WWII Historian Says G7 Leaders Need to Remember the Lessons

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, Hiroshima, which is the site of the G7 summit, is the most powerful reminder of the total catastrophe of nuclear weapons of 10 bandied around these days as a legitimate — often bandied around these days as a legitimate battlefield weapon. In his new book, Evan Thomas concludes, the United States had no other option than to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. It is controversial as he tells more to Walter Isaacson.

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

EVAN THOMAS, AUTHOR, “ROAD TO SURRENDER”: Great to be back.

ISAACSON: Your book, the “Road to Surrender,” comes out this weekend, it’s about the decisions that led to the dropping of the atom bomb in Hiroshima. And it is sort of a reminder about why we shouldn’t put statesman in that position. Tell me about the G7 meeting in Hiroshima and what it means to you.

THOMAS: Well, I hope it’s a reminder to the statesmen there that they never want to back themselves into the kind of corner we are in August of 1945, when really, there was no choice but to use these terrible weapons. I know there’s a lot of argument over the years, but in my book, I think I made a pretty compelling case that, really, we were stuck, the Japanese would not surrender to end this terrible, terrible war. We had to use, not one, but two nuclear weapons, and that was a terrible thing for the world and for the people who had to use them never recovered from it. And I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the agonies they went through as they face this moral and political dilemma about whether to use these things when there really was not a good choice.

ISAACSON: Your book’s theme is moral ambiguity, you know. And we live in an age of Twitter, and where nothing is morally ambiguous. People leak to one side or the other. And we’re seeing that even in foreign policy today, even with China. Are you worried that we are marching down a path where we are putting people into a position where it’s perhaps more likely that the bomb would be used again?

THOMAS: Yes. We are — as you say, we live in this world now of kind of moral righteousness. You know, when people have these Twitter debates or debates on the internet or anywhere, I am right, you are wrong. And not only you’re wrong, you are morally inferior to me or to my group, and that’s a bad culture that we are in. And you can see it play out on the world stage. Putin is kind of crazy moralist. It’s a twisted Russian morality, but he’s — you know, I’m moral and the other side is evil. And he is backing himself into a corner where he may have to act on that to save his own crazy notions of his own morality. Even more dangerous, I think, is the corner we’re getting into with China. China is — you know, China is building missile fields, as we speak. We thought the arms race was over. We thought we were out of nuclear age. The Chinese are building, I see them (ph) fields and we are going to be back into a scary standoff with another nuclear arm power. I hope that we take lessons from the past about why it’s not simple, it’s not I’m right, you’re wrong, but that statesmen have got to work together to avoid getting to the brink.

ISAACSON: But we’re not even having nuclear arms control talks with the Chinese now. And the Russians have pulled out of most of the nuclear arms agreements that we talked about. Is that sort of an example of the fact that everybody has gotten onto a righteous high horse and we’re not able to do the normal things that people expected after Hiroshima, preventing this bomb from being used again?

THOMAS: Well, the rhetoric is all high horse. I mean, if you just read what Putin says, or what the Chinese say, it’s all kind of agitprop. I mean, it’s way out there in denouncing us as being wicked and evil. Now, you hope they may be talking that way, but behind the scenes there are diplomats who are having realistic discussions with them. There’s a little bit of a sign of that. I think, Nick Burns — Ambassador Nicholas Burns was recently in China. And there is actually an opening here for the world, and that is in Ukraine. If the Chinese could only persuade Russia to stand down, and if the United States, by the same token, could help Ukraine stand down, we could find a diplomatic ending to a war in which people are otherwise backing themselves into a situation where Putin could use a nuke. So, that’s — there’s a little glimmer of hope, to me, that statesmen could be wise about this and find a way out. But it really doesn’t help if you’re posturing all the time about how you are morally superior to the other side.

ISAACSON: You say that it’s possible that Vladimir Putin could use a nuclear weapon. What do you think would drive him to that and what should we be doing?

THOMAS: I think if he feels that he is losing and that he’s going to be deposed himself and he has no other choice but to use a nuke, now, I think it’s a horrific choice and I think the Chinese would try to talk him out of it, but it’s possible. His rhetoric is a crazy. And he — you know, he likes to rattle a nuclear weapon, rattle the nuclear saber. He does it — they do it all the time. And they’re always making references to say, well, the United States, you know, he says, you did it first. You — you know, you did Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not us. And so, he’s trying to put us to morally backfoot us. And, you know, that — in the real world — and I hope Putin reads my book, because in the real world, these decisions are difficult. They are not ideological. We did use those weapons but we used them only after we realized that there was no other choice to use them. There’s a movie coming out called “Oppenheimer.” And there is a scene, which they’ll probably have in the movie, where after we dropped the atom bomb, Oppenheimer, the scientist who helped create the atomic bomb, comes into Harry Truman’s office, President Truman’s office, the Oval Office, saying, I have blood on my hands. And Truman kicks him out. And says, I don’t want to see that crybaby ever again. Now, Truman was posturing a little bit when he was doing that. But the point is, you know, you have to make these terrible decisions and then you have to live with them. And my book is about people had to live with terrible decisions. That’s — that is the real world.

ISAACSON: With Biden going to Hiroshima and the “Oppenheimer” movie coming out, we’re all reminded of these things again. And one thing that Oppenheimer said as he was agonizing, after the bomb was used, is that, possibly the use of the bomb would make sure we never used it again. Tell me about that line of thinking.

THOMAS: Well, Oppenheimer’s own scientists were appalled by what they were about to do. And Oppenheimer calmed them down by saying, look, if we use this thing, it will be so horrific that they we’ll never do it again. War will be over. And, you know, for a long time, it looked like he was wrong about that. I mean, we had a huge arms race. But actually, there was a taboo. The people who used those weapons were shocked by it. And I wrote a book about President Eisenhower and he was pretty determined never to use those weapons again. I fear that with the passage of a half century, more, 70 years now, people forget how terrible they are. They are terrible. And the average ICBM nuclear warhead is 100 times more powerful than the atom bomb that fell on Hiroshima, 100 times, or 200 times. It’s — you know, Hiroshima is taken out of Midtown Manhattan. An H bomb is all five boroughs, I mean, it’s the whole damn thing. And, you know, we’ve — the nuclear taboo worked for a very long time, partly because statesman did avoid pressing the button, and because there’s some arms control, we need to get back into a world in which we are talking with each other again about arms control and about how incredibly dangerous these things are. But I fear we forget.

ISAACSON: You say people’s memories are fading. Is this going to be a spur to say, oh, yes, let’s make sure we get back into arms control and other discussions?

THOMAS: You know, the whole reason why statesmen meet is to have these kinds of conversations, off the record conversations, so they’re not just yelling at each other through their spokesmen. So, I sure hope they talk about that, because it has immediate relevance. Ukraine has got to be resolved before Putin fires off one of these things. And then, right over the horizon. The fate of Taiwan is bringing the United States and China into a nuclear standoff. If we fight China over Taiwan, there’s a very good chance we will use missiles against the Chinese mainland. And China will want to use missiles against our mainland. Once countries — this is not some nice little 19th century sea battle, this is an intercontinental conflict. And that runs the risk of using nuclear weapons. We’ve been there in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We need to go back and relive some of that history to remember just how terrible it was, how — what a close thing it was. That’s another thing that people don’t quite realize. We almost used a third bomb. In my book I write about Harry Truman told the British ambassador they were running out of time and they were going to use a third bomb on Tokyo. People don’t realize that. That’s how close it was. There is a coup d’etat attempt in the imperial palace on the last night to try to disrupt that surrender. People forget all about that, but that’s how close it came to us using a third weapon. And they were planning for a sixth, seventh. They were planning to drop bombs all fall long. We don’t want to be in that position.

ISAACSON: Your book has some really great inside reporting about a lot of the major players, General — Colonel Stimson, who secretary of orbit, mainly from inside the Japanese imperial court. Tell me what you learned there.

THOMAS: Well, the Japanese were determined to die, you know, after we had dropped two atom bombs on them. There’s is a meeting of the supreme war council, the guys who really run Japan. And the minister of war says, wouldn’t it be wonderful to die like cherry blossoms, the whole nation? There’s a deadlock. They don’t — they can’t decide. Finally, the emperor, partly because he’s afraid there’s atom bomb was about to drop on him, correctly, afraid of it, he puts an end to it. But it takes another five days, there’s a coup attempt. And, you know, these cultures — cultures can kind of go mad. And the Japanese culture, at that time, did go mad. Now, fortunately, there are human beings involved. And I write about the Japanese foreign minister, a guy named, Shigenori Togo, nobody’s ever heard of him. He was sentenced as a war criminal to 20 years. But he saved millions of lives, because he was a human being, he read — he was at Japanese who read Goethe (ph), he read German philosophers, and he was a humanist. And he saw that we had to surrender that day, they — the Japanese had to surrender, and he persuaded the emperor explicitly. He persuaded the emperor ever since. I agree with the foreign minister, and he ends it. But it took that kind of human courage, humanistic courage, from somebody who read history, who was — he was — the Japanese foreign minister but he’s anti-Nazi, and he wanted to bring back the Germany of the 19th century, he’d read history and he understood humanity. And fortunately, they were just enough people like that in the Japanese government to end the war. Otherwise, that damn war would’ve gone on and on and millions would’ve died.

ISAACSON: And the other great interesting character in your book, or one of the others, is, of course, Henry Stimson, who was also a humanist but a very much of a realist too, a realist who’s trying to balance realism and idealism. Tell me about his conflicts.

THOMAS: You know, that is American foreign policy in a nutshell. We’re — you know, the United States is a humane country. We are not imperialists. We believe in democracy and human rights. But to make that work, you have to use power. You have to be both a realist and an idealist. That was Henry Stimson. He’s sort of the godfather, forgotten now, but he was the godfather of American foreign policy all through the Cold War. That combination of trying to do the right thing and trying to spread democracy, but at the same time, realizing that you had to exercise power and not a back away from hard challenges. Now, Henry Kissinger understood that. People — but the guy who started this was a guy named Henry Stimson, and he was 77 years old. He was agonized by it. He had — on the day — and this is in my book, on the day he shows Truman the photographs of the destruction of Hiroshima he has a heart attack. And a month later, when he’s trying to get arms control going, he has another heart attack. He can’t sleep. He is agonized. This is not something he is calm about, this is tearing him up inside because there is a conflict between realism and idealism, it’s hard to do both.

ISAACSON: What role did denial, self-denial and misinformation play in the decisions leading up to the dropping of the bomb?

THOMAS: You know, we like to think that when people make a tough decision, they have a very full and considerate debate over it, that’s not the way it really works. There’s a lot of denial. People not wanting to know. On the night that Harry Truman gave the decision to drop the atom bomb, he wrote in his diary, I’ve instructed the secretary of war to choose a purely military target, so that we kill soldiers and not women and children. Nonsense. The bomb was aimed the heart of Hiroshima. But Truman just didn’t want to believe what he was about to do. It’s human. People just have a hard time facing what they are doing, but he did it. He did give the order. He may have had some denial in his diary, but he made the tough decision.

ISAACSON: Was he right?

THOMAS: Yes.

ISAACSON: Your book takes on what was called the revisionist school of history, which among other things said, we were wrong to drop the atom bomb. We could have won the war without dropping the bomb. We did it maybe to scare Russia off, that we had all sorts of ulterior motives. First of all, explain to me why that revisionist theory was wrong.

THOMAS: I would like to be for the revisionists. And believe me, the people who dropped the bomb didn’t want to drop it, but it assumes that Japanese would be willing to surrender, if we just said, you can keep your emperor. No, the facts are otherwise. And I know this from reading Japanese diaries and the record, and I spent a lot of time talking to the grandsons of my —

ISAACSON: And they gave you some of the diaries too, the grandchildren?

THOMAS: Yes, his diary. Yes, right. And it’s just obvious from the contemporaneous record, not later, but what was happening at that time, that the Japanese were not going to surrender. It took two bombs, and it very nearly took a third.

ISAACSON: One of the things that history does, as we revise it, it revises itself, is that it does remind us when it’s — I think it should remind us, at least, of the moral ambiguities, that we can’t be cocksure about everything. To what extent is your book sort of intended in a way to talk about the importance of understanding moral ambiguity?

THOMAS: 100 percent. It’s — the book is all about moral ambiguity. If we go back and read history, the history I am writing, the history that you’ve written, it’s full of moral ambiguity. There’s — hard decisions are rarely black and white. Look at Lincoln and, you know, what was he doing? You know, he did a very difficult thing in freeing the slaves. He was full of moral ambiguity — not moral ambiguity on the decision to free the slaves but everything surrounding it was incredibly complex. And 51 to 49 decisions, close calls, that’s the real world. Our country made a virtue of this in our foreign policy. We were neither purely idealistic, not pure power, nor were we purely idealistic, all lovey-dovey about human rights. It can’t be just one or the other. You have to be both. And that’s why Henry Stimson could not sleep at night. This is hard. I’m sure Joe Biden doesn’t sleep very well. The people who take this seriously that we elect, we don’t — maybe we don’t want them to sleep well. We want them to stay up. These are hard questions. But let’s be realistic about it, let’s be honest about what they are going through.

ISAACSON: Evan Thomas, thank you for joining us again.

THOMAS: Thanks, Walter.

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