NEW BLOG POST: What newly-utilized documents — five drafts of a radio address written by Truman himself in August 1945 — tell us about his changing views on the bombing of Hiroshima. | A “purely military” target? Truman’s changing language about Hiroshima:http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2018/01/19/purely-military-target/ …
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War was over in Europe. By this time, just about every American was touched by the war. Perhaps he was under the impression it would destroy a military base? Doing so not possible w 1 bomb at the time? By the time he did understand it was a city too late?
To utterly destroy a military base with one bomb was not possible prior to atomic weapons, no. My argument is he only understood it was a city on 8/8/45. I don't think he knew 2nd strike was happening on 8/9.
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As for collateral damage — I don't think he expected casualties in the hundreds of thousands of civilians, no. There is collateral damage and there is collateral damage. For what it is worth, even the scientists who knew it was a city did not expect the casualties to be so high.
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Thank you. It was well written. Easy for me to understand. And that's not easy to do. Old and slow.
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The news of Nagasaki was already in US newspapers before Truman radio speech. Thoughts on why speech not changed?
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It *did* change — they removed the "purely," and they shifted the language around to say they tried not to kill civilians as much as possible (not that they did not kill civilians).
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The entire tone changed from "look how responsible we were" to "look, we did the best we could" — a big rhetorical shift!
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I meant changed to say that 2nd bomb had already been used. Speech refers to post-Hiroshima bombs in future tense.
End of conversation
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