Truman’s 1945 decision and the risk of Putin’s actions today

Two specters haunt the leaders of the U.S., Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Canada and the U.K. as they convene in Hiroshima, Japan, for the G-7 summit: the Doomsday Clock and the ghost of Harry S. Truman.

Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has pushed the world closer to the brink of a nuclear conflagration. Embarrassed by Russia’s inept military performance on the battlefield, Putin has hinted that he may resort to tactical nuclear weapons to defeat the Ukrainians.

On Jan. 24, 2023, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward. We are now only 90 seconds before midnight, the shortest position since the clock was created in 1947. That is, the planet is the closest it has ever been to global extinction.

The family of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida lost many members on Aug. 6, 1945. For him, “The unspeakable devastation experienced by Hiroshima and its people was inscribed vividly in my memory. This childhood experience has been a major driver of my pursuit … of a world without nuclear weapons.”

While some historians have questioned President Truman’s decision to incinerate Hiroshima — and the subsequent atomic bombardment of Nagasaki three days later — most Americans have accepted Truman′s narrative.

As for Give ‘em Hell Harry’s “tormenting” decision-making process, Truman was jubilant at the nuclear hellfire he had unleashed: “This is the greatest thing in history.”

Yet Capt. Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped “Little Boy,” which exploded 19,000 feet above the center of Hiroshima, over Shima Surgical Hospital, exclaimed, “My God, what have we done?”

Soon after the Hiroshima blast, Truman announced: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cities, not military bases. Indeed, as John Hersey noted in “Hiroshima,” the human toll was horrific: “…their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.”

Today, as the world watches Putin’s savagery in Ukraine, we recoil at the Russian leader’s deliberate targeting of non-combatants.

Was Truman’s atomic obliteration of more than 200,000 innocent men, women and children — in two densely populated Japanese cities — needed to end the war in the Pacific? Did it save nearly a million American and Japanese lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan?

Or were Truman’s actions crimes against humanity?

Curtis LeMay, who headed the 21st Bomber Command and directed the firebombing of Osaka and 58 other Japanese cities, declared: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.”

And LeMay added, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had cautioned Truman not to drop the atomic bomb, said “I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

According to Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, the military chief of staff to the president during World War Two: “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 almost defeated and ready to surrender . . . in being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

The roll call of military chiefs who opposed Truman’s decision includes Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, whose report on the air attacks was released in July of 1946, determined that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Imperial Japan’s militarism caused indescribable carnage throughout the 1930s and 1940s, leading to the infamous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s declaration of war.

But as the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking, the G-7 leaders would be wise to remember Hersey’s admonition that “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

Iaconis, an adjunct professor at Suffolk County Community College’s Social Sciences Department, is writing a novel about Harry S. Truman.