2. You're repeating the old "bombs versus invasion" line — and one of my points (and every scholar in the last 15-20 years?) is that this wasn't actually the choice as anyone saw it in 1945. That's an after-the-fact justification, one cooked up only after the bombs "worked."
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And not (to reiterate) because I think that one or the other was better, but rather to stimulate historical engagement beyond the simple "should they have dropped the bomb" story that most people know, which utterly lacks important nuance and is misleading.
3. You have, I think, overgeneralized the US attitudes towards bombing (conventional and atomic) at the top. There were several conflicting views. Again, Stimson is useful for demonstrating this — he clearly thought the area bombing in Japan was verging on war-crime territory.
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He told Truman they were going to get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities — a pretty big statement to make to your boss, the President! I emphasize this because the "flattening" of historical attitudes into "everyone thought it was morally unproblematic" is wrong.
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And by that I mean, demonstrably historically incorrect, a curious anachronism of its own, again as a way to dodge the question in the present day. Stimson (who exerted a lot of influence on the bombing decisions) *clearly* felt the atomic bomb presented new moral questions.
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Truman himself *clearly* indicated, especially in the early postwar, that the atomic bomb presented severe moral hazards. That doesn't mean that they decided not to use it, obviously. But it does mean that we can't just wave it away as "this is how people thought in WWII."
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4. Lastly — the reason to focus on the high-level discussions (which did, at times, explicitly reference popular opinion) is because these people made the decisions. It is important to focus on which decisions were made, and which were not, which is part of my overall point.
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Decisions not made by Truman: whether or not to use the bomb. That was already in motion, clearly, and there was no question by anyone that Truman would intervene. Unsurprisingly, he didn't. The focus on that "decision" is, historians have known for a long time now, misplaced.
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Decisions actually made by Truman: 1. Whether to tell Stalin much about the bomb (no). 2. Whether to modify unconditional surrender (no). 3. Whether the city of Kyoto should be bombed (no). 4. Whether to continue bombing after Nagasaki (no).
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And I appreciate the constructive engagement here. My core point is that we have to resist the temptation to frame this in chessboard terms. There was history, old & recent, at work, & visceral reactions that were hardly irrational.
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I'm not trying to frame it in chessboard terms, to be sure, but I would argue much more of it was non-rational (as opposed to irrational) than either the "orthodox" or "revisionist" versions acknowledge. It's messy. Some things were conscious decisions and many things were not.
End of conversation
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