Why Nagasaki Was the Last City Bombed

The following story is co-published with Joe Cirincione’s Substack.

The president of the United States has the sole, unfettered authority to launch a nuclear weapon whenever he wants, for whatever reason he wants. No one can stop him.

When you tell people that, they don’t believe you. Surely, they say, he needs the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the secretary of defense, or somebody. No, he does not. Well, surely, the military would refuse an order from an insane president. No, they would not.

The nuclear command and control system was designed for rapid, unquestioned execution of launch orders. It is structured so that less than five minutes after a president picks up the phone and orders an attack, the missiles will fly. If a president gave such an order in response to an attack on the United States, the military would have detected the attack, started a phone conference and brought in the president (see “A House of Dynamite” or this clip from “Madam Secretary.” ) But a president can initiate the order on his own, without any consultation or conference. One phone call, one command, and the orders flow rapidly to the launch officers.

You can washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/01/no-president-should-have-absolute-authority-launch-nuclear-weapons/" rel="nofollow external" target="_blank">in this article I wrote some years ago for The Washington Post. Or this one by former Obama administration nuclear official Jon Wolfsthal. Or this one , which highlights a commentary by the late, great nuclear analyst and former Minuteman launch officer Bruce Blair.

When civilian control began

But it wasn’t always so. President Harry S. Truman established civilian control of the United States’ nuclear weapons at the end of World War II when he discovered that the military was planning more atomic attacks after two bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 people , almost all civilians.

Truman never “decided” to drop these atomic bombs. He just did not stop a process already underway. When Truman became president on April 12, 1945, following the sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he knew nothing about the secret bomb program. In fact, he knew very little about the conduct of the war. He had become vice president on Jan. 20 of that year and only “saw Roosevelt once or twice in those months,” he wrote in a letter to his daughter in 1948. “But he never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs.”

Truman never “decided” to drop these atomic bombs.

In fact, Truman didn’t get the details of the secret Manhattan Project effort at Los Alamos until two weeks into his presidency, on April 25. But he did not pay much attention to the program until July, when the first bomb was tested. This was a military program and the military was in charge of the massive bombing campaign on Japan, including what weapons to use and what targets to select.

“One of the most surprising things about the ‘decision to use the atomic bomb’ is that there wasn’t one, and Harry Truman didn’t make it,” writes nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein in his definitive history of this period, “The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age.” “That is, no singular ‘decision’ to use — or not use — the atomic bomb was ever actually made by anyone, much less Truman.”

A weapon too awful to use

When the United States began working on the bomb it was seen as purely defensive — a deterrent to Adolf Hitler, who was thought to be racing to develop the weapon (he was not). Scientists believed that this was not a military weapon, it was too indiscriminate, its destructive power too great to ever be used by a civilized nation.

By the time the bomb was tested in July 1945, the Allies had defeated Hitler. Japan did not have a program for a similar bomb. But the war had changed government views on killing massive numbers of innocent civilians.

The firebombing of German cities including Dresden and Hamburg had not contributed significantly to the Allied victory, but the Army Air Force under Gen. Curtis LeMay continued the strategy in Japan, beginning with the fire bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. Over 300 B-29s dropped 1,700 tons of incendiaries, destroying 85% of the city and killing 100,000 people. Overall, LeMay’s campaign dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs on 66 Japanese cities, killing many hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The military chiefs saw the new atomic bomb as simply another weapon. One plane with one bomb could do the work of thousands of bombs dropped by hundreds of planes. The bombs used on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on Aug. 9, each had the power of 15-20 kilotons of explosive force, or 15,000-20,000 tons of dynamite. That is 10 times the power of the Tokyo raid.

The plans for using the atomic bombs had been made months ago. As soon as they were ready, they were to be rushed to the theater and used.

Although Truman would say at the end of 1945 that using the bomb was “the most terrible decision a man ever had to make” and that “it was a decision to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings” (Wellerstein, p. 137), all the evidence indicates that he did not, in fact, make any decision.

The military chiefs saw the new atomic bomb as simply another weapon.

As Wellerstein reports, the actual order to begin the bombings was a military order drafted by Gen. Lester Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, and issued by Gen. Thomas Hardy, the acting Army chief of staff, and approved by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson on July 25. The bombings would begin “after August 3” on one of four selected cities as soon as weapons were available and would continue as more weapons were produced.

Truman was aware of the orders, but may not have fully understood them. Nor was it necessary for him to approve them. He appears to have believed that Hiroshima was an Army base, not a city of 350,000 people. Indeed, the orders (as current nuclear plans do now) referred to “targets” not “cities.” This may be why Truman, in his formal announcement of the bombing on Aug. 6, calls Hiroshima “an important Japanese army base,” which it was not.

It is also not clear that Truman knew that the Army would bomb Nagasaki on Aug. 9. But it is clear that it weighed heavily on him as reports came in of the destruction. Enough to finally prompt him to intervene to stop plans to drop more atomic bombs on more cities. At a Cabinet meeting on Aug. 10, Truman ordered “that there will be no further dropping of atomic bombs” without the express approval of the president.

Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace noted in his diary, “Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”

Truman thus established civilian control over atomic weapons. He went on to reaffirm and expand that control after the war. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 took the programs away from the military and gave authority over the vast atomic enterprise to the newly created civilian Atomic Energy Commission, firmly under the control of the president.

The military made repeated efforts to wrestle back control. Echoing similar arguments made today to merge conventional and nuclear weapon operations and to delegate use authority to regional military commanders, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal claimed in 1948 that our ability to deter the Soviet Union would be gravely weakened if the military did not have the ability to rapidly use atomic weapons. Truman rebuffed him.

A weapon too awful to be controlled by one person

Presidential adviser David Lilienthal recalls in his dairy that Truman regarded this line of argument with “a very fishy eye.” Truman’s reply to Forrestal and others championing these arguments is worth repeating in full:

“I don’t think we oughts to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that” (Wellerstein, pp. 171-173, emphasis added).

These are not military weapons. These are weapons of mass slaughter.

Truman may not have ordered the first atomic bombings, but he strove mightily to ensure that they would be the last. As the Trump administration prepares its new nuclear review , expected to order the production of more and newer types of nuclear weapons and to ease the conditions for their use, we should remember Truman’s words.

These are not military weapons. These are weapons of mass slaughter. No civilized nation should ever use them again. While Truman’s decision to assert civilian control over these weapons may have been sufficient to prevent their use in the past, it is no longer enough. We now must confront the possibility that a crazy president with sole authority could use them on a whim, or in a late-night fit of rage.

If a Democrat occupies the White House again, they must put the structural reform of our nuclear policy — particularly sole authority — at the top of their agenda.

We should heed Truman’s warnings.

The post Why Nagasaki Was the Last City Bombed appeared first on Truthdig .