From: ERA00002@aol.com
Here is a short essay I published on my "Altercation" website
(www.altercation.msnbc.com) in response to Nicholas Kristof's NYT column
on the "emerging consensus" on the dropping of the bomb. It's by Professor
Eric Rauchway, (history, UC Davis). The site has links that will take you
to some of the sources.
Eric Alterman
ATOMIC ANNIVERSARY
Today we have another Altercation special event: On the 58th
anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb, Eric Rauchway writes a short
essay replying to Nicholas Kristof's determinedly wrong column of
yesterday stating that there's an "emerging consensus" the bombing
was
militarily unnecessary (Kristof does add he thinks this "consensus' is
mistaken). Eric is also the author of a new book, Murdering McKinley.
Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which I might
not even have mentioned - didn't we have a big enough fight on the 50th
anniversary? Do we have to start ginning up a new one two years before the
60th?
Nichoals Kristof cites "an emerging consensus" among historians:
"We Americans have blood on our hands" because of Hiroshima. Borrowing
from the President, he critiques "[r]evisionist historians like Gar
Alperovitz," who have shaped "this emerging consensus" that "Washington
believed the bombing militarily unnecessary."
Kristof knows lots of things about lots of things I know nothing
about, and I learn from his work, especially on contemporary Asia and
Africa. But he doesn't know "American scholarship" all that well.
Even if
you're not an a-bomb expert - I'm not - you can say pretty quickly that
Kristof has the wrong end of the stick.
First of all, woe betide anyone who asserts there's an "emerging
consensus" on the atomic bombs of 1945; it's one of those issues that
reliably draws shouty people. And Alperovitz's work in particular
invariably polarizes the profession; reviews of his Atomic Diplomacy and
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb include accusations of professional
malfeasance as well as expressions of strong admiration. When historians
get to scuffling over his work, well, the tweed flies.
But second of all, and more importantly, if you went looking for
common ground between historians identified with both the left and the
right, you would find quite the opposite of what Kristof says.
Walter LaFeber of Cornell says,
Militarily, the Americans dropped the first bomb to end the war as
quickly as possible and before perhaps a million casualties resulted from
an invasion of Japan.
America, Russia, and the Cold War, 7th ed. (1993), p. 25
John Lewis Gaddis of Yale says,
Having acquired this awesome weapon, the United States used it against
Japan for a simple and straightforward reason: to achieve victory as quickly,
as decisively, and as economically as possible.
We Now Know (1997), p. 87
And Barton J. Bernstein of Stanford said as early as 1974,
The administration did not decide to use the bomb against Japan in
order to stop Soviet entry into the Pacific war or to gain advantages over
the Soviets in Eastern Europe or in the Pacific. Rather, the Truman
administration acted upon the inherited [i.e., from FDR] assumption that
the bomb was a legitimate weapon for combat use against an enemy.... The
combat use of the bomb promised to speed the end of the war and thereby to
save American lives.
"The Quest for Security," Journal of American History 60:4, p. 1014
Indeed, Bernstein long ago indicated that what Kristof describes as
the Alperovitz "consensus" is dodgy for a few simple reasons.
1. Truman didn't per se decide to use the bomb; he simply allowed
the existing bomb program established by FDR to go ahead. (This, by the
way, is why suggestions that Truman's bigotry influenced the decision
cannot be terribly serious. The bombing had nearly nothing to do with
Truman personally.)
2. Assertions that Truman, or nearly-Secretary-of-State James F.
Byrnes, were thinking principally in terms of scaring the Soviets and not
of defeating the Japanese come from other people's (usually self-serving)
recollections recorded well after the fact - after they were persuaded
that the a-bomb was something terrible and different.
3. The bomb's developers didn't think of it as a deterrent threat
rather than a combat weapon. The notion that it belonged to a special
category only emerged after people could see what instant, awful and
lasting damage it could do.
None of this general belief that the bombs were going to be used
for military purposes touches the question of whether they were used in
the best possible way - could they have been deployed against a more
definitely military target? Could there have been a little longer delay
before the second bomb? How many lives did avoiding an invasion really
save? Wouldn't an invasion have cost Japanese lives too - more Japanese
lives, maybe, than the bomb? Working up to an invasion would probably have
meant continued conventional bombing and continued blockades, generating
more casualties even before the invasion itself occurred.
Bernstein again, this time in 1998:
In 1945, before Hiroshima and even afterward, Truman rightly
believed that the use of the A-bomb on Japan would be warmly endorsed by
Americans, that they never would have understood, much less approved, a
decision not to use the weapon if it was available, and that no mainline
American politician, who would have been likely to be President at the
time, would have decided otherwise....
He also seemed to believe that the use of the bomb, as Secretary
Byrnes contended, might help him in dealing with the Soviets. But that
hope was never a controlling reason but only a supplementary, and thus a
confirming, reason to do what Roosevelt would probably also have done,
what virtually all top-level presidential advisers seemed to endorse, and
what only one adviser, Under Secretary Bard, who was on the fringes of
decision-making, ever questioned before Hiroshima: dropping the bomb on
Japan in order to speed a surrender.
"Truman and the A-Bomb," Journal of Military History, 62:3, p. 567
As I say, if there were something like a professional historical
consensus, this would be it. Nobody's happy about the bomb - Truman wasn't
either - but you won't find hordes of historians going around accusing the
Truman administration of using the bombs without military reasons in the
midst of what was, after all, a brutal war in which the bombing of
civilians had already been established as awful, common practice.
Whatever the shortcomings of my profession, Mr. Kristof - and
historians can be maddening - consensus on Alperovitz isn't one of them.
Please build a straw man out of someone else
Eric Alterman