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This was the same meeting where they decided to put forward an offer of conditional surrender (which the US rejected). There isn't any evidence that the Nagasaki attack changed anyone's point of view in that room.
Absence of evidence is not absence of effect, but it clearly wasn't a crucial part of it. The idea that the Japanese didn't believe that the US had more atomic bombs is mostly untrue. If Nagasaki hadn't happened, it seems likely that little would have changed regarding surrender.
This is why many people who have studied it have found Nagasaki not that justifiable. Ted Telford, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, concluded that had had "never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki."
I think one can come up with "plausible justifications" for Hiroshima, even if they are debatable. Nagasaki is definitely a trickier moral issue, if your concern is with not slaughtering masses of civilians unnecessarily.
(If your argument is, "the Japanese [people] were evil and deserved it," then clearly the issue of plausible justification isn't an issue for you. I always get many replies to this effect.)
(I understand where they are coming from, especially from people who are from countries brutalized by the Japanese military. I don't think that justifies targeting children, as I've written on here before. But I understand it.)
Anyway, the most important consequence of Nagasaki, in my opinion, was that it greatly disturbed Truman. He had just gotten the casualty reports from Hiroshima and was already unnerved. He didn't know another bombing was going to happen so quickly. His attitude quickly soured.
The next day, he got a memo from General Groves saying they'd have another bomb ready in a week or so. Truman's reply was immediate: no further bombs were to be dropped without his express authority. He told his cabinet he couldn't bear to kill "all those kids."pic.twitter.com/NvthB4Ymvd
Truman's reclamation of authority, and insisting that all further nuclear use orders be routed through the President (and not the military), changed the nature of US nuclear weapons going forward. He reinforced this many times in his later presidency.
In fact, he outright refused to give the military "custody" over the bombs themselves — they didn't actually *have* the nukes that were being produced in the Cold War, they were kept by the civilian Atomic Energy Commission. (He eventually gave them 9. Eisenhower changed this.)pic.twitter.com/l7jqRFJC9c
In his later presidency, Truman always feared what would happen if you gave the military access to nukes. He thought they did not understand, as he told a number of military and AEC figures in 1948, that they were not "military weapons," but "used to wipe out women and children."pic.twitter.com/pahh9pWrmX
So for me, the ultimate importance of Nagasaki is not that it was the "second" bomb used in combat. It is that it was — so far — the **last** bomb used in combat. And if we're very lucky, and very wise, it might stay that way. /THREADhttps://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/nagasaki-the-last-bomb …
(NB: I realize I left off the caption for those graphs! These are from a website on "The President and the Bomb," on the history and policy of Presidential use authority, that I plan to debut by the end of the month.)pic.twitter.com/ue7pFnFHzP
(For more background on the "custody" issue — in which the physical weapons were denied from the military in the early Cold War — see my writing here.)http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/01/30/the-custody-dispute-over-the-bomb/ …
I have to run off to my own workshop now — where the Internet is unlikely to be working (sigh...) — so if you leave a lot of questions and/or angry disagreements, I won't see them until tomorrow. Just FYI!http://reinventingcivildefense.org/expo/
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