Dan Snow's History Hit - Oppenheimer: What If America Never Dropped the Atomic Bomb?

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

The new Oppenheimer movie has everyone asking questions about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 - were two bombs necessary? Would the war have ended without it? Was there an ulterior motive? Would the Americans have dropped a third if they had it?At the end of WWII, the Manhattan Project demonstrated the power humanity had harnessed for destruction. When the uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945, city residents saw a flash of light and a loud boom- virtually everything within a 2-mile radius was destroyed. Those who survived the initial impact were then caught in subsequent firestorms and after that, many succumbed to radiation poisoning. It's estimated 1 in 3 were killed. 3 days later, Nagasaki suffered the same fate.At the time, it was said it was necessary to end the war and to show why these weapons should never be used again. But is that true? To answer some of the questions we've all been asking after learning about Oppenheimer, Dan is joined by Professor Paul Poast from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago who explains how the decision was really made to drop the bombs, what would have happened if they hadn't and reveals that the Manhattan Project was actually more about impressing Stalin than destroying Japan.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The night of the 5th to the 6th of August 1945 had been a night of sirens in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, but by 0700 the all clear had been sounded. Around an hour after those sirens had quieted, the American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, began its bomb run over the city. At 8.15, the aircraft's bombardier released one bomb from an altitude of 31,000 feet. In the months previous, Japan had been incinerated by tons of bombs, dropped in huge numbers by vast fleets of American bombers. But on this day, on the 6th of August, this single bomb would do the damage of thousands

of conventional bombs, because this was an atomic weapon. Inside the casing of that bomb was not high explosives, but 64 kilograms of uranium-235. It took less than a minute for that bomb to travel from 31,000 feet to 600 meters above the city streets where it detonated. A nuclear reaction then took place. Neutrons crashed into the nuclei of uranium atoms, causing a fission chain reaction. More neutrons splitting more and more atoms. Unimaginable energy was unleashed, and with it, enormous destruction. The largest bomb ever dropped in history to that point had had the blast equivalent to 6.5 tonnes of TNT. This bomb had an explosive force equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT.

On the ground, survivors remember seeing a brilliant flash of light, Then a very loud boom. In a second, an area like a circle with a diameter around two miles was completely destroyed. Buildings were levelled. A few bits of twisted superstructure remained. And after that initial blast, there came the firestorm. Hiroshima's paper and wooden houses were consumed in a blaze that sent giant clouds soaring up into the atmosphere. Around one in three people in the city were killed. 70, 80,000 people, it's impossible to be certain. They were killed by the initial explosion, they were killed in the firestorm, and they were killed by radiation poisoning in the weeks and months that followed.

Tens of thousands more were injured and made homeless. Something like three quarters of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed or damaged. Nearly every single doctor and nurse in Hiroshima was killed or injured. Most had been at work in the downtown area. One doctor is famous, Terufumi Sasaka. He remained on duty at the Red Cross Hospital, but faced an insurmountable challenge. Survivors were stigmatized, some say even to this day, even those very few who are still alive. They're known as the Hipapsha, and I've been lucky enough to meet several of them. I've interviewed them on this podcast.

They've told me how they face prejudice in work, difficulties in finding a partner, for decades after the strike. after the strike. In this episode, I'm going to ask why the Americans dropped that atomic bomb on a Russian and why they dropped another one on the city of Nagasaki a few days later. The Americans had spent a huge amount of money on the Manhattan Project, this vast scientific and engineering endeavour to develop the most powerful weapon in history. It had done so because there was very real fear that Germany might win the race to develop the most powerful weapon in history. It had done so because there was very real fear that Germany might win the race to develop the weapon itself. And nuclear-armed Nazi Germany was a terrifying prospect. Thankfully, we now know the Germans were nowhere near building a bomb

and Germany surrendered in May 1945. But Japan remained undefeated and the attention of people involved in the atomic weapons program turned to the war in the Pacific. The decision to use not just one bomb but two bombs has caused enormous debate and discussion, study and some condemnation in the decades that have followed, was it really necessary to get Japan to surrender? Were they primarily aimed not at Japan, but as a way of signalling to Stalin the need to stay in his lane? Would nuclear weapons have been used at some time in the future if they hadn't been used in Japan? Would they have been used in Korea? Would they have been used in Vietnam or elsewhere? To help point me at the answer to some of these questions, tell me, think about some of

these debates. I've got Professor Paul Post on the podcast. He's Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. And he's going to talk me through how this debate is still evolving as more and more evidence is uncovered by historians and I think the attitude of different generations means that we've shifted the assumptions and the questions that historians are now asking. I'm doing this pod partly in response to the release of the film Oppenheimer which has caused a surge of requests and questions on the History Hit website and social channels. So I hope this helps to answer some of those queries. Here's Professor Paul Post. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Paul, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me on. Paint me a picture. Where are we? It's summer, June, July 1945.

The extraordinary American Pacific fleet is pushing slowly towards the Japanese home islands, meeting great resistance. What is the thinking about how you're finally going to defeat Japan? So this is really the big question. And obviously, we're having this conversation because there's been a lot of discussion about this very idea over the past several days because of the release of the movie Oppenheimer. And I think it's brought to the fold for a lot of people kind of the necessity, if you will, of using the atomic bombs at the end of World War II. And it goes directly to this question of how exactly, or at least what was the thinking within the U.S. administration, within the

military establishment, as well as, say, with President Truman himself, what was the thinking about how to go about bringing the end of the war? And I think there's a few pieces of context that are worth keeping in mind. The first one is that we can elaborate more on this as we go along, is there was never really a decision to drop the atomic bomb. There was never really a decision to do that. And that's a point that a lot of historians who study this will point out. Alex Wellerstein, who's done a lot of research on this, he will point that out many times that a lot of there's a common narrative that there was a decision, there was kind of this wane of, you know, how many casualties would there be if there was an invasion versus this? And it was never like that. It was never like that. Instead, the thinking going on was, number one, there was a recognition that Japan wasn't going to win. That was never really a question. There was not a

question by the time you're in late or mid-1945. There wasn't a question about Japan being able to win the war. And even Japan themselves, the Japanese government recognized that as well. The question was, how could you end it and at what cost and when? And so that's where then they started to think about what were the various things that would need to go into actually inducing Japan to surrender. And there were several things that were recognized that were going to go into this. There was strategic bombing of Japanese cities with conventional bombs, conventional armaments, firebombing, for example, going on for a long time leading up to the actual drop in atomic bombs. So that was going to need to continue. Number two was a recognition that the Soviet Union was going to be opening up a second front. And that was something that had been agreed to previously.

It was just a matter of waiting for when that would happen. That was expected to happen around mid-August of 1945, was when the Soviets would open up a second front by invading through Manchuria. We should say, Paul, at that point, the Soviets, the Allies in the war against Hitler, the Soviets and the Japanese were not at war with each other, were they at that point? Even though they abutted against each other in Manchuria, what we could call Northern China now, and the Americans were sure that the Soviets were going to come, Stalin was going to join the Pacific War. Yes, exactly right, that the Soviets at that point, the Soviets had been concentrating all of their effort on Nazi Germany, and indeed had conducted most of the heavy fighting against Nazi Germany. You know, it was the U.S. and the

British who opened up a second front against Nazi Germany, but it was the Soviets who were fighting the primary front. Well, as that was winding down, the roles were supposed to reverse, which is now the U.S. had been conducting the primary front against the Japanese, and now it was going to be time for the Soviets to be able to enter the war. Now, there's this idea of maybe the Soviets wouldn't. You know, there's always this notion that the U.S. and the British and the Soviets were allies, but they weren't friends. They were, you know, allies of convenience, if you will. I think it was Churchill that said, I would follow the devil into hell if it will help me to defeat Hitler. Right. And so they did not necessarily trust each other. However, as you pointed out, the Soviets were no friends to the Japanese.

They had actually fought an earlier war in some cases that kind of the conflict between them in the late 1930s was considered kind of a precursor to World War II, though it was a much smaller battle. And that also took place in Manchuria. Of course, you can go further back to before the Soviet Union, you could go to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905. So there wasn't really a question about that the Soviets would have an incentive to want to eventually open up that front against the Japanese. It was really just a matter of timing and when that would happen. And in fact, if anything, there was more of a concern of to what extent would the Soviets try to cooperate and coordinate with the United States and the British when it came to opening up that second front? To what extent would they say try to

acquire as many spoils as possible and try to shut out the United States in that effort? So that was really a big concern. But nevertheless, the more immediate idea was that was going to be part of a package of things that was going to help to bring about the end of this war. And then the final component of that was the dropping of the atomic bombs themselves. And we can go more into the specifics about that and about like, well, how many did they have? Did they expect to drop more? So on and so forth. But that was being prepared. Troops were already being sent for it. There were casualty assessments being done. There was a lot of debate about what those assessments would entail. There was some revising of that even after the war to kind of show that maybe they were higher than expected. Some estimates put expected U. if it's somewhere between a million

and 100,000, that's still a large number. So that was another part of this, but that was going to take time. And the more immediate things were going to be the continuation of the bombing, the usage of the atomic bombs, and then also the Soviets opening up their front. And so those were the things that were on the table in the summer of 1945. Was there much debate around the use of those atomic bombs? Or were they seen now as just another tool in the arsenal? We've seen all sorts of extraordinary weapons taken from the drawing board and used on the battlefield through the 20th century at that point, poison gas of World War I, extraordinarily powerful conventional bombs, firebombs that you've mentioned that were striking the Japanese cities.

Was there an awareness at the time that anyone's going to go, hang on, this is a different level, we need to take some time, we need to talk to some philosophers about this, what's going on here? There was a recognition that this was a special type of weapon. I mean, that's the very idea motivating the Manhattan Project to actually develop this bomb was that this would be the ultimate weapon. And that's why there was a fear about Germany being able to develop it first. That's the quote that's used by Robert Furman. I think I even shared that at one point about Furman was in charge of like intelligence, foreign intelligence

for the Manhattan Project. And he said Manhattan Project was driven by fear. And why was there fear? Because there was a recognition that an atomic weapon would be an ultimate form of weaponry, would be kind of the, as famously said by Oppenheimer himself, you know, the bringer of death. So I do think that there was a recognition. Having said that, was there yet the notion of kind of an ethics around it, right? And today we refer to that ethics that's been built around it as the nuclear taboo, which is just the idea that you just shouldn't even give consideration to the use of this type of weapon. And that wasn't yet developed. It was recognized that this would be the ultimate weapon that would be very

powerful, but it was not yet at the point of saying, and therefore it shouldn't be used. Instead, it was a matter of thinking, this is the ultimate weapon. It should be used because of the fact that it's the ultimate weapon. And it should be used in the context of the fact that we're fighting this war. It also should be used in a political context. And what I mean by political here is in a few levels, both an international level and a domestic level. Domestically, if there's knowledge that the U.S. has this weapon and it's found out that the U.S. has this weapon and instead the U.S. chooses not to use that weapon and opts instead to invade Japan,

what are the domestic political consequences of that, right? What happens when voters say, wait, you had this ultimate weapon that could have ended the war and you instead sent my son to Japan to die, right? That would be a key political consideration that kind of fed into this notion of, well, of course, we're going to use whatever we have at our disposal. There was also the international element to it as well, which is that there was a recognition that this was a powerful weapon, and it was important for the United States to be able to demonstrate the power of this weapon. Now, to what extent did that fully feed into the decision to use the bomb? I think it was a consideration at the time of many of the decision makers. It was one of the things that was on the table. It was one of the ideas was that, hey, this would send a message to the Soviets, this would send a message to other countries that we have this bomb and the

destructive power of it. It wasn't the sole factor, but that's another one of the things that kind of fed into the idea that, yes, this is the ultimate weapon, but it should be used. Speaking of the decision, you talk about the decision making around dropping the bomb. Truman was quite clear throughout, was he, that this was not going to be devolved to like an army level or a fleet level commander. This was, as you say, it's a political weapon. Any decision to drop the bomb has to come from Truman's pen itself. Yeah, so the idea here, and this is another one that there's a lot of like discussion amongst historians that go into this, here, and this is another one that there's a lot of like discussion amongst historians that go into this, is that there was never like a National Security Council meeting where Truman sits down

and says, okay, I'm authorizing this. You know, it wasn't the same as I think a lot of people think about the Osama bin Laden raid. When Barack Obama back in 2011 had a meeting, he hears the intelligence, and then he makes a decision, we are going to launch this raid, right? And there was a lot of risk about that support. That's how that went down. And that, and I think in a lot of people's minds, is how these consequential decisions are made, is you're in a meeting, and then I'm going to make this decision, and I'm going to go with the consequences of that decision. That never really happened with the atomic bombs. There was instead a series of

decisions, as historians have pointed out. It was kind of always given that if we could develop this, it would end up being used. And so there was definitely input by Truman. Once he became president, he was kind of kept in the dark about it until he actually became president. But there was never a moment where Truman said, all right, I am authorizing the use of this. And now here's the order. Okay, the Enola Gay can now take off and fly and bomb this. Instead, the consequential decisions that Truman made were more of the negative decisions. What do I mean by that? He did sign off on changing the targets. And this is something that's actually depicted in the movie, though, as many people pointed out inaccurately, was that Kyoto was actually held out often as a target,

but it was constantly removed from the list because of the fact that Kyoto is so culturally significant to Japan that would dramatically complicate post-war relations between the US and Japanese if they bombed Kyoto. And so they kept trying to put that back on the target list. And finally, Truman was the one that stepped in and said, no, this can't be on the target list. So it was in that negative sense that he was involved. And then also he was involved in the decision to say, okay, two is enough. We're not going to drop a third one. Of course, there's always things like we don't yet have a third one ready, but the two is enough. So he did step in to make the call to say, okay, we've dropped enough. He wasn't involved in this decision to say, okay, I'm picking up the phone.

I'm meeting with my cabinet. We are now making this decision. I'm picking it, and now I'm going to make the call, and the plane is going to take off. It didn't unfold in that way. So the bomb was invented, and it was moved into theatre, into the Western Pacific, and that developed a momentum of its own. The assumed end point of that process was going to be that it would be used in battle. Yes, the assumed end point was that it was going to be used. It was just more of a matter of when and how. I have not yet had the opportunity to watch

the movie Oppenheimer, but I have read the book, American Prometheus, that the movie is based on. And in that Oppenheimer talks about how when he finally got word of the use at Hiroshima, his first reaction was actually relief because he was worried it was going to be a dud. He was worried that it just wasn't going to work and that would look poorly. Because he was worried it was going to be a dud. He was worried that it just wasn't going to work and that would look poorly. Then upon further reflection, he started to realize, well, wait a minute. OK, that's he kind of had two emotions at once. It's like, OK, I'm glad that wasn't a dud. It actually worked. But on the other hand, now starting to think about what happened to the people on which this was used. Right. And so then that starts to lead to these conflicting emotions.

But the idea that it was going to be moved into theater, it was going to be used at some point, that was never really questioned. It was definitely debated. And so I don't think it's accurate to say that nobody gave any consideration at all to not using it, especially not using it on a civilian location. I think that there was debate about should we do a demonstration, a kind of a public demonstration. You know, the Trinity test had happened. And of course, but that was for that was internal consumption, if you will. Right. It wasn't set up to display to Japan, look at the destructive power of this weapon. Right. This is what will come to you if you don't surrender. There was consideration to that. And ultimately, that was just not the path that was pursued. Going back to what we were just talking about, there was never really a

decision. It was just a decision that was made that a demonstration bombing is not what's going to be done. And so that kind of, again, feeds into the idea that there was always an intent that these bombs were going to be used in actual warfare. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week, every every week as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the ones shaping our future we talk to award-winning

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from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned that Japanese couldn't win by the summer of 1945, and even in Japan, that was seen to be true. What was the Japanese government trying to do? Was it trying to surrender? Was it trying to negotiate its way out of utter defeat? Did the dropping of the bomb sort of curtail those potential moves towards, well, a less bloody surrender? moves towards, well, a less bloody surrender. This is another point of debate amongst historians. And I think that's part of the reason why these discussions keep going on is because over the past decades, as more information has been revealed, we've learned more about both the decision making within the Truman administration, which we've been talking about, but also the decision-making within the Japanese government. And the more we learn, yes, we do clarify some things, but it still leaves open a lot of questions. And one of the key questions is what you're pointing at, which is that, well, what were they holding out for? What was the hope? And there was kind of a combination of factors. First of all, there was not consensus within the war cabinet about the course of the war in terms of surrendering or not.

That was one thing. It was just simply different factions. There was even a coup attempt that happened in August of that year. There was a variety of infighting happening. Number one. Number two, there was also a belief that the Soviets, though there was fear about them entering the war, there was hope that they may actually step in and help broker some sort of peace settlement. And that was viewed as something that potentially could be preferable

to just a straight out surrender, because then you would be in a position to negotiate terms. This feeds into another one of the debates that a lot of historians have, which is the status of what we call unconditional surrender, right? That was what the U.S. had said, was that Japan can only surrender under unconditional surrender. And there's been a lot of debate about, did that actually contribute to this debate within the Japanese cabinet about continuing to fight? Well, since it's unconditional surrender, we have to keep fighting because we have no room for bargaining, right? And there's still debate amongst historians.

There are some historians who will say, yes, that was indeed the case. There's others who say, no, there was an understanding that there could be conditions. And indeed, there were conditions, right? Eventually, they did allow, the U.S. government did allow the emperor to remain and maintain his status. So but again, these are all things where it's there's nothing definitive. There is more evidence on one side or the other. But what it shows is that there was at least a recognition that Japan couldn't win. The question was, under what conditions could they surrender And could it be under conditions where they could actually end up with a favorable outcome? And what's interesting is we're seeing these similar

debates happening today with the war in Ukraine, right? There's a lot of discussions about the thinking by Putin and within his government and Putin himself about the conditions under which he can end the war. And I've been saying this in various outlets that Russia can't win this war, but they don't have to lose it. And so what do I mean by that is they could still end up with an outcome where they gain territory. And that would actually, in a way, be a form of victory. It might be a period victory, but it'd be a form of victory.

Well, you could look at the Japanese government at the time. There was definitely a sentiment within the government by certain individuals that that could also happen. Maybe the Soviets could step in and broker something and we end up with some sort of beneficial outcome, at least some sort of gains from this, even though we can't win. And so the timing of the first atomic strike, just listening to you, I'm wondering if it was just the timing dictated by logistics. It was the time it took for the infamous USS Indianapolis to deliver pieces of the bomb to the requisite airfield on the right island and it to be assembled. And it was that what determines the decision making around, even just tactically

around that flight taking off and that bomb dropping? Yes. I don't think there's anything necessarily like special about the dates and about the time, right? That really it was a matter of you have the Trinity test, which takes place July 16th, 1945. And so then it's like, okay, we tested it, it works.

So it's just a few weeks later now that we'll start putting it into field and deploying it, right? So whether it's August 9th or August 15th or August 2nd, it's just a matter of getting it there, getting it into theater and then actually deploying it. So there was nothing special about it in that sense. That also helps explain the time of not just the first bomb, but the second, right? It was just three days later. And there wasn't really even time to like process what had happened, right? They dropped it, it was used, and it took time for information to start coming in about the effect. It even took time for the Japanese government to process what was happening. And there was no like allotment for

that time to happen. It was like, okay, we've got a second one now. So now we're going to drop that one and we're going to use it, right? And of course, it was even dropped on a secondary target because it's just, that's what you do. That's what we've been ordered to do. And that's how we're going to utilize this. So it was really just a matter of once the bomb was shown to be able to work through the Trinity test, then it's like, okay, let's go ahead. Let's start deploying this and let's utilize it. And so that's truly what happened. It is striking, isn't it, that the second strike comes so fast. There was no sense of, hey, let's deploy this most extraordinary weapon ever existed by human beings and just give people a time to kind of process it. It was fascinating that that second strike took place. And now again, is that determined by we've got two bombs, we're going to use two bombs?

Or is it determined by a generation of military officials who believed in hitting the enemy as hard as you can with everything you've got? It does seem curious that there wasn't time given to go, hey guys, you've seen what we've got now. You want to think very long and hard about surrendering? It's really an excellent question. And it feeds into the idea that, look, it's a weapon, we have it, we're going to use it, right? And that was the procedure. Like we have this weapon, we've developed it, our mission is to now utilize it. And that is also part of the evidence that lends towards, say, that argument for the usage of the bomb versus the demonstration effect argument, right? And this is also part of the evidence that lends towards, say, that argument for the usage of the bomb versus the demonstration effect argument, right? And this is the argument that the primary motivation for using the atomic bomb was to send a message to the Soviets, right?

That it was really kind of viewing not so much about the war, but about the post-war. Right. We should say this is one of the big, I don't know, is it a critique or this is one of the, when people are trying to be smart, they talk about, of course, the Japanese weren't the intended target anyway. They were just, they were in the way. And it was actually all about scaring Stalin and constructing a post-war architecture and balance of power. You said it very well. That's exactly this argument, that it really had nothing to do with Japan. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. Anyhow, there was no need to drop this bomb. And so it was solely done for the purpose of this demonstration effect towards the Soviets. That's the notion of this kind of revisionist argument.

This dropping of the second bomb, I think, is one of the key pieces of evidence that leads to that not being the case. Right. Because if it was just about demonstration, then you would demonstrate it and it very well, Hiroshima showed it. Then you allow time for processing that, you talk it up, and you do that for the purpose of sending this message. But the fact that you immediately followed up with another bomb kind of suggests that it's more of a standard operating procedure explanation, which is just, we have this bomb, we're going to use it. Now, having said that, what has given credence, and I've already touched on this a little bit, what has given credence to that revisionist argument is the fact that there were individuals in the U.S. government who had that view. So about the demonstration effect, that there was kind of this notion that this could send a message to the Soviets, right? that this could send a message to the Soviets, right?

You know, it's well known that Truman made it a point when he heard about the Trinity test of like communicating this to Stalin, right? Hey, we just tested this. This is something that leads to giving credence to that argument. But the problem, again, with that argument is that if it was truly just for that, if that was the primary motivation for doing this, then you wouldn't have seen the immediate follow up with the second one. And you would have seen, I would say, you would have seen a lot more effort to kind of play up the demonstration effect. And that just wasn't the case. So Truman, it's amazing to me. So he never kind of signed off. Okay, let's go number two right now.

Thank you very much. This was like an operational decision that was taken in theater. Yes, operational decision. And I mean, again, Truman was aware of this. And Truman obviously was part of this decision-making process to utilize the bombs. But again, it was never a situation where there was like a decision made. Astonishingly, we should keep talking about the Soviets' role. The Hiroshima bomb was dropped on the 6th. The Soviets did indeed invade the Japanese territory in North China, in Manchuria,

declared war on Japan on the 7th of August, and then the second bomb was dropped on the 9th. I mean, that is, I can't think of any nation on earth that's ever had to deal with three hammer blows like that in the space of a week. This is also part of why there's so much debate over the decades about why exactly did Japan surrender, right? I mean, some people have gone as far as to say that they really surrendered because of the Soviets. It had nothing to do with the atomic bombs. There's other arguments, and I think very credible arguments, that the dropping of the atomic bombs affected the timing. I mentioned very briefly earlier that the plan for the Soviet operation for their invasion to Manchuria was to come in around mid-August.

And so around August 15th. And that got sped up, right? And I think a big reason why that got sped up was because of the dropping of the atomic bomb. It led to, okay, let's start this process. And so a lot of historians have pointed to that now as one of the effects that kind of sped up this process. Then you followed up with the other atomic bomb, and that's kind of the things that were being weighed by the cabinet. Now, again, over the years, we've seen the historiography go back and forth on this. Some saying fully that it's really about the Soviets and the atomic bombs were irrelevant. Others saying the atomic bombs affected timing or that the atomic bombs were even the key factor. One of the things that really, I think, to me, puts more weight on the Soviet factor is the fact that if you look at the damage

that had been done to cities in Japan by conventional bombing, there were a number of cities that actually experienced a higher percentage of destruction than what was caused on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was not enough to actually cause them to surrender. Now, of course, the big difference is that, say, cities that were devastated by conventional bombing, that would have occurred over a series of weeks, firebombing and so forth, as opposed to one fell swoop, one blow from an atomic weapon. But it leads you to say that there seemed to be a very high tolerance level on the part of the Japanese government to incur this kind of damage. But that the key thing that was new, totally new information was now the Soviets invading through Manchuria and kind of the position that that now put

Japan in. It caused a few things. First of all, from the perception of the military establishment, they believed that their best troops were in Manchuria and they were getting overrun very quickly by the Soviets. So the idea was that, well, gee, if our best troops can't hold out there, there's no way we can bring them to the homeland. They're not going to be able to hold out if the U.S. actually invades. So that was one way in which it caused new information was that, okay, maybe our best troops can't hold up as well as expected.

The other way in which it caused new information was just the idea that Japan, I mean, if you look at the history, Japan and the United States have actually had a very good history, right, in terms of cooperating, working together, as I often describe to students that they viewed each other as the two rising non-European great powers in the early part of the 20th century. In contrast, Japan did not have good relations at all with Russia and then the Soviet Union. So it's kind of like if you're going to surrender to somebody, it's better to surrender to the Americans than to surrender to the Soviets. And so for me, I do think that the evidence comes down more on the Soviet invasion. And I think that if you played out the counterfactual, where the atomic bombs were dropped by themselves,

and you do not have the Soviet invasion at the same time, I don't think Japan surrenders right away in August of 1945. Interesting. Why was there not a third bomb? So part of it is that the US didn't have a third bomb ready in theater to be able to do this. And it was going to take a little bit of time to have a third bomb ready. But a more important factor, I think, is the fact that Truman himself actually stepped in and indeed made a decision to halt the bombing. He made that decision on August 10th. Now, it was temporary. He didn't say like, that's it.

You know, I've had an epiphany and this is immoral and we shouldn't be doing this anymore. It was more of like, at this point, it's important that we stop because it is quite devastating. And I think then it was kind of lead is like, let's now allow this process to play out. Let's allow this to get both informed by the Japanese government, but let's give ourselves time to actually process what's happened. So I think that that's to me that political decision by Truman on August 10th to say, okay, we don't need to drop another one right now, even if there is another one ready. I think that's more consequential. And then, of course, then there wasn't time. Then Japan ends up surrendering, and now we don't have it. Now, if Japan doesn't surrender, if we go into September,

does Truman say, all right, well, we've got a third one ready. Let's do it. That's a counterfactual we'd have to think through. But in that moment, in the history that unfolded, Truman made that decision to say, okay, two's enough for now. They're destructive enough. He is very aware of the destruction it was causing, the deaths it was causing. And so we should pause on this for now. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's interesting, Paul, this idea, I just want to quickly return to that part of the decision making was around signaling to the Soviet Union with an eye on the post-war settlement. There's a few points to keep in mind. Number one, there was already a lot of thinking about the post-war situation, right? This was part of Potsdam. This was part of Yalta. These conferences were about establishing what the post-war order was going to look like, dividing up Germany, for example, what to do with the territories that Japan had taken over. There was also, of course, the Bretton Woods Conference,

right, 1944. And that was about what's the post-war economic situation going to look like. And that's where they came up with the IMF and the World Bank and so forth. So there was this wartime planning going on. There was this planning already happening by the Allies. The Soviets were at Bretton Woods. They were all involved in this process. There was already a lot of thinking going towards the post-war situation. And the reason why is because it was recognized really by 1943 that the Allies were going to win the war. It was just a matter of when would they win the war and at what cost would they win the war. But they recognized that Germany couldn't win the war. They recognized Japan couldn't win the war.

In fact, there was never really a concern that Japan would win the Pacific War per se, because that's part of why when the U.S. even entered the war through an agreement with Britain, they had what they called the Germany First Policy. And this was even terms that were set even before the U.S. entered the war was this idea that we're going to focus on Germany first because they're the bigger threat. Japan is not as big of a threat as Germany, especially to world order and so forth. So once it became clear that Germany was going to be defeated, it was just more of a matter of what's it going to look like once they're defeated? How far are the Soviets going to go? Can we occupy them? Can we establish a situation that doesn't lead to a

new war happening? So those things were already on the table in 43, 44, 45. So in that sense, it would make sense that they would also be thinking about, OK, well, how do we end this war and end it in a way that sets up the post-war world? And that is something that does give some validity to that demonstration argument towards the Soviets. Hey, we have this power. So keep that in mind when you're bargaining with us. Keep that in mind if you think you're going to go back on some of these deals that we've reached, right? That we have this power. So I do think that there's some validity to that, though it is something that it leads to the, if you will, amoral nature of international politics, right? Is to put that type of consideration and then weigh that against the death and destruction that was caused by those bombs, that is something that

is very hard to process. And it's part of the reason why I often say to people that world politics is really the dismal science, right? We also call economics the dismal science, but it's really world politics is the dismal science. Stalin's making rueful jokes about not getting as far as Paris like Tsar Alexander had, and he's reoccupying parts of the Baltics and parts of Eastern Poland that he occupied when he was in league with Hitler in 1939. I think you can justify this deterrent effect in terms of trying to contain Stalin after the war. We should say, you mentioned the regaining the nuclear taboo. That's something that

seems to be unarguable. Thankfully, it has not been nuclear weapons used since. There were calls for them during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. I showed once about Khe Sanh. There was a suggestion in the Johnson White House that it might be appropriate for a nuclear weapon to be used there to relieve that siege. Do you think that an important legacy of those two atomic strikes is that they haven't been used since? Is it more likely, had those two not happened, that a nuclear attack would have happened somewhere on the planet on another occasion? I think so. I think so. And this is where, you know, thinking through counterfactual history is hard, right? We can't replay history. We can't replay history without the dropping of the atomic bombs to then say, oh, well, if it hadn't been on Japan, it would have been in Korea, for example, or would have been somewhere else.

It may have even happened in Europe, if you will, that this bomb could have been used. Right. And of course, there were a lot of near misses during the Cold War where that could have happened. And we can think about the Cuban Missile Crisis and about the stakes of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Would the perceived stakes of the Cuban Missile Crisis have been very different if there wasn't the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? These are very difficult, very difficult counterfactuals to try to think through. But I do think that that is one of the legacies of it, that the knowledge that was gained by the destruction that could not have been achieved by just simply a test, a demonstration. I think it required not just the official reports, but then the later journalistic

reports of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I think started to create this notion of this is just an unacceptable weapon and it shouldn't be used again. Now, having said that, did it truly rise to the level of a taboo? I don't know, because when we say taboo, what we're typically talking about is that it just isn't even given consideration. It's just immoral to even consider it. And that's not the case. Right. That is not the case. Even U.S. military doctrine, nuclear doctrine, wasn't based on the idea that it was inconceivable to use nuclear weapons. Right. That is not the case. Even U.S. military doctrine, nuclear doctrine wasn't based on the idea that it was inconceivable to use nuclear weapons. Right. In fact, today, our nuclear doctrine is launch on warning, not launch on strike. Right. That it's like if there is a credible warning that we are under attack, the president can have the authorization to actually launch nuclear weapons.

That is not a taboo situation. Taboo means that it is just inconceivable to even try to use these weapons. But what is absolute fact is that these weapons have not been used in war. And that's a key thing. They've obviously been tested. And that was a whole other point of controversy we could get into is about where they were tested, how they were tested. But being used in warfare, they haven't been since they were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that is part of the evidence that

leads to this notion that there is some sort of taboo against their use. Paul, long may that taboo last. It's been feeling a little bit shaky over the last year and a half. So we will see. We will see. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about that momentous month in 1945. Thank you so much for having me on. you