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One of the visitors mentioned at the beginning of the entry was Iwao Yamazaki who became Minister of the Interior in the next cabinet. Stimsons diary mentions meetings with Eisenhower twice in the weeks before Hiroshima, but without any mention of a dissenting Eisenhower statement (and Stimsons diaries are quite detailed on atomic matters). Hasegawa argues that Truman realized that the Japanese would refuse a demand for unconditional surrender without a proviso on a constitutional monarchy and that he needed Japans refusal to justify the use of the atomic bomb.[47], Clemson University Libraries, Special Collections, Clemson, SC; Mss 243, Walter J. The weapon is in the pit covered with canvas. Early in the morning of August 9th Manchuria was invaded by the Soviet Union. The discussion of weapons effects centered on blast damage models; radiation and other effects were overlooked. Upper image - July 24, 1945, photo by 28th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron As these cables indicate, reports of unfavorable weather delayed the plan. An importanton-line collection focuses on the air-raids of Japanese cities and bases, providing valuable context for the atomic attacks. After Suzuki gave the war party--Umeda, Toyoda, and Anami--an opportunity to present their arguments against accepting the Byrnes Note, he asked the emperor to speak. Social critic Dwight MacDonald published trenchant criticisms immediately after Hiroshima-Nagasaki; seePolitics Past: Essays in Political Criticism(New York: Viking, 1972), 169-180. The destruction was. As Farrell observed in his discussion of Hiroshima, Summaries of Japanese reports previously sent are essentially correct, as to clinical effects from single gamma radiation dose. Such findings dismayed Groves, who worried that the bomb would fall into a taboo category like chemical weapons, with all the fear and horror surrounding them. Augusta, Truman learned about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and announced it twice, first to those in the wardroom (socializing/dining area for commissioned officers), and then to the sailors mess. This account hints at discussion of the atomic bomb (certain other matters), but no documents disclose that part of the meeting. Library of Congress . Soviet aircraft had bombed Changchun and Harbin by darkness. That goal, he feared, raised terrifying prospects with implications for the inevitable destruction of our present day civilization. Once the U.S. had used the bomb in combat other great powers would not tolerate a monopoly by any nation and the sole possessor would be be the most hated and feared nation on earth. Even the U.S.s closest allies would want the bomb because how could they know where our friendship might be five, ten, or twenty years hence. Nuclear proliferation and arms races would be certain unless the U.S. worked toward international supervision and inspection of nuclear plants. Stimson accepted the language believing that a speedy reply to the Japanese would allow the United States to get the homeland into our hands before the Russians could put in any substantial claim to occupy and help rule it. If the note had included specific provision for a constitutional monarchy, Hasegawa argues, it would have taken the wind out of the sails of the military faction and Japan might have surrendered several days earlier, on August 11 or 12 instead of August 14. [75]. "Little Boy" weighed about 9,000 pounds and had a yield approximating 15,000 tons of high explosives. The day after he told Sato about the current thinking on Soviet mediation, Togo requested the Ambassador to see Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and tell him of the Emperors private intention to send Prince Konoye as a Special Envoy to Moscow. The numbered items are military and industrial installations with the percentages of total destruction. Since the end of WWII, the popular view in the U.S. has been that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki precipitated Japan's surrender on August 15. [18]. We picked a couple of cities where war work was the principle industry, and dropped bombs. They note large scale destruction of the city and damage to buildings (the hospital, gas storage tanks, the Mitsubishi plant, etc.) According to Robert S. Norris, this was the fateful decision to turn over the atomic project to military control.[8]. As for target cities, the committee agreed that the following should be exempt from Army Air Force bombing so they would be available for nuclear targeting: Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura Arsenal. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs brought renewed attention to these documents more recently on August 5, 2015, the same day Naryshkin was pointing a finger at the United States in his speech. This issue of the diplomatic summary also includes Togos account of his notification of the Soviet declaration of war, reports of Soviet military operations in the Far East, and intercepts of French diplomatic traffic. bobert. 153-154, 164 (n)). 816-268-8200 | 800-833-1225 Both Richard Frank and Barton Bernstein have used intelligence reporting and analysis of the major buildup of Japanese forces on southern Kyushu to argue that U.S. military planners were so concerned about this development that by early August 1945 they were reconsidering their invasion plans. Three days later, it dropped another on Nagasaki. [7], Documents 2A-B: Going Ahead with the Bomb, RG 227, Bush-Conant papers microfilm collection, Roll 1, Target 2, Folder 1, "S-1 Historical File, Section II (1941-1942), The Manhattan Project never had an official charter establishing it and defining its mission, but these two documents are the functional equivalent of a charter, in terms of presidential approvals for the mission, not to mention for a huge budget. [15]. The intention was to force Japan to surrender, thus avoiding a long war in the Pacific. Togo asked Sato to try to meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov as soon as possible to sound out the Russian attitude on the declaration as well as Japans end-the-war initiative. In the course of the conversation, Harriman received a message from Washington that included the proposed U.S. reply and a request for Soviet support of the reply. For more on the debate over Japans surrender, see Hasegawas important edited book,The End of the Pacific War: A Reappraisal(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), with major contributions by Hasegawa, Holloway, Bernstein, and Hatano. Tsar Bomba's yield is estimated to have been roughly 57 megatons, about 1,500 times the combined power of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki . (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 77-BT), Ground view of Nagasaki before and after the bombing; radiuses in increments of 1,000 feet from Ground Zero are shown. With the devastating battle for Okinawa winding up, Truman and the Joint Chiefs stepped back and considered what it would take to secure Japans surrender. Alperovitz, 662; Bernstein (1995), 139; Norris, 377. [59]. [23] It is possible that Truman was informed of such discussions and their conclusions, although he clung to a belief that the prospective targets were strictly military. One of the reports key findings was that a fission bomb of superlatively destructive power will result from bringing quickly together a sufficient mass of element U235. That was a certainty, as sure as any untried prediction based upon theory and experiment can be. The critically important task was to develop ways and means to separate highly enriched uranium from uranium-238. Originally this collection did not include documents on the origins and development of the Manhattan Project, although this updated posting includes some significant records for context. [67], National Archives, RG 165, Army Operations OPD, Executive Files 1940-1945, box 12, Exec #2. [77], Harry S. Truman Library, President's Secretary's Files, Speech Files, 1945-1953, copy on U.S. National Archives Web Site, On 15 December, President Truman spoke about the atomic bombings in his speech at the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, organized by bureau chiefs and other leading figures of print media organizations. 25,000 more were injured. My analysis will provide some historical and political context and offer an initial assessment of these documents. Record Group 107, Office of the Secretary of War, Formerly Top Secret Correspondence of Secretary of War Stimson (Safe File), July 1940-September 1945, box 12, S-1, Tacitly dissenting from the Targeting Committees recommendations, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall argued for initial nuclear use against a clear-cut military target such as a large naval installation. If that did not work, manufacturing areas could be targeted, but only after warning their inhabitants. 4 (copy from microfilm), General Groves prepared for Stimson, then at Potsdam, a detailed account of the Trinity test. [27], Commenting on another memorandum by Herbert Hoover, George A. Lincoln discussed war aims, face-saving proposals for Japan, and the nature of the proposed declaration to the Japanese government, including the problem of defining unconditional surrender. Lincoln argued against modifying the concept of unconditional surrender: if it is phrased so as to invite negotiation he saw risks of prolonging the war or a compromise peace. J. Samuel Walker has observed that those risks help explain why senior officials were unwilling to modify the demand for unconditional surrender. By the end of November over ten weapons would be available, presumably in the event the war had continued. It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think that they were and are. For Eisenhowers statements, seeCrusade in Europe(Garden City: Doubleday, 1948), 443, andMandate for Change(Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 312-313. Since 2005, the collection has been updated. Still unaware of radiation effects, Truman emphasized the explosive yield. Frank, 286-287; Sherwin, 233-237; Bernstein (1995), 150; Maddox, 148. (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 77-BT), This shows the "Little Boy" weapon in the pit ready for loading into the bomb bay of the Enola Gay. [70]. At the beginning of the discussion, Eisenhower made a significant statement: he mentioned how he had hoped that the war might have ended without our having to use the atomic bomb. The general implication was that prior to Hiroshima-Nagasaki, he had wanted to avoid using the bomb. Collectively the decoded messages were known as Magic. How this came about is explained in an internal history of pre-war and World War II Army and Navy code-breaking activities prepared by William F. Friedman, a central figure in the development of U.S. government cryptology during the 20th century. [65], Clemson University Libraries, Special Collections, Clemson, SC; Mss 243, Walter Brown Papers, box 68, folder 13, Transcript/Draft B. That there may be a difference between the two sources becomes evident from some of the entries; for example, in the entry for July 18, 1945 Brown wrote: "Although I knew about the atomic bomb when I wrote these notes, I dared not place it in writing in my book., The degree to which the typed-up version reflects the original is worth investigating. Both cities were leveled from the bombs and this, in turn, forced Japan to surrender to the United States. Truman Plays Part of Himself in Skit at Gridiron Dinner, and List of Members and Guests at the Gridiron Show,The Washington Post, 16 December 1945. [39], The last item discusses Japanese contacts with representatives of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland. The final decision to drop the atomic bomb, when it was made the following day, July 25, was decidedly anticlimactic. The Soviet invasion was.[58], Clemson University Libraries, Special Collections, Clemson, SC; Mss 243, Walter J. Something went wrong. We gave them fair warning and asked them to quit. An intercepted message from Togo to Sato showed that Tokyo remained interested in securing Moscows good office but that it is difficult to decide on concrete peace conditions here at home all at once. [W]e are exerting ourselves to collect the views of all quarters on the matter of concrete terms. Barton Bernstein, Richard Frank, and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, among others, have argued that the Magic intercepts from the end of July and early August show that the Japanese were far from ready to surrender. The first bomb, dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, resulted in a total death toll of around 140,000. With the goal of having enough fissile material by the first half of 1945 to produce the bombs, Bush was worried that the Germans might get there first. [59a], Takashi Itoh, ed., Sokichi Takagi: Nikki to Joho [Sokichi Takagi: Diary and Documents] (Tokyo, Japan: Misuzu-Shobo, 2000), 923-924 [Translation by Hikaru Tajima]. Open Document. The non-specialist staff sent to observe these effects, their biased premise, and the markings on the documents all suggest that the report was from the beginning meant to anticipate and align with Stalins intention to downplay the importance of the United States atomic bomb while pushing the Soviet Unions own nuclear project forward. The outspoken Szilard was not involved in operational work on the bomb and General Groves kept him under surveillance but Met Lab director Arthur Compton found Szilard useful to have around. [73] As it turned out, a few hours later, at 4:05 p.m., the White House received the Japanese surrender announcement. [19]. More than seventy years after the end of World War II, the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains controversial. [25]. According to what Byrnes told Brown, Truman, Stimson, and Leahy favored accepting the Japanese note, but Byrnes objected that the United States should go [no] further than we were willing to go at Potsdam. Stimsons account of the meeting noted Byrnes concerns (troubled and anxious) about the Japanese note and implied that he (Stimson) favored accepting it, but did not picture the debate as starkly as Browns's did. His implicit preference, however, was for non-use; he wrote that it would be better to take U.S. casualties in conquering Japan than to bring upon the world the tragedy of unrestrained competitive production of this material.. Frank, 258; Bernstein (1995), 147; Walker (2005), 322. They also discussed postwar legislation on the atom and the pending Henry D. Smyth report on the scientific work underlying the Manhattan project and postwar domestic controls of the atom. [61], Documents 73A-B: Ramsey Letter from Tinian Island, Library of Congress, J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, box 60, Ramsey, Norman. Schaffer,Wings of Judgment, 143-146. Every August, newspapers are dotted with stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accompanied by a well-picked-over but never resolved . Thus, he wanted Roosevelts instructions as to whether the project should be vigorously pushed throughout. Unlike the pilot plant proposal described above, Bush described a real production order for the bomb, at an estimated cost of a serious figure: $400 million, which was an optimistic projection given the eventual cost of $1.9 billion. The nuclear age had truly begun with the first military use of atomic weapons. Not knowing that the Soviets had already made a commitment to their Allies to declare war on Japan, Tokyo fruitlessly pursued this option for several weeks. Quotation and statistics from Thomas R. Searle, `It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers: The Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945,The Journal of Military History55 (2002):103. Since these issues will be subjects of hot debate for many more years, the Archive has once again refreshed its compilation of declassified U.S. government documents and translated Japanese records that first appeared on these pages in 2005. Also included, to give a wider perspective, were translations of Japanese documents not widely available before. For more recent contributions, see Sean Malloy,Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), Andrew Rotter,Hiroshima: The World's Bomb(New York: Oxford, 2008), Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko,The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War(New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008), Wilson D. Miscamble,The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The bomb was dropped to impress the Soviets, and persuade them to relax their grip on eastern Europe. The proposal has been characterized as the most comprehensive attempt by any American policymaker to leverage diplomacy in order to shorten the Pacific War. Washington, D.C., August 4, 2020 To mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the National Security Archive is updating and reposting one of its most popular e-books of the past 25 years. Some historians believe President Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb in order to intimidate the Soviet Union whereas others believe it was a strictly military measure designed to force Japan's unconditional surrender. [32], Record Group 353, Records of Interdepartmental and Intradepartmental Committees, Secretarys Staff Meetings Minutes, 1944-1947 (copy from microfilm). On the August 6, 1945, the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, by the United States. According to the official US version of history, an A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later, to force Japan to surrender. Barton J. Bernstein, Eclipsed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Early Thinking about Tactical Nuclear Weapons,International Security15 (Spring 1991): 149-173; Marc Gallicchio, After Nagasaki: General Marshalls Plans for Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Japan,Prologue23 (Winter 1991): 396-404. Letters from Robert Messer and Gar Alperovitz, with Bernsteins response, provide insight into some of the interpretative issues. [1], Ever since the atomic bombs were exploded over Japanese cities, historians, social scientists, journalists, World War II veterans, and ordinary citizens have engaged in intense controversy about the events of August 1945. [Photograph: The atomic cloud rising over Nagasaki, Japan, August 9, 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the point of no return in the history of world politics: they mark the dramatic culmination and end of the war, while symbolizing the beginning of an era of nuclear fear. The warning would draw on the draft State-War proclamation to Japan; presumably, the one criticized by Hull (above) which included language about the emperor. For example, the governing clique that supported the peace moves was not trying to stave off defeat but was seeking Soviet help to end the war. ], Documents 1A-C: Report of the Uranium Committee, National Archives, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Record Group 227 (hereinafter RG 227), Bush-Conant papers microfilm collection, Roll 1, Target 2, Folder 1, "S-1 Historical File, Section A (1940-1941).". Record Group 457, Records of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, Magic Diplomatic Summaries 1942-1945, box 18. After the first successful test of the atomic bomb in 1945, U.S. officials immediately considered the potential non-military benefits that could be derived from the American nuclear monopoly. The total area devastated by the atomic strike on Hiroshima is shown in the darkened area (within the circle) of the photo. Sadao Asada emphasizes the shock of the atomic bombs, while Herbert Bix has suggested that Hiroshima and the Soviet declaration of war made Hirohito and his court believe that failure to end the war could lead to the destruction of the imperial house. For example, Bernstein cites the entries for 20 and 24 July to argue that American leaders did not view Soviet entry as a substitute for the bomb but that the latter would be so powerful, and the Soviet presence in Manchuria so militarily significant, that there was no need for actual Soviet intervention in the war. For Brown's diary entry of 3 August 9 1945 historians have developed conflicting interpretations (See discussion of document 57).