Every year at this time I trace the final days leading to the first use of the atomic bomb against two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, with close up probes of individual days. In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic decisions made by President Truman, his advisers, and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.”
As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, and in four books (including one with Robert Jay Lifton) since 1984, and now in my award-winning PBS films “Atomic Cover-up” and “The Atomic Bowl” and soon to arrive “Hollywood Bomb,” plus companion books. You can now watch the 2026 PBS American Experience film “Bombshell,” on responses and coverups after the bombings, for which I served as consultant and talking head:
Now today’s report:
Preparations at Tinian in the Pacific to get the first A-bomb ready for use, possibly within a week (weather permitting) were finalized, with the city of Hiroshima remaining as #1 target. It has been barely touched by Allied bombing so it would serve as the best site to judge the bomb's experimental effects. Also it is nearly surrounded by hills, promising a "focusing effect" (as the target committee boasted) that will likely guarantee killing tens of thousands. Kokura was target #2 and Nagasaki #3, with the bomb on an assembly line process with no need for a separate order for the second and third bombs, which would doom, in the end, Nagasaki.—
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, now back at the Pentagon from Europe, cabled Truman, who was still over there that he had drafted a statement for the president that would follow the first use of the new weapon--and Truman must urgently review it because the bomb could be used in just a few days.
Stimson sent one of his aides to Germany with two copies of the statement. The top secret, six-page typed statement opened: “____ hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on ______ and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.” Later, as we will see, the claim that Hiroshima was merely “a military base” was added to the draft. It will also include what became a famous declaration: “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
—"A Petition to the President of the United States" organized by famed nuclear scientist Leo Szilard, and signed by dozens of his Manhattan Project colleagues -- the only real pre-Hiroshima protests by insiders -- urgently urging delay or extreme caution on the use of the new weapon against Japan, continued to be held in limbo and kept from the President's eyes while Truman remained abroad.
--After scientists sifted more data from the July 16 Trinity test of the first weapon, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project provided Gen. George Marshall, our top commander, with more detail on the destructive power of atomic weapons. Amazingly, despite the new evidence, Groves recommended that troops could move into the “immediate explosion area” within a half hour (and, indeed, in future bomb tests soldiers would march under the mushroom clouds and receive harmful doses of radiation). Groves also provided the schedule for the delivery of the weapons: By the end of November more than ten weapons would be available, in the event the war had continued.
--Groves faced a new problem, however. Gen. “Tooey” Spaatz on Guam urgently cabled that sources suggested that there was an Allied prisoner of war camp in Nagasaki just a mile north of the center of the city. Should it remain on the target list?” Groves, who had already dropped Kyoto from the list after Stimson had protested, refused to shift. In another cable Spaatz revealed that there were no POW camps in Hiroshima, or so they believed. This firmed up Groves’s position that Hiroshima should “be given top priority,” weather permitting. As it turned out, POWs died in both cities from the bombings.
In Germany, Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to Truman--and the highest-ranking U.S. military officer during the war--continues to privately express doubts about the bomb, that it may not work and is not needed, in any case. (Gen. Eisenhower, privately, as we have seen, had just come out against using the Bomb.) Leahy would later write in his memoirs:
“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.
“The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
“Who’s Next” by Tom Lehrer, 1960s.
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