The Third Shot: Ending the First Nuclear War

Transcription

1 Book Proposal for The Third Shot: Ending the First Nuclear War by Michael D. Gordin Assistant Professor of History Princeton University The Second World War ended suddenly. On 6 August 1945, an atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima; on 8 August, the Soviet Union technically abrogated their neutrality pact with Japan and declared war, and early the following morning began a staggeringly successful steamroller advance across Manchuria; and on 9 August, a second atomic bomb this one a plutonium-fueled Fat Man destroyed much of Nagasaki. As the story is usually (and frequently) told, this triumvirate of shocks so stunned the Big Six of the Imperial inner circle, and especially Emperor Hirohito, that he unprecedentedly intervened in war-planning deliberations and moved for conditional surrender on 10 August. (The momentous meeting took place on 9 August; the Nagasaki blast occurred in the middle of it.) Back in Washington, President Truman and his cabinet considered the offer, and Secretary of State James Byrnes penned a response that demanded that the Japanese surrender unconditionally Allied war terms since the late President Franklin Roosevelt had enunciated them at the Casablanca Conference in On 14 August, the Japanese accepted, and the Emperor broke his traditional silence and announced the surrender on the radio. Sudden indeed. The central thesis of The Third Shot is that the war ended suddenly for the Allies as well. This statement is a little hard to swallow for the generations who have grown up with the truism 1

2 that the bomb ended the war. Consider, for a moment, how the war looked to US servicemen, military planners, and politicians after the explosion of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. With the exception of one academic article from the late 1970s, this has never been seriously contemplated. Millions of Americans have been taught about the history of the atomic bomb and have thought about it as if it was self-evident, ex ante, that the advent of nuclear weapons would by their very nature compel the Japanese to surrender. It is, supposedly, obvious to all that these weapons are special, epoch-making, and transformative, and that this was recognized by all contemporaries who were involved in the supposed decision to drop the bomb and by the Japanese who suffered the consequences. The Third Shot argues, on the contrary, that no one in 1945 (not surprisingly) was able to foretell the future; there was no certainty and in fact quite a lot of skepticism among the principal American politicians and military figures (scientists, the third group who were aware of the bomb before Truman s public announcement on 7 August, are a slightly more complicated case) that the bomb would in fact work. At first, they thought it would work if it exploded; then it would work if it shortened the war by a few months, say, before the scheduled 1 November invasion of the southern island of Kyushu (Operation Olympic); and finally, after 14 August, it was seen to have worked when it ended the war. But absolutely nobody before that date thought that two bombs would be sufficient: if the first bomb did not cause surrender, they reasoned, then many would be required, and certainly a third shot before the end of August. By chronicling the attitudes towards the bomb before the detonation over Hiroshima, and then for the first time in a monograph after Nagasaki but before surrender, The Third Shot shows that for a sizable group of decision-makers it was not the case that the bomb was special and therefore 2

3 had the power to end the war. Rather, the sudden surrender of the Japanese caught Washington rather off-guard, compelling the doubters to attribute special status to the bomb after the fact. The Third Shot accomplishes this tall order in three ways: in space, in time, and in emphasis. Much excellent work has been published on the history of the atomic bomb use on Japan, but almost all of this work has sought to answer one (or both) of two questions: what was Truman s intent in using the bomb?; and, what ended World War II? The most important sites for the first question are Washington, DC, and the Potsdam Conference of the Big Three (Truman, Churchill/Atlee, and Stalin) in July 1945, since those were the places where the final decision to use the bomb was made; the most important site for the latter is obviously Tokyo, for it was the unconditional surrender announced by Hirohito that ended the war. The crucial time for the first question are the days at Potsdam, for once the order to begin atomic bombing was sent to the Pacific Strategic Air Command on 24 July 1945, Truman s mind was made up, and his intentions can be evaluated; the time for the latter is after the Nagasaki attack, since that day (9 August) reflects the beginning of serious surrender deliberations. As for emphasis, both questions seek to understand the events in a kind of counterfactual haze: what if we had warned Japan?; what if we had made a demonstration?; what if we had modified the terms of unconditional surrender?; what if we had used only one bomb?; what if we had waited for Soviet entry first? All of these questions are impossible to answer definitively, since we cannot rerun the tape and see what the result would be. Their interest is to locate the beginnings and assign blame: who caused the Cold War?; who began the age of civilian bombing and city targeting?; was the bombing militarily necessary?; was the bombing morally justified? Instead of taking such counterfactual approaches for those admittedly intriguing questions, The Third Shot asks not What would have happened if things had turned out otherwise?, but 3

4 rather: Why does it matter that things happened in the way they did? To answer this, I ask the superficially counterfactual question: What if Japan had not surrendered? This question is only superficially counterfactual because, as noted earlier, Japan in fact did not surrender immediately upon the use of the atomic bombs, and so there were in fact eight days after Hiroshima and five after Nagasaki when this counterfactual was indeed the actual historical record. As historians, we have the ability by concentrating on the events that occurred in this pre-surrender, post-atomic period and the almost ignored archival documents produced then to tell for the first time the story of how the atomic bomb was thought about and treated without the retrospective tinge by which the surrender colored everything. By telling the narrative of the bomb decision not in terms of a teleological story leading to Hiroshima or to surrender, or as a romanticized tale of Great Men Making Epochal Decisions, but as a story couched deeply in military history, The Third Shot offers an original, archivally-based account that looks at how the bomb was conceived of as a military option. From this point of view, the atomic bomb was perceived by many such as Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall as a quantitatively different firebomb (it was much more explosive, more efficient, and required less B-29 bombers to deliver), but not as a qualitative change in warfare. For these military men, the decision to drop the bomb was actually taken the moment development shaded into a real weapon, and by December 1944 months before Roosevelt s death in his fourth term of office crews had already been assigned to deliver the bomb to both Germany and Japan. (Germany surrendered too soon, to the chagrin of many who were motivated to develop the bomb out of fear of Hitler s men succeeding at it first.) This book removes the retrospectively-applied aura of the bomb as Always Special and therefore demanding special procedures of deliberation over use, special committees, and special moral deliberations by the Commander-in-Chief. To be fair, for some of 4

5 the participants, particularly those close to the scientists, the bomb was indeed intrinsically special because the source of its explosive power the fission of uranium or plutonium was unprecedented. If one emphasized the bomb as a bomb, however, what mattered was whether it would destroy enemy personnel and infrastructure, full stop. Debates over other special aspects of the bomb such as nuclear energy or radiological effects were rather muted until after surrender had demonstrated that the bomb was in fact special. The most direct way The Third Shot reorients the historical and contemporary conversation on the atomic bomb s use in World War II is by stressing that there was, in fact, a third bomb (for starters) intended to be used in combat from the beginning of the weapon s development. Discussion of target and timing for the Third Shot most likely Tokyo Bay on 20 August were active both before and after Nagasaki, and even after surrender but before the beginning of the Occupation on 2 September, a transitional period when Allied forces feared a militarist coup might restart hostilities. That third shot was a military reality until surrender the two bombs success began the rapid and mostly unconscious process of expunging it from historical memory. This military option, mentioned in numerous cables, briefings, shipping manifests, and diplomatic and scientific correspondence, drops out of sight by the end of August 1945, and today Americans believe the reason why we dropped two bombs on Japan is because we knew in advance that two would suffice. The days up to surrender prove this supposed military omniscience nonexistent. This rapidly reorients the time of the story to begin long before Summer 1945 (with the assumption that bombs would be used in combat) and to end after Potsdam and even after Hiroshima. The reorientation in space is similarly broad. The story of the atomic bombs use emphasizes a canonical list of places: Washington, Potsdam, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 5

6 Los Alamos. None of these places ever interacted with a combat-ready atomic bomb. The one site where the bomb s reality was evident as a military weapon was the island of Tinian in the Marianas (3 miles south of Saipan, 125 north of Guam, and 1450 miles southeast of Tokyo). By August 1945, North Field on Tinian was the largest airfield in the world, with a capacity twice the size of its closest competitor, Idlewild (now JFK) airport in New York City. The affinity with New York ran deep. Roughly 10 miles long and 3 miles wide, Tinian Island resembled Manhattan Island it was a relatively flat, coral island (95% planted in sugar cane by the Japanese during their control of the islands), and oriented north-south. When the Seabees developed the island, they laid out the streets in direct correspondence with Manhattan: the main north-south avenues were dubbed 8th Avenue and Broadway, with cross streets 42nd Street, Wall Street, and 125th Street. The 509th Composite Group, which was assigned to assemble and deliver the atomic bomb, was stationed in the Morningside Heights region the Manhattan Project, begun at Columbia University before the war with Japan, had returned full circle. By focusing on the way individuals stationed on Tinian perceived the weapon they were in charge of delivering, one sees the military aspects of the atomic bomb in relief, with its international-relations implications, its moral valences, and its scientific particularity in the background. In particular, since Tinian was the home base for most of the B-29s involved in the extensive firebombing campaign that began in March 1945, the atomic bomb, analyzed in situ, begins to resemble firebombs more and Doomsday Devices less. Finally, nowhere more than on Tinian was the Third Shot a reality, for it was here that they were to receive the shipments and prepare for the drop itself, and they remained in a state of readiness for assembling that third bomb until the instruments of surrender were signed on 2 September that is, over two weeks after surrender supposedly catapulted the bombs into unusable status. 6

7 This raises the final aspect of The Third Shot: an investigation of the central assumptions of nuclearism the belief that nuclear weapons are qualitatively different weapons and thus entail new strategic thinking, new international postures, a new moralities. This book does not deny that, at least during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union did in fact for the most part behave as if they believed nuclear weapons were in fact special. As long as politicians and generals treated these weapons as special, they in fact were so and their public image today reveals the persistence of nuclearism. The Third Shot does not argue that nuclearism is the wrong way to view these bombs, only that there was once a historically viable alternative that has been erased from our collective memory, and it was surrender itself that selected the Awe-Inspiring Bomb as the mode of thinking about these weapons, instead of the Large Firebomb version that had been prevalent in military circles in the days when the Third Shot was a reality in the making. Market Needless to say, books on the Second World War comprise a large proportion of trade history publications, and The Third Shot is designed to appeal to this group of readers, as well as those interested in the role of nuclear weapons in foreign policy and international relations. There is very little technical content or language in the book, which focuses on the ways educated statesmen and military officers (and their scientific liaisons) treated the weapon during the course of the war. It is hoped that this book will also be of interest to those interested in East Asia or military history. It is the most serious reconfiguring of the history of the atomic bomb drop since Gar Alperovitz s Atomic Diplomacy (first edition 1965 and still in print), and it will address much of the same narrative as Richard Rhodes s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. These are sizeable groups of readers, and the adoption of the text for use in classrooms of military history, diplomatic history, US history, and the history of science is quite possible. Chapter Outline: Chapter 1: Introduction The introduction lays out the historical problem and the importance of addressing it, offering a reprise of much of the argument sketched out above, emphasizing how a small but central period of time before surrender has been obscured from view 7

8 and how a frank reckoning of what happened in that time period requires us to reexamine many of our assumptions of the way the atomic bomb was used in World War II. Chapter 2: Shock There are several reasons why nuclear weapons have been considered special since the end of World War II. The most common one is its radioactive aftereffects, which are addressed in Chapter 3. The typical explanation of why it was special evoked before the end of the war was that it was a weapon designed to shock the Japanese into surrender. When the project to develop an atomic bomb was first authorized in 1941 and begun in earnest in 1942, strategists envisaged it either as a deterrent against a Nazi nuclear threat or as part of a strategic bombing campaign a larger, more efficient firebomb. It was only in the Spring of 1945, when it became clear that the Japanese Empire was already defeated, that Allied (but mostly American) war planners began to conceive of the atomic bomb as a shock that would give the Japanese a reason (or an excuse) to translate their defeat into unconditional surrender. Interestingly, when one enters the diplomatic and military records of the period, one finds that while the atomic bomb was part of this Shock Strategy, the strategy itself was not born nuclear. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew a noted Japan Hand in diplomatic circles recognized the need for shocking Japan into surrender, but he suggested a clarification of the terms of unconditional surrender (specifically, allowing the Japanese to retain the Emperor), and to declare various military events (the spectacular firebombings of Tokyo in May and June, and the horrific bloodbath at Okinawa) as an explicit set of shocks to induce surrender. For reasons of timing, the military did not adopt a strategy of shock until the atomic bomb was ready for delivery. The atomic bomb was not billed as a shock because of any particularities of its physics. This chapter uses Grew s efforts to set the scene of the ending of the war and to address two central aspects demanded of any account of the use of atomic bombs: the evolution of the unconditional surrender war aim; and the escalation of firebombing against Japanese cities. Chapter 3: Special The code name for the atomic bomb in the Henry L. Stimson s War Department was S-1, where the S stood for Special. Briefed by science advisers such as James Bryant Conant and Vannevar Bush, and receiving reports from the officer in charge of the Manhattan Project, Leslie R. Groves, and the Director of Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Stimson came to view the bomb as special indeed, much as the scientists did. Stimson devoted much time, as reflected in his astonishing diary, piecing together the implications for this special weapon on international relations and warfare in general, and his advocacy is a large part of the reason why we today think of nuclear weapons as a breed apart. This chapter discusses the formation and history of the Manhattan Project and Stimson s vision of the bomb as a special weapon. Even for this advocate of the qualitative distinction of atomic warfare, however, one finds plenty of evidence that he did not think the bomb would end the war as quickly as actually transpired. This chapter also addresses two central issues that would later be cited often as signs that the bomb did indeed possess special status: the issue of radioactivity, which was substantially underestimated (or downplayed) in the documentation produced by the Manhattan Project until long after on-site investigations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the Potsdam Conference. It was at this conference that the decision to use the atomic bomb was made by Truman. Using Stimson as a guide, this chapter chronicles the long series of meetings and decisions that had been made since December 1944 that made Truman s intervention at Potsdam nothing short of a fait accompli. Even at Potsdam, which has been elevated as a summit of epochal decision-making by historians of the onset of the Cold War, one finds that the operational decisions for the bomb were 8

9 made largely in the same way as those for any other strategic development in the war through normal military channels. Chapter 4: Miracle A central argument of this book is that the use of the atomic bomb must be understood in the full context of the war with Japan, a long and bloody conflict that hopped from island to island in preparation for the final invasion of Japan, tentatively scheduled for November 1945 in order to accomplish defeat of Japan (V-J Day) within a year of the surrender of Germany (8 May 1945). This chapter collapses the history of the Pacific War into the conquest of one island, Tinian, located in the Marianas archipelago. Tinian is a convenient choice for two reasons. First, it has repeatedly been analyzed since as a perfect amphibious operation, demonstrating in almost flawless fashion the tactics developed to conquer islands in the Pacific. The Marianas campaign (which included the conquest of Saipan two weeks before Tinian in July 1944, and the reconquest of Guam afterwards) also serves as a fitting microcosm of interservice rivalry, and the casualties sustained here became the kernel for the estimates of losses in an invasion of the Home Islands, a much ballyhooed figure in atomic-bomb debates ever since. As yet a further revealing coincidence, Tinian s conquest marked the first use of napalm in combat, that munition which would prove so central in the firebombing campaign that would be started by Curtis LeMay the following year. That bombing campaign serves as the second reason to focus on Tinian, for it was later praised as a miracle, an island aircraft-carrier, the largest airfield in the world and the launching point for those firebombing raids that relentlessly incinerated the major cities of Japan. Following the conquest of Japan, and then the evolution of city bombing, this chapter describes the training of the 509th Composite Group, responsible for the delivery of the atomic bomb, and concludes with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August Chapter 5: Papacy Most histories of the use of the atomic bomb make the Hiroshima attack the climax of their narrative; this chapter shows, however, that in revealing ways the Nagasaki attack on 9 August was more typical of how the bombs were viewed before surrender. This chapter continues the narrative from the previous one by remaining on Tinian codenamed Papacy in Manhattan Project cables and exploring how the Nagasaki raid was planned and executed. The 24 July order for the use of the atomic bomb specified that the bombs would be used as made ready by the Project staff. That is, the decision to initiate atomic warfare was precisely a decision to initiate; the number of bombs was not fixed in advance, and was limited only by the speed of production and the exigencies of weather. The proposed date for the second bomb drop was 11 August, but bad weather loomed, and so Captain William Deak Parsons, the weaponeer on the Enola Gay who armed the Little Boy uranium bomb, and Norman Ramsey, the chief scientist on Tinian, decided to reschedule the Fat Man plutonium bomb for 9 August. The original target was to be the arsenal at Kokura, but it was clouded over on that day, so after several passes the pilot of the Bock s Car, Major Sweeney, decided to bomb Nagasaki instead. Everything about this drop the target, the timing, the method of approach was unorthodox and determined by people on Tinian. This bomb use was operationally decided in the field, and thus is the template for all future drops that would have taken place had surrender not intervened. Chapter 6: Surrender The Third Shot was an existence in potentia for only five days: after the Nagasaki drop but before surrender. On 10 August, the Japanese offered to surrender on the condition that the Emperor was allowed to stay, and traditional narratives of the atomic bomb s use emphasize the negotiations in Tokyo and Washington that led to unconditional surrender on 9

10 August 14. This chapter focuses on Tinian and Washington, showing how surrender was by no means a foregone conclusion either before 14 August or even after, until the Occupation had taken hold in September. This chapter shows how contingent surrender looked at the time, how it was not seen as inevitable, and also how the fact of surrender, once it took place, began to erase rapidly any notion that there was a third bomb, or even that there had been any doubt before the end of the war that the atomic bomb would hasten (or cause) the end of hostilities. By the end of the narrative in this chapter, the orthodoxy of the story of the bomb in both its traditional and revisionist variants was set, and the Third Shot was consigned to oblivion. Chapter 7: Conclusion This concluding chapter ties up the story that has unfolded in the previous pages, demonstrating how surrender quickly led to the rise of nuclearism in strategic and diplomatic thinking, and how the legacies of forgetting the Third Shot can be seen inflected in the onset of the Cold War, the use of atomic diplomacy in the Korean War, the decision to build a hydrogen bomb, the fallout debates of the 1950s, and the debates about arms control and nuclear proliferation that persist to the present day. 10