Big Six v. Little Boy: The Unnecessary Bomb
Andrew Cockburn, 16 November 2023
Even today, conversations on the topic with otherwise well-informed Americans tend to elicit reminiscences of how fathers and other relatives, veterans of the Pacific and European wars, had nurtured mordant expectations that they wouldn’t survive the prospective invasion of the Japanese home islands. They had been saved by the atomic bombs that had brought about Japan’s surrender. But Henry Stimson, the former US secretary of war, has been highly selective in the evidence presented.