Hiroshima and Nuclear Counterfactuals
At 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, the world changed forever as an American atomic bomb exploded in the skies over Hiroshima, Japan. That city-busting attack, and the one launched against Nagasaki three days later, killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. However terrible the suffering those attacks inflicted on the Japanese and Korean inhabitants of those two cities was, the potentially even more catastrophic legacy of those two fateful days in August 1945 was that they ushered in the atomic age, casting a pall of nuclear armageddon over the world that persists to this day.
The decision to use these new “special weapons” against Japan was neither foreordained nor the product of some iron law of history. Those officials had a number of military options before them, and given only slight changes in the political or strategic calculation here and there it is possible to imagine a world in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki never became the icons of nuclear holocaust that they have. We know what option US officials actually chose, of course, as well as the consequences, humanitarian and strategic, of that choice. But what alternatives did those decision-makers leave on the table? What might have happened if they had chosen other than they actually did? Is it conceivable that those who ultimately authorized the use of atomic bombs in 1945 might have peered into the nuclear abyss and recoiled in horror, turning their backs forever on Oppenheimer’s “destroyer of worlds”?
These questions, of course, are as important as they are unusual. For the most part, yearly reflection on the anniversary of the first and only use of nuclear weapons takes the form of a “debate” between those who argue that the bombs had to be dropped on the grounds of military necessity (traditionalists) versus those who denounce the bombing on moral grounds (revisionists). Vanishingly little energy is devoted to thinking through what alternative actions were conceivable and what the costs and benefits of those actions might have been. The interminable rehearsal of these “arguments” has become little more than an occasion for moral preening that ultimately does justice neither to the big questions regarding the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki nor to the memory of those who suffered the consequences of that fateful decision.
That addressing these “what-if” questions is important should also be self-evident. When viewed from the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to cast a moral judgment on the decision to drop the bomb. But if we juxtapose the actual historical timeline to one or two of the more plausible alternative histories generated by these questions, a different picture comes into focus—a picture that more sharply highlights not just the costs and benefits of the actual decision to use atomic weapons but the speculative costs and benefits of the decision not to. Counterfactual history allows us to sharpen our judgment by juxtaposing what did happen with what could have happened. That which at first sight seems obviously good, strategically or in some other sense, may seem decidedly less so when compared to what might (realistically) have been. Similarly, those events that seem unquestionably “bad” at first blush might well appear less bad when juxtaposed to other plausible counterfactuals.
My goal in these two short articles, then, is to reflect on what did not happen but might have happened, so that we might better understand and assess what did happen. I am not at all interested in “second guessing,” applauding, or vilifying those US decision-makers who had to make a tough choice, in very high-stakes conditions, three-quarters of a century ago. Nor am I interested in coming to some decisive conclusion—strategic or moral—regarding the propriety of using nuclear weapons against two mostly civilian targets. Rather, I am interested in demonstrating through the development of two alternative timelines, the first of which I will explore in this article and the second in the next article, the moral and strategic complexity of the profoundly consequential decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I leave it to my readers to decide what they would have done had they been sitting behind the Resolute Desk with their finger on the proverbial—but not yet existing—nuclear button in the late summer of 1945.
Virtual History #1: Non-Use and the War Ends Quickly Anyway
In February 1945, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted an advisory document to President Truman stating that, in their considered opinion, the use of the “special weapons” that would become available beginning in August was not necessary to bring the war to a speedy end. They recommended that the president not authorize the use of atomic weapons against Japan. Following further consultations with senior officials at the State Department and other close advisors, President Truman concurred with the service chiefs and issued an order that atomic weapons should not be used without his direct authorization, which he then pointedly withheld.
The president then ordered the Potsdam Declaration—the document that called on Japan to surrender unconditionally and submit to occupation and post-war supervision of its economy and political system—amended to make clear that the “Chrysanthemum Throne” would not be abolished if the Japanese surrendered and that its incumbent would remain in place and not be tried as a war criminal. This assuaged the concern of many on the Supreme Council that surrender would mean the end of the Imperial system, and the emperor, altogether. The diehard militarists among the Japanese leadership continued to advocate for a final, decisive battle in defense of the home islands.
But the combination of crippling economic blockade, catastrophic battlefield defeats, imminent Soviet entry into the war on the Allies’ side, continuous fire-bombing of Japanese cities, looming threat of a massive US invasion, and American claims to possess a super-weapon capable of destruction “the like of which has never been seen on this earth” resulted in the marginalization of this formerly dominant faction within the high council. The emperor, given a way out of an unwinnable war with his throne intact, seized what he probably saw as his last, best hope and ordered the peace party in the council to make overtures to the United States on the basis of the Potsdam Declaration: immediate surrender of all Japanese fighting forces, Allied occupation of Japan, trials for those suspected of war crimes, immunity for the emperor from any such charges, and the perpetuation of the Imperial office and its incumbent as “symbols of the State and of the unity of the people.” President Truman signaled his agreement to these terms in a radio broadcast on July 12, 1945. After several more days of back-channel negotiations and a failed coup d’état, Emperor Hirohito gave a recorded radio address across the Empire on August 15. In this address, known to posterity as the “Jewel Voice Broadcast,” he announced the Japanese Empire’s capitulation to the Allies. The instrument of surrender was formally signed aboard the USS Iowa in Tokyo Bay on August 5, 1945.
The end of the War, however, was not to be the end of geopolitical conflict. Late in the evening of August 8, 1945, in accordance with the still-in-effect Yalta agreements but in violation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and soon after midnight on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. From Moscow’s perspective, this seemed like a natural next step in what was already shaping up to be a return to the 1917-1941 era of East-West hostilities. The Red Army had already defeated the German Wehrmacht and had occupied vast swathes of central and eastern Europe. Its western defensive glacis securely in place, the Soviet leadership turned its full attention to its southern and eastern flanks. In the east especially, they saw both threats and opportunities. The threats had to do with the emerging reality of a British-American-Nationalist Chinese condominium in what is now called the Indo-Pacific region. The Kremlin feared this was all part of a capitalist strategy to encircle and strangle the Soviet Union and thus forestall a global revolution—a revolution that they believed the capitalists feared even more than the German Reich and the Japanese Empire.
Sensing a window of opportunity, they invaded not only Japanese-occupied China but also the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the northern part of the island of Honshu, the island of Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands (giving them unimpeded access to the Pacific Ocean). Following several skirmishes with US occupation forces, hurried negotiations with the US resulted in the informal (later formalized in the Potsdam Treaty) division of Japan into two occupation zones, North Japan and South Japan. This, coupled with the occupation and later annexation of Mongolia and most of Manchuria, provided the Soviets on their eastern frontier what the occupation of Germany and Eastern Europe did in the west: a defensive buffer and offensive springboard that would serve them well in what, by the time North Japan invaded South Japan in 1950, was already being called the Cold War.
Andrew Latham is a professor of Political Science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He regularly teaches courses on Conservative Political Thought, Medieval Political Thought, and International Security.