Alex WellersteinVerified account

One of the difficulties in talking with Americans in particular about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that many of them have, at best, a half-remembered high-school version of that history in their head, and the subject is typically not covered well in high school.

I think one thing too often overlooked is that Hiroshima came after six years of war (if you star counting in Sept. 1939) in which, at a minimum, 40 million people had died, half of them civilians. (True count probably more like 60 million.)

Dresden and Hamburg had been destroyed in firestorms that killed tens of thousands. All sorts of horrors had happened, especially in Eastern Europe and China. That level of killing has got to inure you to the prospect of leveling a Japanese city or two in order to end the war.

Pointing to supposed Japanese interest in a negotiated settlement ignores the lesson drawn from Germany. The Nazis fought to the bitter end, long after they knew the war was lost. Some German leaders still fantasized making peace with the allies & then jointly taking on the USSR

The lesson policy makers would have drawn from Germany’s end was that it was likely Japan would also fight on, at the cost of millions more dead without some enormous “shock” like an A-bomb.

Truman said the American people would not understand or forgive him if he had the chance to save the lives of millions of American boys by dropping the bomb and didn’t take it. I see no reason not to believe that’s what he truly thought.

The narrative of saving lives (and "millions" is an overstatement by Truman) did not arise until well after the fact. Not how they talked about it at the time. It is very important (and tricky) to sort out the after-the-fact justifications from motivations at time.

And on parallels to Germany — the policy experts and folks who had Truman's ear were keen to emphasize that Japan was *not* Germany. Very different considerations, militarily, diplomatic, politically, and culturally. They were very aware of this, for all their faults.