What's the source? I'm going to put this in my lecture slides and I'd like to attribute it
A poll of Americans from November 1945 showed that nearly a quarter wished that there was time to drop "many more" atomic bombs on Japan prior to surrender. Fascinating for a lot of reasons, including the way it pushes against the narrative of "only used it to get surrender."pic.twitter.com/axZyBnQyhM
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Hazel Gaudet Erskine, "The Polls: Atomic Weapons and Nuclear Energy," Public Opinion Quarterly 27, no. 2 (Summer 1963), 155-190. Lots of interesting poll data from a variety of sources and time periods is compiled in the article.
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Thanks a million!
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If Truman didn’t actively put a hold on dropping them, how many more possibly could have we dropped? One, two...
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Another on August 18 or so. Around three or four more per month after that. Maybe more if they developed composite cores.
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Interesting that no question frames an option as "military targets," but clearly says "cities." More evidence that these were always meant to be city destroyers targeting civilians?
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I think it's just evidence of the limited imagination of the pollsters.
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. . . it pushes against the narrative of "only used it to get surrender." It's not like the people polled had any input into the decision.
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I think you're misunderstanding my point — I'm saying it is interesting because it shows that the popular understanding of the bombs diverged in an interesting way from the official rationale. For a large % of Americans, they were vengeance weapons.
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Is there any record of who the people who were polled were?
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It's a national poll by Forbes.
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Okie dokie. Just curious if the population of the poll was skewed one way or the other.
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Finding this in the August 1945 PopSci has stuck with me; it's no poll data but the idea of using wmd of any kind as a vengeance weapon was already therehttps://books.google.com/books?id=GSEDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA6&dq=should%20we%20gas%20popular%20science%201945&pg=PA50-IA15#v=onepage&q&f=true …
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(that the author had written "Japan will never attack pearl harbor" in 1938 and was still getting paid for war predictions shows the discourse has always been bad)https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/archives-debating-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-bombings …
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A lost cause-esque history rewrite. We sure don’t like our warts.
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stimson controlled the a-bombs and truman was the worst president in modern history until trump. "give em hell harry" started the national security state, the cia, the cold war, and endless war ever since i agree with stalin that FDR was probably assassinated by "churchill gang"
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Murdering all the Japanese you could get your hands on was a pretty common position back then.
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Revenge and fear are powerful emotions.
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Given the narrative the two bomb as we did option will clearly be the favorite. In reality the top japanese officials hadn't confirmed what happened (or just had) when the second bomb flew but weather conditions pushed back the first bomb and forward the second. Still a hard call
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