Every Club in the Bag

Letters

Vol. 24 No. 16 · 22 August 2002

From Bruce Kent

R.W. Johnson (LRB, 8 August) claims that it was the prospect of having to invade Japan and suffer a million or more casualties that made Truman decide to drop the first atomic bombs. That may have been what Truman was told. It was not true. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 reported that 'prior to December 1945 Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if the Russians had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.' Admiral William Leahy, Truman's Chief of Staff, believed that 'this barbarous weapon … was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective blockade and the succesful bombing with conventional weapons.' It is much more likely that the bombs were dropped to find out how well they worked and as an object lesson to the Soviets about where power lay in the Pacific.

Bruce Kent
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, London N7

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Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002

From Russell Seitz

Unlike R.W. Johnson (LRB, 8 August), I am not surprised that Peter Hennessy and Percy Cradock should write their respective histories of the nuclear age without mentioning the 'nuclear winter'. The idea that the world might freeze in the darkness following a nuclear explosion was advertised as hard science, but in fact had no basis except as an outcome produced by a one-dimensional computer model. A programmer had effectively switched off the sun in his climate model as if it were a light bulb, and then allowed the program to run on for 40 consecutive dayless nights. More serious efforts at modelling the motion and transport of the weather were soon to generate more subtle scenarios than the apocalyptic original, which was judged, in Foreign Affairs in 1986, to be of 'vanishingly low probability'. In 1991, the Kuwait oil fires were seized on by the proponents of the theory of nuclear winter as a means of testing their hypothesis. Here at last was a set of fires as massive and extensive as any that might be generated by nuclear missiles. Carl Sagan predicted that a sooty plume would ascend into the stratosphere, overshadow South Asia, and cause the monsoon to fail, dooming millions to famine. It didn't happen.

Russell Seitz
Nantucket, Massachusetts

From Toby Poynder

Bruce Kent (Letters, 22 August) quotes the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 as saying that Japan would likely have surrendered 'prior to December 1945' even without the use of atomic weapons or Russia entering the war. But the Survey also predicted that a continuation of the conventional bombing campaign would have escalated from the July 1945 total of 42,700 tonnes of bombs dropped to 115,000 tonnes a month. Given that over 800,000 Japanese had already been killed in the nine months of bombing up to July 1945 it is arguable that the atomic weapons killed fewer people than would have died in another four or five months' conventional bombing. A further argument in favour of using the Bomb was the avoidance of Allied casualties that would otherwise have resulted from a continuation of the war.

Toby Poynder
London W11

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Vol. 24 No. 18 · 19 September 2002

From Martin Watts

It won't do for Bruce Kent to perpetuate myths about the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan (Letters, 22 August). First, there was absolutely no need 'to find out how well they worked', as it was abundantly clear how effective they would be after the Alamagordo test explosion earlier in 1945. Second, it is not the case that the 'Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender': why in that case did they not surrender after the dropping of the first bomb? It was only when the Government realised that it might face the total obliteration of every major city in Japan that it surrendered (even then it refused to do so unless the position of the Emperor was guaranteed in any postwar settlement). Third, many lives (and not just American ones) were saved by the atomic bombings. An earlier (conventional) raid on Tokyo had created a 'firestorm' that claimed 100,000 lives: 30,000 more than were lost at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

It is unlikely that the bombings were intended to overawe the Soviets and demonstrate US power in the Pacific for at least three reasons: first, Truman informed Stalin of the existence of the bomb, and Stalin urged him to use it; second, before the Nazi surrender, Berlin had been seriously considered as a possible target; third, at that point relations between the Western Allies and the Soviets had not yet broken down, and there is evidence that Truman was reasonably confident that it would be possible to 'get along' with the Russians in the postwar world.

Martin Watts
London NW7

From Alison Macleod

Bruce Kent is right on one point: without the atom bomb, the Japanese would still have been forced to surrender before the end of 1945. But the principal reason was the prospect of famine. Once Japan's trade routes had been cut, there was nothing like enough rice in the country to feed the people, and what little there was the military took for its own purposes. By the middle of 1945 most civilians were half-starved: the Americans and their allies had only to blockade the country to kill several million Japanese. Had they done this, Bruce Kent would now no doubt be writing to ask how the Americans could be so cruel as to impose a lingering death on millions of women and children when all the time they had at their disposal a weapon that could have brought the war to a quick end.

Alison Macleod
London N10

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Vol. 24 No. 19 · 3 October 2002

From Michael Jacobsen

A secret addendum to the Yalta agreement, first published in February 1946, revealed that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed in February 1945 that 'in two or three months after Germany has surrendered, and the war in Europe has terminated, the Soviet Union shall enter into the war against Japan on the side of the Allies.' The war in Europe ended on 8 May, so that the three months envisaged at Yalta were due to expire on 8 August. On 29 May Harry Hopkins reported to Truman that Stalin 'left no doubt in our minds that he intends to attack during August.' The Soviet Union promptly declared war on Japan on 8 August, with the Red Army 'properly deployed on the Manchurian positions' as promised to Hopkins on 28 May. The US dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, respectively. Japan surrendered forthwith. Peter Calvocoressi has remarked that this clinching of the imminent American victory deprived the Russians of all but a token share in the postwar settlement in the Far East. Thus Bruce Kent's view that the decision to drop the bombs was motivated in part by a desire to demonstrate to the Soviets where power lay may be an overgenerous understatement, rather than a fanciful myth as suggested by Martin Watts (Letters, 19 September).

Michael Jacobsen
Ulverston, Cumbria

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Vol. 24 No. 20 · 17 October 2002

From Bruce Kent

It is hard to understand why my suggestion that the dropping of two atomic bombs was not the only way of ending the Pacific war in 1945 causes such indignation (Letters, 19 September). A wide range of military figures have taken that view. Field Marshal Montgomery, in The History of Warfare, has this to say: 'In my view it was unnecessary to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 and I cannot think that it was right to do so … The dropping of the bombs was a major political blunder and is a prime example of the declining moral standards of modern war.' General Eisenhower was just as clear: 'Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face. It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.'

Bruce Kent
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
London N7