Both good threads, but with due respect to @wellerstein - whose work I admire - @baseballcrank is correct. Alex’s view seems rooted in old-school Cold War revisionism.https://twitter.com/EsotericCD/status/1027732601098981377 …
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And for what it is worth — I don't consider myself a "revisionist" in the sense you mean; e.g., the Gar Alperovitz sense of things. That view has many flaws in it. I think J. Samuel Walker's "consensus" view is basically about right.http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/ …
Walker (the former official historian of the NRC, so not exactly your leftist academic, eh) essentially synthesizes the best of the "orthodox" and "revisionist" views into an appropriately messy soup that seems like the kind of thing actual human beings would do.
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(Because both the "orthodox" and "revisionist" extremes make the historical actors WAY too rational, strategic, and clairvoyant in their aims. Which I think anyone who has looked closely at gov't decision-making knows it isn't how it has ever worked in real life.)
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The only "revision" I myself make to this topic (forthcoming article alert!) is about Truman's own understanding of what he did, which I think is more limited than scholars have tended to argue (I think he misunderstood the nature of the Kyoto vs. Hiroshima choice). Anyway. FIN.
End of conversation
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