Lessons for the World on Nuclear Weapons

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: 77 years ago, this weekend, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Snuffing out 70,000 lives in an instant and announcing the arrival of the atomic age. All these years later, the world is struggling with the legacy of the bomb’s invention. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres warning this week that the world is just one misstep away from nuclear annihilation. In this conversation, Hiroshima historian Evan Thomas talks to Walter Isaacson about that historic moment.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And, Evan Thomas, welcome to the show.

EVAN THOMAS, AUTHOR, “IKE’S BLUFF”: Hi, Walter.

ISAACSON: You and I wrote a long time ago — I’m just trying to think how long ago — a book together called “The Wise Men,” which had in it the story of the dropping of the atom bomb. Back then, there were a lot of revisionist historians, not us, but a lot of others saying, the U.S. didn’t need to drop the bomb, it was done to scare the Soviets. It was not something that was necessary. Now, you’re in the middle of a book about the dropping of the bomb. You’ve got a lot of access to the players in Japan and what they thought. Tell me, was it necessary to drop the bomb?

THOMAS: Yes, without question. I know there’s been a ton of research on this and revisionist have argued that Japan was ready to surrender that if we just warned them, they would’ve surrendered. I think the evidence now is overwhelming, that revisionists are just wrong. That Japan was not ready to surrender. One bit of truth of this is that on the morning after we have dropped the second bomb and the Russians have declared war on Japan the night before and invaded Manchuria, the vote in the Supreme War Council, the people who actually ran Japan was a tie, three to three, of whether to surrender. And the ones voting again — and it had to be a consensus. The ones voting against surrendering were the powerful ones, the war minister, the army- navy chief of staff. They were determined to fight to the bitter end. Part of this was (INAUDIBLE), what we would consider to be crazy, loopy, nutty. But it wasn’t all that crazy for this reason. The Japanese knew they lost the way, but they thought if they could force us to invade it would be such a bloodbath that we would give them good terms. We would say, OK, you can keep the emperor. You can — no occupation. Maybe just us some of your territory. They were — that was not completely nutty because if they had forced an invasion, we would have lost somewhere between 40,000 and a million men in the first month or so, simply because the Japanese had piled a beach of the kamikaze planes and suicides, sprag (ph) men, suicide speedboats. It was going to be an utter — it was going to make Okinawa, which was a bloodbath look like a skirmish.

ISAACSON: You know, you and I show one thing, which is both your father and my father, one in the Navy in the Pacific then.

THOMAS: Right.

ISAACSON: So, I think instinctively, we say, whoa. You know, we may not be here had there been an invasion. Do you really think, though, there would’ve been an invasion by the U.S. of the mainland?

THOMAS: The argument against revisionists is, oh, my God, there’s going to be an invasion. My dad is going to get killed. Actually, and I’m not so sure there would have been an invasion for this reason. When we ordered out the invasion, when we plan the invasion, it looked like we had a three to one advantage. Which is the normal — if you’re doing an amphibious landing in the Pacific in World War II, you want to have about three to one edge. Well, we had it in June but we did it in August. By August, the Japanese had brought in so many reinforcements. There were more Japanese on the beach than America is coming into the beach. So, the navy and the air force, which never wanted to do the invasion — invasion is an army of — that was MacArthur and Marshall. And army and navy would say, no, no, no. We’re not going to — no invasion. We’re going to squeeze them, starve them, burn them. You know, the air force wanted to bomb, navy wanted to blockade them. And, you know, that probably would’ve worked in a hellacious way. The Japanese were already starting to starve to death. They were down to like 500 calories a day to the civilians. And by — this is August, by say Christmas time, you would have had in the millions dying of starvation with disease, civil war, who knows what would’ve happened.

ISAACSON: But you are saying, a million people would’ve died if we had done the blockade and tried to starve them.

THOMAS: The least, the least.

ISAACSON: How many people died from the atom — two atom bombs?

THOMAS: 200,000. It is a big number. I am not minimizing this at all. It was 70,000 right away in Hiroshima and another 70,000 —

ISAACSON: But do you think you can make moral calculus when you say, it would’ve been a million, but this way was only 200,000 or was the bomb something so totally different, we should have thought about that more — you know, in a different way?

THOMAS: You know, the record of them debating all of this, it is not a clear-cut thing. They’re not making a moral calculus. They are not weighing the numbers. It doesn’t work that way. There was an inevitability to this problem. We spent $2 billion making the thing, which is a lot of money. We were on track to use this. It was going to be hard to justify not using it having spent all of this money. There was not a high tone world debate about this. There were moments when we got into it. One of the characters I write about, Henry Simson, did worry about it and did make some moral arguments. But the overwhelming momentum was to drop this whole thing.

ISAACSON: Well, you know, you talk about Colonel Henry Stimson who was then, I think, secretary of war. He had been secretary of state and one at the grand old people in foreign policy. Tell me about him, because the story that you write in the book, even of him having a heart attack after showing the photos to Truman make him seem like this morally anguished person that I never knew he was.

THOMAS: He didn’t show moral anxiety because he was a hard guy. He’d been a prosecutor. He’d been secretary of war and then secretary of state. And he was above certain a stern wasp visage. You didn’t see any weakness in Henry Stimson or any whining or any complaining. That was against his ethos. But, privately, we know from this diaries, he was torn up about this. And, as you mentioned, on the morning that he shows the president of the United States the photos of the destruction of Hiroshima, he has a heart attack. Now, was that a coincidence? You know, maybe. But maybe not. He has a bigger heart attack a month later. He was very torn up by this and he knew — he believed it was the right thing to do. He didn’t second guess himself in that sense but he was killing a couple of hundred thousand people, and he knew he was.

ISAACSON: Ultimately, the decision, at least in theory, was President Truman. A totally new president at the time. I think he’d been in office like three or four months, and he didn’t even know about the atom bomb that much when he comes into office.

THOMAS: At all.

ISAACSON: So, how much is he entering into making this decision?

THOMAS: You know, I mean, the guy around the Manhattan Project, General Groves, famously said that Harry Truman was like a kid on a (INAUDIBLE). In other words, just going down the hill, couldn’t stop himself. It was a condescending view of Truman, and ultimately, not fair. Truman was the president. He was responsible. He did take responsibility for it. But he was overwhelmed by this decision. It would’ve been very hard for him to say no. In fact, it would have been impossible for him to say no, and he never really even considered saying no. He did some — and this is (INAUDIBLE) — self-denial. He wrote in his diary, on the night that the order went out to the — and the order was to drop a bomb starting with Hiroshima and then, continuing the bomb for cities that was on the target list, he wrote in his diary, the president wrote in his diary, Hiroshima is a purely military target. Thank God no women and children will be killed. But hello? I mean, it was just completely untrue and impossible. And, you know, you — there’s no clear evidence on why he wrote that, whether he convinced himself, he was in denial. Henry Stimson didn’t maybe give him the world’s press briefing. They spent part of the day taking another city, Kyoto, off the target list. So, he may have felt, well by sparing Kyoto, I’m doing the right thing here. Or just human psychological need to live with the impossible decision. And he was used to living with difficult moral problems. And he just rationalized it. Later, after, afterwards, he did take responsibility, and he — you know, the buck stops here and he was kind of contemptuous. There’s a famous scene when Oppenheimer, the scientists who basically designed the bomb. He comes in after — this is a couple months later, after Hiroshima, and says, oh, Mr. President, I have blood on my hands. And Truman says, get out of here. You know, this was my decision. So, he did take responsibility.

ISAACSON: This is part of a whole trend of U.S. policies during World War II that there was a debate between those who believed in precision bombing, which wasn’t working all that well. One of the characters in your book, Dewey Spots (ph), also decides, well, we need to do pure carpet bombing at times, and they did the firebombing, especially the firebombing of Tokyo. Did they see the atom bomb as just part of a progression, sort of like the firebombing of Tokyo?

THOMAS: No. It’s the academics who wrote about this way, crossing the moral Rubicon and, you know, they — all sorts of professors have come up with excuses. That’s not the way talked about it in real-time. There was a lot of denial. Stimson thought that he had a promise to stop firebombing. Because as you mentioned, they firebombed Tokyo in March. 100,000 dead, more than Hiroshima. And Stimson was not happy about this. And he thought that — Bob love it, Robert loved it. And promised him that they were going to stop firebombing. And they kind of shoved Stimson off, like kind of blow him off and they continue to firebomb, right up to August. Now, it is true that had we not dropped the atom bomb, they were going to shift — they had better radar and better weapons and they were going to shift their position by — but we didn’t have the capacity to precision bomb. We wanted to. We thought we had the capacity, but we didn’t. The British understood that they didn’t and they just did area bombing, city bombing, and they were killing civilians and they didn’t make any bones about it.

ISAACSON: Should they have just done a demonstration of the atom bomb somewhere, like on a remote island, and done that to scare Japan into surrendering?

THOMAS: It was briefly discussed, but ejected because, A, they weren’t sure it would work, they weren’t sure the Japanese would notice. They did not know if you set it up. They thought they might shoot down the plane. It was very promptly (ph) rejected. I know today people say, hey, we should have it done a demonstration. But at the time, they barely thought about it because they figured it wouldn’t work, it was just too much for a risk and it wouldn’t have been pressed the Japanese anyways.

ISAACSON: You know, I have read some of your draft and your research, and one of the most interesting things is what you got from the Japanese side, and you got the family of Foreign Minister Togo, who was one of those six people in the war council, right? And he was the one who thought he can make a deal with the Russians. He wanted to surrender. Tell me about his role.

THOMAS: Well, he is the only guy who could see that this was, you know, heading to a very bad ending and is not wedded to this idea of noble sacrifice. The Japanese got themselves in a state of mind that there was something beautiful and wonderful about death. This is — not just a top, but in this society of Japanese war movies would end in death, and often in suicide. It was considered heroic and noble. And this whole idea — it was in the newspaper headlines, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the 100 million, the entire population of Japan perished gloriously to defend the idea of the Yamato (ph) race? It all sounds mad now, but it was pervasive, particularly, in the military. And Togo, our man, Togo, he was an exception. Partly, he wasn’t even Japanese, he was Korean. Japan is a very racist place. His family had been Korean 400 years earlier, but he was still a Korean. He had to buy — his family bought a samurai name. His real name was Park. So, he was an outsider. He had studied in Germany and he had studied (INAUDIBLE) sort of the good Germany of the intellectual Germany, and he was a humanist, and he just thought more like a westerner than his own colleagues. But persuading them was hard because he was a target for assassination. If you try to make peace, there’s a real chance the army was going to come and kill you.

ISAACSON: So, what was the role of the emperor? I mean, he was supposed to be regarded as a deity and yet, in some ways, he is not in control there.

THOMAS: He is not. He’s really the tool of the military. The military needs the emperor for legitimacy. We’re doing this for the emperor. But the emperor needs the military to stay in power. And under the system that they had worked out really by his grandfather, the military had power. And they — for instance, when they made a decision, they would make it come to the emperor and the emperor would say nothing. And that meant, OK, you could do it. The emperor —

ISAACSON: But doesn’t he record a surrender message that almost results in a coup?

THOMAS: He does. Finally, the emperor — because of — partly, because he – – you know, he doesn’t want to be killed by the Americans. Because he fears that we are about to bomb the palace. He is not wrong about this. President Truman, at this moment, is thinking about a third atom bomb to land on Tokyo. So, these are a few hours. In fact, Truman tells the British, we are going to do this. So, they’re picking up radio messages, they sense that Tokyo is next. So, his — partly to save his own skin and also, because it’s the right thing to do, he does surrender. And he records a message to be played on the radio the next day. There is a coup attempt that night, and there are soldiers running through the palace looking for the recording to smash the record so that the country can’t hear the recording the next day. They can’t find it. It is hidden in a lady’s and waiting chamber, and they can’t find the record. So, there’s coup.

ISAACSON: Wouldn’t it have been smart for us earlier on, meaning the U.S. and the West, to have allowed Japan, told Japan that they’d be allowed to keep their emperor?

THOMAS: Yes. There is — and this is part of the revisionist argument. The Potsdam Declaration doesn’t say, you can keep your emperor. And Stimson wanted this. There is still a debate about this. Because — and the hardliners say that, if we had said, keep your emperor, that that would have been a sign of weakness and that would have strengthened the hand of the militarist and made it even harder to surrender. So, there is a view — Rick Trank (ph), who is a leading scholar of this and some others, take the view that that would have not — that would have backfired. It would’ve shown weakness. And you could not show any weakness. But there is also the view that we would have looked better in history if we, at least, offer the Japanese the chance to keep their emperor, because after all, they did keep their emperor. We let them keep their emperor.

ISAACSON: And so, how did they end up keeping the emperor? We finally did say, if you surrender, the emperor can stay in power?

THOMAS: There’s a little back and forth. They said, we will surrender if we can keep the emperor. We thought about it for half a second and said, yes. Now, we word it in a way that made it clear that the emperor was reporting to us and he was no longer the deity, he was no longer the supreme being. He was working for, as it happened, General MacArthur.

ISAACSON: You know, we are doing this on the anniversary, right around the anniversary, of the dropping of the bomb. To what extent do you think the dropping of the bomb sort of shaped the post-Cold War order?

THOMAS: Well, for sure. I mean, there is no question we immediately and very quickly got into a standoff against the Soviet Union that was frozen by the existence of the bomb. It was a very perverse blessing. Mutually assured destruction is a terrible thing. But, you know, it worked. We didn’t have a major conflict with the Soviet Union, and there is a pretty good bet that we would have if it hadn’t been for the ability of each side to destroy each other. So, it’s a perverse blessing, but it was a blessing. It blocked a kind of cold piece.

ISAACSON: Well, it’s been 77 years, almost, since a bomb was used in combat. Do you think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki sort of stunned people so much that it is one of the few weapons we have that we would no longer think of using?

THOMAS: Yes. And I fear that the stunned gun is going to wear off. That’s been so long. 77 years is a long time. People will forget. And they will be willing to use one of these things. You know, the conventional warhead on U.S. IPCM that was 200 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. There are these tactical weapons with the Russians — you know, you hear the Russians, you hear a little talk about the Russians might actually use one in Ukraine that are smaller than Hiroshima, but they are still nuclear weapons. They still horrible weapons that kill people with radiation and incredible blasts. You know, they are unthinkable weapons, still.

ISAACSON: Evan Thomas, thank you so much for joining us.

THOMAS: Thanks, Walter.