end of December 1945, 140,000 people had died. Of this total number, approximately 20,000 – less than 15 percent of the casualties – were military personnel. [8] As Truman acknowledged, a great many of the victims had been children, as well as women and the elderly. By 1950, the continuing effects of radiation raised the death toll in Hiroshima to 200,000. [9] In Nagasaki, with an estimated population of 250,000 people at the time of the bombing, approximately 70,000 people had died of its effects by the end of 1945. [10] It was reported that only 150 of these were Japanese military personnel. [11]

In search of a “fair background”

In an August 9 report on the Potsdam conference, Truman had the audacity to declare: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” [12] Of course, as many of Truman’s own statements reveal, he was well aware that the vast majority of those who had been incinerated in Hiroshima were civilians. However, publicly and even privately Truman continued to refer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets and defended his decision to drop the bomb until the end of his life. “I would not hesitate to drop the A-bomb again,” he said in 1965. [13]

Approximately 43,000 troops were stationed in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, but the fact that the city had largely escaped conventional aerial bombardment as late as August 1945 speaks to the fact that the Allies considered the city to be of low importance militarily. The same can be said to an even greater degree of Nagasaki. The Allied strategy throughout 1945 was to level through aerial bombardment any target important to Japan’s continuance of the war. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been central to “war work” for Japan, they too would have been heavily bombed.

The criteria actually set out by the committee that had been established to identify possible targets for the new atomic bombs during its initial meetings in April 1945 were as follows: “(1) they be important targets in a large urban area of more than three miles diameter, (2) they be capable of being damaged effectively by a blast, and (3) they are likely to be unattacked by next August.” In addition, they agreed

that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released. [14]

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson expressed his concern to Truman that heavy Allied bombardment would leave no target in Japan that could provide the bomb with a “fair background to show its strength.” [15] To drop the bomb on a sparsely populated area already damaged by bombardment would not reveal the power of this new weapon to the world in full. The June 1 notes of the Interim Committee are most instructive: “[T]he present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning.”

War on civilians

Attacks on civilian populations were nothing new in the Second World War. As Truman explained in 1954, “The civilian population is treated as a military asset in (modern) wars. And the destruction of manufacturing plants is war on civilians.” [16] Prior to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in February 1945 the Allies firebombed the German city of Dresden, dropping nearly 650,000 incendiaries. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time and described the process of retrieving corpses from the shelters:

When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm is an amazing thing ... It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out ... The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. One hundred thirty thousand corpses were hidden underground. [17]

In March 1945, Tokyo was firebombed. Major General of U.S. Army Air Forces Curtis E. LeMay developed a target zone that, according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, was 87.4 percent residential. More than 2,000 tons of incendiaries were dropped. The Bombing Survey noted that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man.” [18] The fire burned so hot that in the shallower Shitamachi canals where people gathered to escape the flames, the water boiled. More than 100,000 men, women and children died during the night of bombing, and more than one million people were injured.

What made the atomic bomb different from these earlier indiscriminate attacks on civilians was the fact that only one bomb was necessary to accomplish the destruction. This meant that one plane and a handful of soldiers could devastate an entire city, as opposed to the more than 300 planes it took to carry out the Tokyo slaughter. Another difference was the increased rate of death the atomic bomb could bring to bear: Whereas, in the firebombing of Tokyo one in every ten casualties was a fatality, in Hiroshima, the death rate stood at a staggering 54 percent. Overall, it was calculated that “Little Boy” was 6,500 times more efficient at producing casualties than a conventional bomb. [19]

How the bomb saved lives and other fables

“There was nothing left to do but use the bomb,” Secretary of State James F. Bynes coolly asserted in 1947. The alternative to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Churchill railed in front of the British House of Commons a week after it happened, would have been to sacrifice “a million American, and a quarter million British lives in the desperate battles and massacres of an invasion of Japan.” [20] In his August 9 public statement, Truman declared, “We have used [the atomic bomb] in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.”

When the Hiroshima City Council wrote a letter in 1958 protesting Truman’s assertion that he had “no qualms” in using the bomb against Japan and that “if the world gets into turmoil ... it will be used [again]. You can be sure of that,” Truman called a press conference to defend his decision to drop the bombs. He claimed that dropping the bombs had spared “at least a quarter million of the invasion forces against Japan and a quarter of a million Japanese” from complete destruction, and “twice that many on each side” from serious injury. He claimed that dropping the bomb “was urgent and necessary for the prospective welfare of both Japan and the Allies.” [21] Truman’s ridiculous assertion here that the bomb actually benefited Japan would be echoed during the Vietnam War in the idea that U.S. troops had to destroy villages in order to save them.

This version of events remains with us today. The Allies were forced to drop the bomb because the Japanese would never surrender – they were a nation of “fanatics,” where even the children would willingly commit suicide before surrendering. “This is your war – you wanted it,” says an American soldier to his Japanese enemies in the 1944 Hollywood film Purple Heart. “And now you’re going to get it – and it won’t be finished until your dirty little empire is wiped off the face of the earth!” [22] This was the racist propaganda whipped up at home in order to justify the atrocities being committed against civilians. Paul McNutt, chairman of the War Manpower Commission, told a public audience in 1945 that he favored “the extermination of the Japanese in toto.” [23] The Japanese were so dangerous, in fact, that people of Japanese descent, irrespective of their citizenship status, were forced into concentration camps across the United States for the duration of the war with Japan.

When the Smithsonian planned an exhibit 50 years after the event that questioned the U.S. decision to drop the bomb, right-wingers mounted a massive pressure campaign to shut the exhibit down. The following exchange took place on the August 28, 1995, broadcast of This Week on ABC between host David Brinkley and conservative columnist George Will:

Will: The Smithsonian has some people obviously working for it who shouldn’t be. They’re tendentious, and they rather dislike this country and ...

Brinkley: And ignorant.

Will: And ignorant. It’s just ghastly when an institution such as the Smithsonian casts doubt on the great leadership we were blessed with in the Second World War. [24]

The Smithsonian exhibit happened, but it was cleansed of any criticism of the U.S. decision to drop the bomb.

This officially sanctioned fairy tale that the war would not have ended unless the bomb was dropped exists in spite of the fact that, as even the chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to acknowledge in 1990,

the consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.” [25]

Formerly classified documents and the personal diaries of key players have been made available to the public in the decades since the war. Anyone familiar with those documents would conclude that the bomb was unnecessary – except for characters such as Will and the now-fallen Newt Gingrich. They have a stake in keeping the lie alive that the Second World War was the “good war,” that the U.S. was pure in its desire to get rid of fascism and usher in an era of global peace and prosperity, and that it was purely a victim of Japanese aggression. However, even as events unfolded in 1945, many of Truman’s closest advisers and high-ranking military officials thought that Japan was already defeated and that they would soon surrender on terms that would be agreeable to the Allies.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and later president of the U.S., was informed by Stimson that the U.S. was going to drop the atomic bomb on Japan,

I voiced my misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.” [26]

Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman, told his biographer Jonathan Daniels that after Truman assured him that the bomb would be used against a military target and only because it would save American lives, “they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could which was just what they wanted all the time.” [27] In his autobiography, Leahy states,

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” [28]

Even General Douglas MacArthur, the man in charge of Pacific operations, questioned the usefulness of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. His consultant Norman Cousins wrote in 1987, “The war might have ended weeks earlier, [MacArthur] said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” [29]

The list of people close to Truman who felt that Japanese surrender was possible without the bomb or an invasion is staggering: Joseph Grew, Under Secretary of State; John McCloy, Assistant to the Secretary of War; Ralph Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy; and Lewis Strauss, Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, to name a few more. Shortly after the war ended, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that

certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the date U.S. forces were to invade Japan – ed.], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. [30]

But even if there had been an invasion of Japan, the claims advanced by Truman, Churchill, and others that the invasion would have resulted in the deaths of 250,000 to a million American soldiers were invented after the fact. U.S. military planners’ estimates of the number of deaths that would result from an invasion varied between 20,000 and 63,000. [31]

Truman’s other excuse was that the bombing was legitimate retaliation for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Samuel McCrea Cavert, general secretary of the Federal Council of Churches, wrote a telegram to Truman three days after the bombing of Hiroshima urging that “Japan be given time to reconsider ultimatum before any further devastation by atomic bomb is visited upon her people.” Truman’s irritated reply was that, “Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor ... When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. [32]

The comparison is disturbingly lopsided (not to mention racist) – thousands of American military casualties at Pearl Harbor versus hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But that is not all. Both the United States and Japan knew that they were going to war with each other over control of the Pacific. The only question was who would fire the first shot. Stimson recorded in his diary for November 25, 1941 – before the bombing of Pearl Harbor – that he, Roosevelt and other high-ranking officials met at the White House to discuss “how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” [33]

Stimson told a congressional committee five years later:

In spite of the risk involved ... in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s minds as to who were the aggressors. [34]

When the time came, the U.S. obliterated two cities, in spite of the fact that Japan’s terms of surrender before the bombings – the retention of the emperor – were accepted by the U.S. after the bombing. The bombings were therefore neither necessary to save lives nor necessary to convince Japan to surrender. If so many of the key Allied players felt that Japan was ready to surrender and the bomb was unnecessary, why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed?

“I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys”

While it is clear from the record that Japan was already defeated and “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all,” as Major General Curtis E. LeMay bluntly asserted in September 1945 [35], the reason for the slaughter of nearly 300,000 civilians and the destruction of two cities makes no sense unless the larger picture is considered. If the U.S. had merely wanted to play with its new deadly toys, it could have taken the advice of many scientists and advisers who were proposing a demonstration in an unpopulated area with representatives from various countries present. The fact is that the administration was thinking beyond the war to the time in which the victorious Allies would redraw the world map. The main contenders for dominance in the postwar period were the U.S. and Russia.

Containing Russia’s influence after the war created a dilemma for the U.S. in terms of how to end the war. If Russia entered the war against Japan as the Allies had planned or, alternatively, if they were to broker the peace with Japan, as Japan had implored them to do, then Russia would have a greater hold on Asia – which the U.S. did not want. This situation provided a major incentive to bring an end to the war before August 15, the date on which Russia was set to declare war on Japan, and also to do so in such a way as to strengthen the U.S. position after the war. It is in this context that the logic behind the decision to incinerate “all those kids,” in not one, but in two Japanese cities, becomes terrifyingly clear.

The bomb held an increasingly important place in the administration’s approach to both the war in Japan and its relationship with Russia throughout 1945. The Target Committee had been set up in April 1945 to consider where to use the new weapons – months before the first test took place at Alamogordo and in spite of increasing evidence that Japan wanted to negotiate its surrender. Also, though both Churchill and Stalin were pushing for a meeting to take place with Truman in June, he deliberately postponed any such meeting until July 15 (the Potsdam conference) – so that it would occur after the bomb had been tested and Truman could better decide how to use it in his diplomatic discussions with the other Allies. On the ship on the way to Potsdam, Truman said of the upcoming test at Alamogordo, “If it explodes, as I think it will, I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys.” [36] It is clear that he was referring to U.S. ally Russia and not to Japan.

In mid-May, Stimson had a long conversation with McCloy about how to “deal with Russia,” which suggested an incentive to explode the bomb. Stimson said it was a time to

let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way ... I told [McCloy] this was a place where we really held all the cards. I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it. They can’t get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique ... [L]et our actions speak for themselves. [37]

Leo Szilard, one of the key scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, detailed a May 28 meeting with Secretary of State Byrnes and two other project scientists:

[Byrnes] knew at that time, as the rest of the government knew, that Japan was essentially defeated and that we could win the war in another six months. At that time Mr. Byrnes was much concerned about the spreading of Russian influence in Europe.

According to Szilard, Byrnes made clear his belief that demonstrating the power of the bomb would “make Russia more manageable in Europe.” [38]

Once Truman received the full report of the Alamogordo test on July 21, his whole demeanor toward Stalin changed. Stimson’s July 22 diary entry records Churchill’s observation:

Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday. I couldn’t understand it. When he got to the meeting after having read this report he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting. [39]

Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary of Churchill’s thinking after learning of the successful test:

It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war; the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter. Furthermore, we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians ... [Churchill explained] (pushing out his chin and scowling) now we could say, “If you insist on doing this or that, well ... And then where are the Russians!” [40]

Sadly, the successful test of the atomic weapon made it all but certain that unless Japan’s emperor showed up at Potsdam, fell to his knees, and offered an unconditional surrender to Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, the uranium and plutonium bombs were going to be dropped on Japan. While Truman’s diary revealed a July 18 conversation with Churchill about the “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace,” subsequent discussions at Potsdam made clear that the plan was to use the bomb before the war ended. Meanwhile, Byrnes was attempting to use Chinese negotiations with Russia to stall Russia’s entry into the war, “believing after that atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill, thereby being in a position to press for claims against China.” [41]

While Truman could later talk about the devastating effects of the bomb when its use was considered elsewhere, humanitarian concerns did not register in the discussions at Postdam. Stimson wrote that when Truman learned that the bomb could be used against Japan as early as August 1 – despite knowledge that the Emperor himself had expressed interest in negotiating a peace settlement – Truman “said that was just what he wanted, that he was highly delighted.” [42] On August 6, Hiroshima became the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon.

Most dangerous rogue nation

Since the bombs were dropped 55 years ago, the world has suffered greatly. Cold War politics led to the Korean War in the 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to countless smaller conflicts. The decades-long frenzied arms race left in its wake massive stockpiles of weapons that can destroy the world thousands of times over. As awesome as the Hiroshima bomb was, a modern atomic artillery shell can deliver the same yield. Thousands of people have been killed or wounded from various nuclear accidents and radiation experiments. This summer alone we witnessed wildfires burning out of control dangerously close to nuclear facilities at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington – both of which posed a serious threat to the health and safety of millions. As well, we witnessed a plea from Ukraine for more than $300 million – the amount needed to take the final steps to shut down the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A meltdown there in 1986 has resulted in 15,000 to 30,000 deaths and skyrocketing rates of cancer in the surrounding area.

After the Stalinist regimes collapsed in 1989, bringing the Cold War to an end, we were promised a “peace dividend.” Instead, we now see President Clinton and the Pentagon rushing ahead with their completely kooky $60 billion National Missile Defense system – despite the fact it has proven a miserable failure so far and has been mercilessly criticized by major scientific organizations. Even more ominously, the push to develop this system has raised the prospect of yet another global arms race.

Clinton cites the threat from “rogue nations” such as North Korea in defending his reckless support for the new system. But as the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons on a human population, the U.S. remains the most dangerous rogue nation in the world today.

* * *

Notes

1. Quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 250.

2. Quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 734.

3. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 416.

4. Quoted in Rhodes, pp. 717–18, 722, 726.

5. Alperovitz, Decision, p. 533.

6. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 416–17.

7. Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Grosset/Putman, 1995), p. 176. “I lost plenty of sleep,” said Truman in 1959, “but not over saving Japanese lives. I lost sleep worrying about our boys ... and it broke my heart when just one of our soldiers, sailors or marines died.”

8. For more information about the effects of the bomb on Hiroshima, visit the HICARE Web site at http://www.hiroshima-cdas.or.jp/HICARE/indexe.html (as of July 14, 2000).

9. Rhodes, p. 734.

10. Rhodes, p. 740.

11. Unites States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cited in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 534n.

12. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 521.

13. Quoted in Lifton and Mitchell, p. 175.

14. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 524.

15. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 526.

16. Discussion, February 11, 1954, p. 5, Box 9, Post-Presidential File, HSTL, cited in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 528n.

17. Quoted in Rhodes, p. 593.

18. Quoted in Rhodes, p. 599.

19. Rhodes, p. 734.

20. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 571, 371.

21. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 564–65.

22. Quoted in John W. Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 50.

23. Dower, p. 55.

24. Quoted in Joe Allen, Atom bomb exhibit rewrites history, Socialist Worker 217, February 17, 1995: p. 12.

25. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 6–7.

26. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 4.

27. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 326.

28. Quoted in Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima & Potsdam (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 14.

29. Hoover and Cousins quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 349–50.

30. Quoted in Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy, pp. 10–11.

31. Lifton and Mitchell, p. 178.

32. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 563.

33. Quoted in Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1971), p. 321.

34. Quoted in Lens, p. 322.

35. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 336.

36. Quoted in Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy, p. 6.

37. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 143–44.

38. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 146–47.

39. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 260.

40. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 260.

41. From diary of Walter Brown, quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, p. 268.

42. Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 261–62.