Alex WellersteinVerified account

I'm not trying to imply that these were bad motivations or good motivations, as an aside. Even the one that is often trotted out as the "bad" motivation (show the Soviets who is boss, which Byrnes definitely expressed), is, as part of other motivations, not necessarily terrible.

Separately, the goal of my Tweetstorm was to emphasize instead of seeing it as "bomb versus invade," the real question is "bomb 2 cities with 2 bombs in 3 days versus a lot of possibilities." The *specifics* of what occurred were not dictated by strategy, and

those specifics matter in terms of human impact, perception, etc. (The thread is not really about whether the bombs should have been dropped, but contextualizing historical discussions about whether the *second bomb* in particular was strictly necessary, etc.)

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.

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.

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.