The history of the atomic bomb

President Harry Truman was really only in office for just a couple of months when he had to make this momentous decision. Walk us through the mindset of President Truman when he did make the decision to drop the bomb. Sure. You know, he comes into office immediately after the death of President Roosevelt in April of 1945. And so he's only been on the job at this point, you know, a little over three months and is having to come up to speed very quickly on all of the things that are going on to lead this war. And one of the things that he gets read in on, of course, is the atomic bomb. We've spent another $3.7 billion to develop the B-29 to carry the bomb. Given the way that combat has been going in the Pacific War up to this point, I think it would have taken a monumental decision on his part not to go ahead and use this particular weapon. And one thing I always find fascinating, Jonathan, is that he was completely in the dark about all of this. And it wasn't until about 24 hours after FDR died that Secretary of War Harry Stimson came to him and said, oh, by the way, Harry, we have to talk. Yeah, that's exactly right. Truman earlier in the war had been running a commission that was investigating whether or not there was fraud going on in some of the War Department programs. And when he and his team started, you know, sniffing a little closer around this project called Manhattan, Stimson had actually pulled him aside and told him, I can't tell you what this thing is. I can tell you it is under my direct watch. You know, we're not misspending money here, but this is a project that could potentially end the war. So that's all that Truman knew up until that point. Yeah, I'm sorry. Let's talk about the weapons themselves here. There were two distinct and different bombs. There was Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima 81 years ago today, and then three days later, Fat Man that was dropped on Nagasaki. And from a scientific point of view, these were two different instruments, weren't they? Correct. Yeah. Little Boy is a much more conventional design where we got two slugs of uranium. We're going to fire one of them into the other. We're going to create a critical mass, and the weapon is going to detonate. And from a scientific standpoint, we had much more confidence that that weapon was going to work, and so we didn't bother testing it. The one that we did test at Los Alamos beforehand was the Fat Man bomb, which is much more complex. It's based on plutonium, and in order to get plutonium to detonate, you have to compress it using these incredibly complex explosive lenses to, you know, implode the weapon, create a critical mass, and make it go off. Yeah, plutonium is useful to us because it's much more easy to manufacture. So if the plutonium bomb works, that means we're going to have a steady stream of these weapons throughout the duration of the conflict if it goes longer. And I'm still blown away all these years later that we didn't know if Little Man was going to work. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it was all kind of up in the air, and, you know, there were all sorts of scary scenarios like, what happens if we detonate this weapon and it spontaneously sets all the atmosphere on the planet Earth on fire and things like that? You know, they were able to say that there's a relatively low percentage chance of that happening. But nevertheless, you know, we're very much in the Wild West here as far as the science is concerned. You know, before we talk about the lives that potentially could have been saved by using these two weapons, I think we have to acknowledge the lives that were lost. My goodness, this was a catastrophic human toll, wasn't it? Absolutely. When the bomb goes off over Hiroshima, in the immediate aftermath of the explosion and then the firestorm that consumes the city, roughly 90,000 people die right then and there within the first couple, three hours. And then another further, probably around 50,000 or so are going to expire from their wounds or radiation sickness or what have you. So just the bomb at Hiroshima alone, somewhere around 140,000 people are going to be the victims of that. Nagasaki is somewhat less, but still the total toll between these two weapons is probably about 210,000 people. My goodness. And that was the immediate effect. And then there's the radiation sickness years afterwards. That's right. Yeah. To this day, there are still a substantial group of Japanese people that are classified as victims of those bombs and receive medical care and attention. I used to live in Hiroshima. You can still meet with the victims today. When I take tours over to Japan for the World War II Museum, we still meet with an A-bomb survivor who was a seven-year-old girl when that weapon went off. Which leads us to the central discussion tonight. Yeah. And that is what about the supposition over the years that did it really save lives? Now, the Allies already had planned an invasion of the Japanese islands. It was going to be called Operation Downfall. And Harry Truman always argued that he made the right decision because in his mind, we were saving U.S. lives that would have been lost in a Japanese invasion. And there are still questions about that to this day, right? Yeah, that's right. I am strongly in Harry Truman's camp. I'll just come right out and say that. Having led tours of places like Okinawa, which had happened in April through June of 1945, and it resulted in the deaths of about half of the Japanese population of that island, about 100,000 dead civilians. If you forward project what an invasion of southern Kyushu, which was the first phase in the overall downfall plan, you've got 11 million Japanese people living on southern Kyushu. And you take the same sort of statistics that had pertained at islands like Saipan and Okinawa, you could forward project to a body count in the millions easily. So just for that phase of the invasion alone, that's a much larger body count than what ends up happening historically at Hiroshima. And that was only the first part of the plan. The eventual plan is to go up and invade Tokyo, and there's around 11 million people up there. So that was going to be a bloodbath for the Japanese, and it was going to be a bloodbath for the American troops involved as well. Any validity to that argument? There's a lot of things to unpack there. On July 21st, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow floats the notion to his boss, the foreign minister, who's strongly in the peace camp, and said, I think the very best deal we're going to get out of this war is unconditional surrender with the possible retention of the emperor. And when he floats that to his boss, Togo, Togo immediately comes back and says that's completely unacceptable. So I think any notion postwar that the Japanese were on the brink of surrendering is nonsense, frankly. The hardliners were in control of the government at this point, and they wanted to fight to the last. So the bombs really act as a catalyst to help them change their mindset that we're not going to get an invasion of Japan out of the Americans anymore because they can just sit back and drop bombs on us until we decide to surrender. That sort of obviated their hope for an American invasion. Now, was there any evidence to suggest in your research that Truman and Stimson knew that the Japanese were not going to surrender? Oh, absolutely. No. Both of them were, you know, in receipt of daily what they call the magic updates, you know, that were apprising of the situation in Japan. And so it was crystal clear to the American planners at this point in time that the Japanese were nowhere near ready to surrender. You know, Truman always said publicly, anyhow, that he had no regrets about giving the orders to drop the bombs. That was publicly. Anything in your research to ever suggest that privately, maybe he had some doubts or regrets? No. In fact, when he when he would be publicly called on that, he got into a little bit of a spat later on in his life with the city of Hiroshima. And he maintained fiercely, you know, for all the reasons that we just cited, that this was actually the better way to go. There's a further issue here that I'd like to bring up. You know, we as Americans tend to frame this question strictly in terms of American lives saved and Japanese lives lost. But we need to spread our lens wider and consider what's going on in Asia as a whole at this time. China, vast swathes of it are still being controlled by the Japanese army. Same thing happening in Vietnam and Indonesia. There are massive famines happening in those latter two countries, and there's a tremendous amount of fighting going on in China. So it's not just Japanese people that are dying at this point. If you do the math, roughly speaking, every month that this war goes on, a half a million people are dying and 80 percent of them are allied combatants or civilians, mostly civilians. So anything that drags this war out further is going to be killing disproportionately more allied people, you know, rather than than the Japanese. And so as horrible as the bombs were, and I absolutely acknowledge that they were, they ripped off the Band-Aid and allowed us to get this war over with as quickly as possible, rather than having to either invade Japan or, you know, bombard and blockade Japan into starvation. And while we're doing either of those things, of course, people are still dying in Asia as well. There's no question that the loss of humanity worldwide leading up to this moment 81 years ago today was just catastrophic. No question, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And again, I wish that we lived in a world where there was a good option that could have ended the war without further bloodshed. But the reality is that we have a spectrum of terrible options to pick from. And so when given that sort of a situation, you know, the least immoral solution that we have available to us is pick the least awful of those options and go ahead and do it. And that's what we did. As a historian, Jonathan, if you could go back in time, if you had the opportunity to be in a room with Truman and Stimson and ask them some questions about your research, what's the question you would ask them? That is a fascinating question. Again, I don't think that they were framing their calculus in terms of the wider world situation. Truman was to a lesser degree. But I guess I would have asked them that question. Have you considered what this option will do in terms of saving lives throughout broader Asia, including China, of course, which was an important ally for us? So I think that's the one that I would trot out. Jonathan, you've got a lecture coming up tonight. Let's talk about that. This is going to take place at the Wings of the North Air Museum. We know it well. Bob Jasperson is kind of a friend of us here because we do a lot of stuff with Bob. And I take my daughters to his, we call it planes and pancakes breakfast fundraiser that they have a couple of times a year. Right. It's just a great organization. And their volunteers are fabulous over there. This is going to start at 630 tonight, right? That's correct. Yep. And you've just basically gotten the Cliff Notes version of my lecture. But the one that I'll be giving tonight has much prettier graphics and goes into much more detail. And this is free, I take it? Absolutely. Yep. And for those of you who are interested in going to hear Jonathan talk tonight, when you go to Flying Cloud Airport, look for Gate H. Now, this is the gate that's near the soccer fields off of, I think it's Pioneer Trail. And you can get in there. So it's going to be a wonderful event tonight and so much to learn. If you enjoyed this conversation that Jonathan and I just had, it's going to be much richer tonight, I promise you. So Jonathan, thanks again for your time here. I really appreciate your having me. Yep. This was a fascinating conversation. And keep up the research, right? Thank you, sir. All right. Jonathan Parshall, the historian, is going to be lecturing tonight on did the dropping of the atomic bombs 81 years ago today, did it actually help save lives? So look for that discussion tonight.