In Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (208 pages. Little, Brown. $19.95), Ronald Takaki, a Berkeley historian, claims Harry Truman ordered the attack for all the wrong reasons: He was a racist who admitted to hating “Japs.” He had “an inferiority complex.” “Inexperienced and insecure in his role as president, he found himself unable to say ’no’,” Takaki writes. Instead, Truman tried to prove “that he was not a ‘sissy’.”
For an even deeper wallow in national angst, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell argue that America has never faced up to the “pointless apocalypse” it inflicted on Hiroshima, embarking instead on a “cover-up” of the bomb’s “human consequences.” In Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (425 pages. Grosset/Putnam. $27.50), the authors argue that turning a blind eye to Hiroshima encouraged “subsequent American cover-ups,” on Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-contra. Then they stumble to an even more sweeping conclusion. “Surrendering our right to know more about Hiroshima and then nuclear weapons in general,” they write, “contributed to our gradual alienation from the entire political process.”
A more sensible view comes from Penn State historian Stanley Weintraub, who has written the best account yet of the war’s final month: The Last Great Victory (730 pages. Dutton. $35). In the summer of 1945, Japanese military leaders knew they were beaten, but Weintraub shows that they were far from ready to surrender. Their bitter-end slogan called for “the honorable death of a hundred million” – the entire population. The atomic bombs not only saved the lives of U.S. troops who otherwise would have invaded Japan; they also spared countless Japanese civilians. And the nuclear knockout punch headed off a Soviet invasion that could have left postwar Japan as divided as Germany or Korea.
Even as he describes the hideous human toll of the bombing, Weintraub manages to keep moral issues from obscuring practical ones. “Given the strides of physics, there was an inevitability about the Bomb,” he writes. “If there hadn’t been an Anglo-American bomb, that would not have precluded an eventual Russian or German or Japanese or French bomb, and the possibilities for even more powerful and efficient bombs.” He quotes Stalin telling his scientists, “You know Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The equilibrium has been destroyed. Provide the bomb–it will remove a great danger from us.”
How wrong Stalin turned out to be is described in Richard Rhodes’s breathtakingly detailed Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (731 pages. Simon & Schuster. $32.50), which goes on sale next week. Using newly available Soviet and U.S. files, Rhodes shows how espionage got the Kremlin into the nuclear game and kept it there until it caught up with Western science. But the hydrogen bomb, incomparably more powerful than the atomic weapons dropped on Japan, brought security to no one. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the hotheaded U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay nearly provoked a nuclear exchange. “If John Kennedy had followed LeMay’s advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their picayune Holocaust,” Rhodes writes. “Ours would have been the historic omnicide.”
The hydrogen bomb made total war unthinkable; Rhodes argues that “today it excludes all but civil wars and limited conventional wars.” In the sputtering dawn of the nuclear age, when the weapons were measured in kilotons and no one else had them, Truman made the right choice and dropped the bomb. But in an era of multimegaton, multinational technology, that’s a decision no rational leader can make again.
