Meditations | News and Notes

In Memoriam: John Coster-Mullen (1946-2021)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 25th, 2021

I received word recently that John Coster-Mullen passed away in the early hours of Saturday, April 24, 2021. He was 74 years old.1 He had been suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease) for the past year or so, I have been told, and it had been a very difficult one as he lost physical and cognitive capabilities. He died peacefully, surrounded by his family, according to his wife.

Illustration of John Coster-Mullen and the Little Boy bomb, from a 2008 profile in the New Yorker by David Samuels.

Illustration of John Coster-Mullen and the Little Boy bomb, from a 2008 profile in the New Yorker by David Samuels.

I don’t know off-hand exactly when I started talking to John. A look through old e-mails suggests that in 2006 we had been talking, but that those e-mails reference earlier conversations. My guess is that we had been in touch in 2005, when I was working on my paper on how people draw atomic bombs. I had interviewed Richard Rhodes very briefly over the phone, talking about how the diagrams for Little Boy and Fat Man were made for The Making of the Atomic Bomb (they were drawn by his son), and Rhodes had mentioned John’s work and how amazing it was. Around that time I probably bought John’s book and got in touch with him, and we began exchanging documents as well. Around that time I was also working on my atomic patents work, and I sent some of those to him very early on as well, knowing he would appreciate them. 

Over the next 15 years or so, we exchanged quite a bit of documents, I acquired three versions of his book, Atom Bombs, and we got to spend some time together in person at the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s conference for the 70th anniversary of the Manhattan Project. He was always generous and excited. He clearly really enjoyed that he, a truck driver (among other things), was producing research that academics from places like Harvard and Princeton thought was important and valuable. 

One of the several copies of John’s self-published Atom Bombs I have. John never “finalized” the book, and was always updating it over the years.

I enjoyed John as a friend, correspondent, and as a subject of study. John is what I call a “secret seeker” in my book, someone who — for whatever reason — is driven towards learning “nuclear secrets.” I find secret seekers (in which I would include Chuck Hansen, Howard Morland, and Carey Sublette, among others) very interesting. Their motivations and methods vary quite a bit, as do their choice of subject. Hansen wanted to know everything of course, but Morland was focused on the H-bomb, and John the specifics of Fat Man and Little Boy.

While some secret seekers, like Morland, have explicitly political agendas in doing this (often related to exposing the futility of secrecy), for others that approach took a back-seat to other interests. With John, I never got the sense that he was strongly motivated by the politics of secrecy, though he sometimes could sound like that when he got irritated with the Department of Energy, or when he got annoyed when people would imply that he was doing something potentially dangerous. Sometimes he would give the old Ted Taylor line, that the surprising thing about the atomic bombs is that they aren’t that hard to build (if you have the fuel, etc.), but it always struck me that he was somewhat infatuated with the history of World War II, and the people who had made and used the bombs, and saw this as the tiny area where someone with his interests and skills could make a real contribution. I think discovering “the secret” for him was more about proving himself as a researcher than probably any big statement about secrecy. Over the years I’ve gotten various documents from him trying to explain himself, and to my eye they come down to a sort of love for the work, the topic, and the people — one that only grew over time and he had more exposure to all three. 

John would occasionally send me various ideas, documents, drawings as he updated his thoughts about the specifics of these bombs. My favorite is the above video that he sent me in 2008 (I don’t know when he made it, exactly) that he made by putting a snake camera inside a postwar Little Boy casing on display at the International War Museum. You can see it moving through the bomb casing from back to front. John would use this kind of hard-won, “nuclear archaeology” data to fill out the minute details of how these bombs were built. This was, for John, clearly a labor of love. It’s a weird thing to suggest that he loved these bombs and the men who made them, but I think he did. 

I respected John’s work a lot. His overall view of the bombings was very much in the standard, “they had to be done, they were a good thing” interpretation, but we could agree to disagree on such things. His technical account of the weapons, and of the procedures necessary to get them working, is unparalleled. His book is my reference for whenever I need the micro-level details of shipment and assembly of the weapons, or of design information relating to them. His book inspired me to write my piece on Nagasaki for the New Yorker in 2015; he had the best account of the chaotic details of that bombing that I ever had read. I suspect my interpretation of them was quite different than his! But our friendship and mutual respect could accommodate such differences in views. Stan Norris reviewed his book in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists over a decade ago, and put it so aptly:

Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close to his exacting breakdown of the bomb’s parts. Coster-Mullen describes the size, weight, and composition of many of Little Boy’s components, including the nose section and its target case; the uranium-235 target rings and tamper; the arming and fuzing system; the forged steel 6.5-inch-in-diameter gun barrel through which the uranium-235 projectile was fired at the target rings; and the tail section—to cite just a few.

John’s biggest “discovery” was that the Little Boy bomb’s internal workings were somewhat opposite of what everyone else had assumed in the “open community” for decades on end. Instead of a smaller projectile of enriched uranium being shot into a larger target of it to form a supercritical mass, it was the other way around: the projectile was the large part (a set of hollow rings), the target was the small part (a solid “spike”).

A diagram of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, by John Coster-Mullen.

One version of John’s depiction of the innards of Little Boy that he sent me (this one from 2017). He told me he drew these diagrams in MS Paint! The hollow projectile is labeled S; the target spike is labeled H. Most of the changes over the last few years were his interpretation of how the tamper pieces were put together.

The profile of John by David Samuels in The New Yorker from 2008 explains his evidence; the main idea was “leaked” to him by Harlow Russ, and it jibed with other data he had. I originally treated this as the same sort of “maybe” speculation that surrounds lots of nuclear topics, though several years later I found a document which to me totally cemented the idea as true (which, of course, I immediately sent to John, and he immediately added it to the hoard of documents in his book).2 John made it more fun for me to look at these detailed technical documents, because he gave me something new to look for.

Looking through my e-mails with John over the years, it’s plain how generous he was. He shared lots of things with me — not just documents and photographs, but texts of talks he was giving, comments from other researchers on his work, and even just silly e-mail forwards. He sent me the declassified guide on the fuzing system of the MK-3 atomic bomb that graces the cover of my new book. He would occasionally send me a new copy of his book if he thought my copy was too out of date. He sent me mysterious pieces of metal (bits of duraluminum, remnants of a non-nuclear bomb test, that he found in an unspecified desert), just as a little offering of friendship and camaraderie. He stayed in good touch until the last year or so; now I know why.

Here’s an excerpt from one e-mail sent in 2009. All underlining is in the original. It gives you a flavor for his working style, and the joy he took in this work.

Dear Alex,

Here is something to open up your eyes.  

I spent all day last month at the Atomic Museum in Albq during the 509th reunion. At the end of the day one of their researchers gave me a CD containing about 800 declassified photos; some old, some newly declassified. This is part of a set of 6 or 7 CD’s that LANL sent to all the museums a few years ago so they would have copies. These are low-rez thumbnails and I made a selection of several dozen that this person burned to a CD for me in their spare time and sent a few weeks later. I went through the thumbnail CD and found this one at about midnight one night. It reveals something spectacular and hitherto unseen.

I was quite shaken and think I woke all my neighbors with my startled yell.

Even a month later I’m still sitting here with my jaw in my lap. Picture TR-229 shows the inside of the tent under the Trinity tower with the sphere on the left (Slotin leaning against it) and the litter with the capsule on the right side. This litter is the one Daghlian and Lehr placed into the 1942 Plymouth in front of the McDonald Ranch. The litter is sitting on a crate with the wood box cover off and the completed Pu filled tamper cylinder sitting strapped to the litter. It can be clearly seen. I’m stunned!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

His work will live on. His wife, Mary, told me that his children are helping fulfill orders on his book still. John always resisted working with a publisher, both because he didn’t want to edit it down (as he feared he’d be asked to do), and also because it was never a finished project. Maybe now it’s ready to be typeset once and for all. We’ll see. 

Photograph of John Coster-Mullen by Alex Wellerstein, 2015

A photograph I snapped (with my terrible phone camera) of John in 2015, while I sat behind him at the Atomic Heritage Foundation conference on the 70th anniversary of the Manhattan Project.

My sense is that while I’m sure there was always one more detail to know, John basically accomplished what he wanted when it came to the history of Little Boy and Fat Man. He changed our knowledge of these weapons dramatically, and his samizdat book is considered quite authoritative on these matters. He never had a college education, but he got to give talks at universities, nuclear weapons laboratories, and rub shoulders with scholars and historical actors alike. He worked at this for nearly 30 years, and established himself as a generous, quirky, and unusual expert. I don’t talk about John much in my book — not as much as I’d like to, but there is only so much room — but I make a sideways acknowledgment that only in America could you have the phenomena of a truck driver whose hobby was to discover nuclear secrets. 

Rest in peace, John.

  1. From interviews and his Facebook page, I gather his birthday was December 21, 1946. [↩]
  2. The document in question is this one: C.S. Smith and I.C. Schoonover to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Gun Fabrication Plan – Second Supplement to Memorandum of June 13, 1945,” (3 July 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, NV0321050. It describes the final decisions about a small amount of cadmium plating that was put on the pieces of highly-enriched uranium to prevent premature fissioning. It describes a plating on the inner surface of the projectile and the outer surface of the target — something that only makes sense if the projectile is the hollow piece. [↩]

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News and Notes

Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States — now available!

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 5th, 2021

A decade in the making, my first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), is finally available this week! 

This is my attempt to synthesize the origins and trends of nuclear secrecy from the 1930s through the present day, from World War II through the high Cold War and the end of the Cold War, with nods and discussions of how the legacies of choices and decisions made in the past still impact our present and future. It’s a lot of book, and I’m proud of it all, even though one could easily write something ten times longer (but then nobody would read it). 

The cover of the Restricted Data book

The amazing cover of the book, created by Isaac Tobin, based on some source images I provided. I really appreciate the way that the cover does a great job of giving the aesthetic appearance of a “nuclear secret.”

Because of the COVID pandemic, I’m not doing any in-person events for the book, sadly enough. But I am doing a lot of virtual events. A few of the ones upcoming that are open to the public:

If you’re interested in having me do a virtual event for your organization, let me know! And if you’re a regular reviewer of books, please review it! It is appreciated!

I’ll be keeping an updated list at the book homepage here, in case you want to stay in the loop on these things. The book website also contains reviews (right now, just the jacket blurbs), photos (some historical, some archival, some of me), documents (which I’ll be adding to over the next few weeks), and the book’s table of contents (just so you know what you’re getting!). 

If you’d like a signed and inscribed copy of the book, this is possible! For the next couple of weeks (I’ll remove this when I stop doing this), if you buy the book through my local bookstore, Little City Books, I will sign the book for you and inscribe it however you’d prefer. All you need to do is indicate that you want it shipped to you, but in the Notes field of the order, indicate that you’d like it signed (and any information on how you want it dedicated, etc.). What I’ll do is swing by the store and sign it, and then they’ll send it to you. So it might be a little bit later than you’d get if you were using Amazon.com (and you will have to pay shipping), but that’s the only real cost of getting it signed (it is otherwise a free service).

I’m excited to have this out, after all of these years. And I suppose this is as good as place to note that last week I was told by my university that I have been approved for promotion to Associate Professor with tenure, which has also been a very long process! 2020 was a pretty long and difficult year for many of us, and though I had things relatively easy (good health, steady work), it was still a period of stress and endurance. So it’s nice to have some positive things now in 2021. 

Per usual, it’s my goal to have a bunch more blog posts in the future. My issue is not enthusiasm, but time — my professional responsibilities have been steadily growing over time. This blog was started during a period where my responsibilities were blessedly low, when I was a postdoc. But the job of a professor is a busy one by comparison, and now that I am Program Director it means I have many more meetings, advising sessions, and tasks that need to get done on top of teaching and regular research. And, frankly, when I do have ideas for a blog post, I now spend more time weighing whether it would be worth trying to turn them into a professionally published article of some sort (but maybe that pressure will go down a bit now that I have tenure). But I’d like to get back into using the blog as a place to post interesting documents, images, and so on (a lot of that kind of output, these days, is ending up on my Twitter feed, which requires a lot less time commitment). 

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Redactions

How many people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 4th, 2020

One question I’ve been asked a lot by journalists is, “how many people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” The reason they ask isn’t because they can’t use Google, it’s because if you start hunting around you’ll get lots of different answers to this question — answers that vary by a factor of two or so. 

So I wrote an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that answers this question, and went live today: Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It goes over the various attempts that have been made since 1945 to come up with estimates on this, and the methodology behind making these kinds of estimates. I ended up tracking down just about every estimate I could find on the casualties, and was pleased to find that I could write a pretty decent history of these efforts despite being limited almost entirely to what was available online during a pandemic (I had to buy one book, in the end).

According to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, this photograph is of the Noboricho Elementary School circa the 1930s. The current Noboricho Elementary School is about 1 kilometer from ground zero at Hiroshima, in a range that inflicted around 98% fatalities on schoolchildren. As my article explains, school records were of particular interest and use to US military efforts to develop the distance-mortality curve which was used to calculate overall casualty rates. Of all of the photographs at the Hiroshima museum, this is the one I found most arresting, because the joy on these faces — both the children and the teacher — is so recognizable, and thus so tragic.

If you’re just looking for “the answer,” this is the paragraph that sums up the general gist of it:

There is, I think it should be clear, no simple answer to this. In practice, authors and reports seem to cluster around two numbers, which I will call the “low” and the “high” estimates. The “low” estimates are those derived from the estimates of the 1940s: around 70,000 dead at Hiroshima, and around 40,000 dead at Nagasaki, for 110,000 total dead. The “high” estimates are those that derive from the 1977 re-estimation: around 140,000 dead at Hiroshima, and around 70,000 dead at Nagasaki, for a total of 210,000 total dead. Given that the “high” estimates are almost double the “low” estimates, this is a significant difference. There is no intellectually defensible reason to assume that, for example, an average (105,000 dead at Hiroshima, 55,000 dead at Nagasaki) would be more accurate or meaningful.

The “low” estimates come from US government (and US military) efforts in the 1940s to estimate the dead. I get the sense that they were trying to come up with real numbers here, not trying to guess low, but there are some real methodological shortcomings with their source terms. Essentially, these estimates are heavily dependent on how many people you think were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the days of the bombings. There are various ways to try and guess this, but ultimately there are reasons to think that all “official” figures you will find will be missing a lot of people. The people who made these estimates were well-aware of their shortcomings. As Stafford Warren, who led the Manhattan Project casualty estimate effort, explained before Congress: “I am embarrassed by the fact that even though I led a medical party which was supposed to get figures on the mortality, and so on, that we could not come back with any definitive figures that I would be able to say were more than a guess.”

The “high” estimates come from attempts in the 1970s, led by the Japanese and international scientists, to come up with a new tally that takes into account some known populations who were left out of the original estimate, notably Korean forced laborers, commuters, and other groups that weren’t included in the kinds of statistics the government and military were looking at. To be sure, the people who did this felt that there was something unjust about undercounting the dead, and so there is a clear political angle to having higher numbers as well. But their work is similarly meticulous and well-argued, so there’s no easy way to just say, “oh, they’re too high.” 

My recommendation for people wanting to use a number is to say who made it. If you want to use the “low” estimate, that’s fine — just state that it was generated by the US military. If you want to use the “high” estimate, that’s fine — just state that it was developed by a group of international scientists in the 1970s. Even better would be to include both, but that gets a bit wordier than most people want to use. For me, the aim is to make sure that these numbers are not just seen as something that is “simply known,” but were estimated by one group or another. 

The article also discusses why these numbers matter. The choice of “low” or “high” numbers is probably not incidental; I see the “low” numbers in sources that tend to emphasize the need for the atomic bombs, and the “high” numbers in sources that emphasize the suffering of the victims. That makes sense, but given that we don’t really have a good way to tell whether either of these sets are correct, I think it is worth being slightly cautious about putting too much political or moral weight upon the raw figures alone. Or to put it another way, if your argument depends on one set of these numbers being the “right” set to use… it’s probably worth thinking through the argument a little bit more. 

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Meditations

What if the Trinity test had failed?

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 16th, 2020

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test. My thoughts on the world’s first nuclear explosion haven’t changed too much over the last five years, so you can read that if you want my “anniversary take.” The only thing that’s really changed in my thinking since then is that I’ve was able to visit the site last summer, and spent some time in the area around it (Socorro, Alamagordo, etc.). It’s beautiful country out there, and compared to my normal (NYC-adjacent) environs, it still feels pretty isolated and sparse. The distances are just large in such a place — it takes you a long time to get anywhere, and driving 50 miles is no big thing. Anyway, I’ll have some opportunity to post a bit more about that trip later in the summer, I believe, so I’ll hold off for now.

The obelisk at the Trinity site, July 2019. Source: Photo by author.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is a question I have been asked a few times in the ramp-up to this year’s anniversary: What is the importance of the Trinity test? I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to answer more than superficially. Of course, I can easily explain the context of what the test was, why it was done, and what followed it. But “importance” implies, to my mind, a counterfactual: that something different would have happened, historically, if it had not occurred, or occurred differently.

I’ve written on counterfactuals before, and I suspect I find them more interesting than many historians. The “official historian response” to counterfactuals is to say, “well, we really can’t know what might have happened, since it is hard enough to know what did happen,” and I can co-sign that. But counterfactual questions can be a way to focus on why we think something was important, and it can be a useful way to think through what we do know about the past. So I often find them to be useful exercises, so long as you don’t put too much stock in their “reality.” (And I was always a fan of Marvel’s What If? series, for a less intellectual justification.)

So my question today is: What if the Trinity test had failed? 

Modes of failure

One of the reasons this feels like a somewhat jarring question is that we slide easily from “this is how history happened” to “this is how history must have happened.” We know the test was a “success,” and that colors everything we think about it and its preparations. But the chances of Trinity failing in one way or another were not all that low. There’s a lot that could have gone wrong with it.

Even after Trinity, J. Robert Oppenheimer estimated relatively high chances of the “combat unit” failing:

The possibilities of a less than optimal performance of the Little Boy are quite small and should be ignored. The possibility that the first combat plutonium Fat Man will give a less than optimal performance is about twelve percent. There is about a six percent chance that the energy release will be under five thousand tons, and about a two percent chance that it will be under one thousand tons. It should not be much less than one thousand tons unless there is an actual malfunctioning of some of the components.

It is probably not desirable to attempt at destination to establish, on a statistical basis, the reliability of Fat Man Components. On the other hand, it is desirable to subject the components scheduled for hot use to inspection and testing with the greatest care.1

Oppenheimer’s estimates are high-enough given the stakes of the test, but the big question is un-estimated part: the failure of a component. Because the “Gadget,” and its weaponized form, Fat Man, had a lot of components. And they were all capable of failure. The implosion design required a lot of things to work just right, in order to to get the simultaneous detonation (within a tolerance measured in nanoseconds) and correct shaping of the compressive forces that symmetrically shrunk the solid-metal plutonium core to over half its original volume. This is why they were having the Trinity test in the first place: they didn’t know if it could be done at all, and even if it could be done, they didn’t know how well it would work.2

An official diagram of the “Gadget,” snug in its casing as the Fat Man bomb. This incredible image comes from a manual that John Coster-Mullen received under the Freedom of Information Act, and the overall document describes all of the many activities that have to be done just right to make one of these fire correctly. There’s a lot that could go wrong; these were not “GI-proof.” Source: “Maintenance and Instruction Manual for Mark III Atomic Bomb Fuze,” Project Y, January 1946, courtesy of the intrepid John Coster-Mullen.

So let’s imagine three possible modes of “failure” for the test. The first is not really a failure at all: that “the Gadget” had gone off with the yield that it had been expected to have, prior to testing. This was around 4-5 kilotons, not the 20 kilotons it turned out to be. So that would have not been considered a failure by the scientists, but it would have made the plutonium bomb considerably smaller than their projections for the uranium bomb. We’ll round that up to 5 kilotons for simplicity’s sake. 

A second possibility could be a result at the low-end of what they thought was plausible: a few hundred tons of TNT equivalent. Let’s say 500 tons, just to pick a number. That means that the Gadget would be seriously underperforming (their goal was at least a kiloton), but still a usable weapon. It would not meet their stated criteria for a usable atomic bomb (they had set that at 1 kiloton), but it would still be something you could drop on an enemy.3

And an ignominious third possibility would be a total failure, a “fizzle” of zero nuclear yield.  This would be the true component failure that Oppenheimer mentioned: a problem with the detonation system, or a major flaw with the lens system. There would be about 5 tons of TNT equivalent result from the high explosive system, which would destroy the “Gadget” and scatter its plutonium. Again, this is not implausible at all — this was a new weapon, and these components were custom-made, and every technical system has a rate of failure. The scientists knew this was a real possibility; some of them even bet on it!

Prior to the Trinity test, the scientists had considered the (uranium-fueled) Little Boy bomb to be their “big” bomb, because they had always assumed it would be capable of hitting at least 5 kilotons, and probably around 15 kilotons. The (plutonium-fueled) Fat Man was guessed to have a yield that would range from a few hundred tons up to 5 kilotons. The advantage of the Fat Man design was that you could make more of them: their production rates, in late 1945, were about half of a Little Boy bomb’s worth of enriched uranium per month, compared to three Fat Man bombs worth of plutonium per month. So they saw their probable future capabilities as one big atomic bomb every couple months, with a few smaller atomic bombs in between. The actual Trinity test revealed that the Fat Man bombs were in fact more powerful than they had expected the Little Boy bombs to be.

A relevant excerpt from the notes of the second meeting of the Target Committee, from May 1945, which describe the range of expected yields at that time for the two weapons.4

The technical implications for these different modes of failure, as I see it, are fairly straightforward. If the Trinity test was as powerful as they expected it to be (5 kt), then it would not have changed much about how they saw the situation — 5 kilotons is still nothing to scoff at. If instead it had been on the low end (500 tons), then that would have been disappointing, but still within the realm of possibility, and I don’t think they would have done too much different, technically, other than try and figure out what the issue had been that had resulted in the reduced yield.

But if the test had totally failed to give a nuclear yield — I think they would have had to do another test. That was certainly their original plan in the event of a failure. That would have taken several weeks to prepare, at best. The original Trinity test had taken months to prepare, but a Trinity failure would still have done damage to the tower, and probably contaminated the site with plutonium. A “quick and dirty” Trinity test, where they just set one off somewhere, wouldn’t have given them the data they needed (and in the face of a total failure, I don’t see them thinking “quick and dirty” would be the way to go — especially given how precious their plutonium stockpile was). So I think that would have essentially set back the possibility of using a plutonium bomb on Japan by a month or so at the minimum. 

What if the cause had been something more nefarious, like intentional sabotage? (An idea floated in the sadly-cancelled Manhattan television show that I consulted for some years back.) I think this would have been the “total failure” outcome, plus a lot more security, hand-wringing, and paranoia. Which is to say: something very different, and not something I feel confident at all predicting, but a really interesting question.

Strategic and diplomatic implications

The success of the Trinity test told the US policymakers and military planners that atomic bombs worked, and that they would have a fair number of them over time. Both of these would have been challenged to different degrees by a failure.

A 5 kt Trinity probably wouldn’t have changed that much. Again, this was the expectation. It might have changed how the bombs were deployed, though. A 5 kiloton explosion would do roughly 40% as much damage as 15 kiloton one.5 To put that in terms of raw effect, if you detonated a 5 kiloton bomb over Hiroshima today at the ideal blast height, you’d kill maybe 47,000 people (according to NUKEMAP), as compared to over 80,000 people for 15 kilotons. That’s still a pretty powerful weapon. But it would be conspicuously less powerful than the Little Boy bomb. So it’s possible they might have imagined using it for purposes other than destroying entire cities, such as targeting specific military bases. But overall I think this is probably “close enough” that their existing assumptions would still have been likely maintained.

NUKEMAP screenshots of the effects of three blasts over Hiroshima, each set at the ideal height of burst for maximizing the range of the 5 psi blast range for their yield: 15,000 tons of TNT (15 kt), 5,000 tons of TNT (5 kt), and 500 tons of TNT (0.5 kt). From largest to smallest (roughly, as the effects scale differently over this range), the rings show: 1 psi blast pressure (very light gray), the maximum distance for 3rd degree burns from the thermal radiation (orange), the area of 5 psi blast damage (gray), the area of 500 rem ionizing radiation exposure in free air (green), and size of the fireball (yellow). Source: NUKEMAP / Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors, CC-BY-SA, Imagery © Mapbox.

A 500 ton Trinity, on the other hand, is much less powerful than they had wanted the atomic bomb to be. It would still kill 15,000 people if dropped on Hiroshima today. But much of the city would still be intact — the psychological effect would be far diminished. And compared to the 15 kiloton bomb, it would have looked relatively paltry. Again, I think they might still have considered using it, but I don’t see them “wasting” any their precious-few “reserved” targets on it — they’d be saving those for the big bombs, and using the smaller atomic bombs for other purposes. So I think this would really shake up how they saw their arsenal and their use of it.

It’s also possible that depending on how well they thought they understood the failure, that it might impact their sensibilities on the Little Boy bomb as well. The scientists had high confidence that the gun-type design would work, and it was easier to confirm the principles behind it without a full-scale test. Would their confidence have been shaken? If their diagnostics of the Trinity test told them that the detonator system had worked as planned, then they might have worried that their deeper understanding of a fission bomb was incorrect. But if they thought it was just an assembly problem — something unique to the implosion design — then they’d probably have still been confident about the gun-type arrangement. 

But the policymakers and military brass would probably have been a lot less confident. Outside of Groves, none of the other military leaders had a deep understanding of the bomb, and several expressed extreme pessimism about its prospects prior to Trinity. A Trinity failure would have reinforced these perspectives. It’s possible they might have judged the entire thing not ready for prime time, and scuttled any use plans until they were confident that it wouldn’t be an embarrassment.

And a failed Trinity would, as noted, probably mean that they would have extreme delays in their plutonium bomb capabilities. I think they’d still want to use the uranium bomb as soon as possible. But they’d know that they would not be able to follow it up with more attacks for some time. Maybe they’d try to bluff about that, or maybe they’d just downplay how much destruction they’d be delivering that way, I don’t know. But I think they’d consider it a pretty different situation.

Stalin, Truman, and Churchill at the Potsdam Conference on the day after Trinity (July 17, 1945). Source: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.

What political implications would this have? Truman received the news of the successful Trinity test with great excitement, and it bolstered his confidence greatly with regards to the end of the war. I suspect that wouldn’t have changed with a 5 kiloton result, but with a 500 ton result, that would probably have been diminished. With a total failure, I think the opposite would have occurred: he might have gotten even more depressed about dealing with the Soviet Union, and with the prospects of an unconditional surrender by the Japanese.

So what might he done differently if that was the case? The two places I can see him modifying his approach would be in his dealings with Stalin, and the question of unconditional surrender and the Potsdam Declaration.

After getting the successful results from Trinity, Truman took a very hard line with Stalin. He believed that the bomb gave him leverage for both the end of World War II and the peace that would follow. Though he did not try to argue that the Soviets should not declare war on Japan or stop their invasion plans, he was less convinced he would need the Soviet entry into the war, and did not encourage them. Without the confidence from Trinity, would he have pushed so hard? I’m not sure he would have; he might have felt the Soviet invasion too necessary for the end of the war to risk alienation. And if he had taken a more compromising approach, what would the impact of that had been on the later Cold War to follow? The Cold War was a complex thing, not the result of a single interaction, but there are scholars who have attributed some of its formation and angst to Truman’s post-Trinity bravado, so it’s not outside the realm of contemplation.

On the Potsdam Declaration, there were members of Truman’s cabinet and the military staff who were trying to put a sentence into the Allied dictum towards Japan that would clarify the position of the Emperor. They knew, from intercepted Japanese communications, that this was a sticking point for even those members of the Japanese high command who were interested in pursuing an end to the war. But Truman, with the pushing of his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, pushed back hard on this, and deliberately did not make things “easier” for the Japanese in this respect. One can argue whether that was the right thing to do or not (that is a separate question), but would he have taken such a hard-line with Japan if he didn’t have positive news from Trinity? Again, I doubt it — he would have been less sure of his own position, and may have listened to those who cautioned him towards moderation.

Would they have still used the Little Boy bomb on the original schedule, to be dropped just after the Postdam Conference ended? I think this depends on what they thought the nature of the failure was for the Trinity test — if it was something particular to the implosion device specifically, then I think they would have continued as planned. If it was something that caused them more fundamental doubts, then I they might have waited until those doubts could be resolved. I don’t think their messaging on the atomic bomb would be significantly affected, however; Truman’s declaration at Hiroshima is basically a “one bomb” announcement (and I am not sure he realized that more bombs would be coming soon afterwards). 

War outcomes

Would a failure at Trinity have changed the outcome of World War II in any significant way? Ultimately this question relies on what you think caused the Japanese to offer up a conditional surrender on August 10th, and then an unconditional surrender on August 14th. In particular, it depends on how important you think the Nagasaki bombing was for the decision-making of the Japanese high command. 

There were a number of overlapping factors that contributed to Japanese surrender, and it is not always clear how much weight to assign each of them. The bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria, the bombing of Nagasaki, the US rejection of the conditional surrender offer, an abortive coup by junior Japanese officers, and an intensification of conventional bombing all took place over the space of less than a week. If we imagine the only thing missing from that list was Nagasaki, does it matter? Or if Nagasaki had used a much less damaging atomic bomb, would it matter?

On the left, the wispy remains of the mushroom cloud rise over the Trinity test site in New Mexico (and one of my favorite, unusual photographs of the test — one of the few that emphasize Trinity’s cloud). At right, a photograph I took just outside the White Sands Missile Range in summer 2019 — not exactly the same vantage point (I suspect the original was taken on a high ridge or from a plane), but pretty close. Source (left): Los Alamos National Laboratory, TR-239.

While it is hard to disentangle these things, the bombing of Nagasaki clearly left less of a distinct impression on the Japanese command than the other factors. It may have reinforced the feeling of hopelessness that lead to the surrender offers, but it’s not clear it was necessary for them. The Japanese do not seem to have seriously doubted that the US had only one atomic bomb, and in any event, the other factors — such as the Soviet invasion — clearly weighed very largely on their minds. 

So it’s not implausible to suggest that the war would have ended around when it did, even without Trinity being successful. That being said, the Japanese decision to surrender was not over-determined in any way. If the Japanese don’t offer up a surrender of some sort by August 10th, what then? Do they offer it up before a second Trinity can be tested, or a second gun-type bomb is ready? Here we end up in the weeds of speculation, beyond what we can know with much confidence. Or to put it another way, here is where whatever preconceptions you have about the end of the war will dominate: if you’re a “bombs did it” sort of person, then you’ll favor that kind of interpretation, and if you’re a “Soviets did it” sort of person, you’ll favor that one. I’m on the fence, though I lean towards the interpretations that show Nagasaki as not being that important, so I see the war ending around the same time it did anyway. This is a separate question from, “what if no atomic bombs were dropped on Japan,” which is even more contentious.

If that’s the case, then the Trinity test was not so important for that particular end, though those diplomatic decisions might have had long-term consequences. One thing is clear, though: if Trinity had failed, we’d talk about the Manhattan Project in a different light. It wouldn’t seem so “inevitable” that something “Manhattan Project-like” would succeed, and perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to deploy allusions to it when talking about big science projects. 

The irony of this whole discussion is that the Trinity test is almost always framed as an important and impressive achievement. But what if it only meant that Nagasaki was avoided, and the war still ended? In that light, maybe it would have been a better thing if it hadn’t had worked so well. To say that feels heretical, and I’m not sure I believe it. But it’s a provocative idea.

Either way, it’s easy to conclude, I think, that the Trinity test “mattered,” at least by the counterfactual criteria set out at the beginning: if it had failed, we’d have ended up in a somewhat different world. The interesting question to ask is whether that different world would be better or worse than the one live in now — and that is surprisingly unclear.

  1. J. Robert Oppenheimer to Thomas Farrell and W.S. Parsons (23 July 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, NV0103571. [↩]
  2. Update, September 2020: I happened to stumble across a document in the Digital National Security Archive in which Oppenheimer was expressing his reservations about the Operation Crossroads tests to President Truman. This line seemed relevant: “Even if all components work correctly, the bombs which are scheduled for use in these tests have a chance of about one in fifteen of giving an ineffective explosion, that one might call a dud. Bombs have been designed which do not have this weakness, but it is not planned to use them.” The Crossroads bombs were of the same model as the Nagasaki and Trinity designs. J. Robert Oppenheimer to Harry S. Truman (3 May 1946), Digital National Security Archive, George Washington University, document NP00024. [↩]
  3. By May 1944, the directive for the Manhattan Project was a weapon of a minimum 1,000 tons of TNT equivalent. William S. Parsons to Leslie R. Groves (19 May 1944), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 6, Folder 5, “Events Preceding and Following the Dropping of the First Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Subfile 5F, “Memorandums from (Capt. W. S.) Parsons.” [↩]
  4. J.A. Derry and N.F. Ramsey to L.R. Groves, “Summary of Target Committee Meetings on 10 and 11 May 1945,” in Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 6, Folder 5D, “Selection of Targets.” [↩]
  5. Blast damage scales as a cubic root (as a power of W1/3, where W is the yield), not linearly. So to double the blast effect, you need to increase the yield by a factor of about eight. Thus a weapon of 15 kilotons is not three times more damaging than a 5 kiloton weapon, even though it releases three times as much energy. [↩]

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Meditations

What journalists should know about the atomic bombings

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 9th, 2020

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even with everything else going on this year, we’re certainly going to see an up-tick in atomic bomb-related historical content in the news. As arbitrary as 5/10 year anniversaries are, they can be a useful opportunity to reengage the public on historical topics, and the atomic bombs are, I think, pretty important historical topics: not just because they are interesting and influential to what came later, but because Americans in particular use the atomic bombings as a short-hand for thinking about vitally important present-day issues like the ends justifying the means, who the appropriate targets of war are, and the use of force in general. Unfortunately, quite a lot of what Americans think they know about the atomic bombs is dramatically out of alignment with how historians understand them, and this shapes their takes on these present-day issues as well. 

The beginnings of the Hiroshima anniversary night lantern ceremony, 2017, which I attended.

Having seen the same recycled stories again and again (and again, and again), I thought it might be worth compiling a little list of what journalists writing stories about the atomic bombings ought to know. This isn’t an extensive debunking-misconceptions list (I’ll probably write another one of those another time), or a pushing-a-particular perspective list, so much as an attempt to talk about the broader framework of thinking about the bombings, so far as scholarship has advanced past where it was in the 1990s, which was the last time that the broader popular narratives about the atomic bombings were “updated.”

I’m tilting this towards journalists — particularly journalists trying to represent this from an American perspective, so frequently (but exclusively) American journalists — not because they get it particularly wrong (they often do get it wrong, but so do even academics who don’t study this topic in detail), but because they are usually the primary conduit of this history to the broader public. And because, in my experience, most journalists who want to write on this topic are not bungling it because they are trying to push an agenda (that occasionally does happen, to be sure), but because they don’t know any better, because they aren’t reading academic history, and don’t talk to academic historians on this topic.

One thing I want to say up front: there are many legitimate interpretations of the atomic bombings. Were they a good thing, or a bad thing? Were they moral acts, or essentially war crimes? Were they necessary, or not? Were they avoidable, or were they inevitable, once the US had the weapons? What would the most likely scenario have been if they weren’t used? How should we think about their legacies? And so on, and so on. I’m not saying you have to subscribe to any one answer to those. However, a lot of people are essentially forced into one answer or another by bad historical takes, including bad historical takes that are systematically taught in US schools. There’s lot of room for disagreement, but let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about the broad historical facts, first. It is totally possible to agree with all of the below and think the atomic bombings were justified, and it’s totally possible to take the exact opposite position.

There was no “decision to use bomb”

The biggest and most important thing that one ought to know is that there was no “decision to use the atomic bomb” in the sense that the phrase implies. Truman did not weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using the atomic bomb, nor did he see it as a choice between invasion or bombing. This particular “decision” narrative, in which Truman unilaterally decides that the bombing was the lesser of two evils, is a postwar fabrication, developed by the people who used the atomic bomb (notably General Groves and Secretary of War Stimson, but encouraged by Truman himself later) as a way of rationalizing and justifying the bombings in the face of growing unease and criticism about them. 

The article in Harper’s by Henry Stimson, published in early 1947, is where the “decision to use the bomb” narrative was first put into its most persuasive and expansive form. I find it is useful to point out that even the “orthodox” narratives have their origins as well — people frequently treat them as if they fell out of the sky or were handed down on tablets.

What did happen was far more complicated, multifaceted, and at times chaotic — like most real history. The idea that the bomb would be used was assumed by nearly everyone who was involved in its production at a high level, which did not include Truman (who was excluded until after Roosevelt’s death). There were a few voices against its use, but there were far more people who assumed that it was built to be used. There were many reasons why people wanted it to be used, including ending the war as soon as possible, and very few reasons not to use it. Saving Japanese lives was just not a goal — it was never an elaborate moral calculus of that sort. Rather than one big “decision,” the atomic bombings were the product of a multitude of many smaller decisions and assumptions that stretched back into late 1942, when the Manhattan Project really got started. 

This is not to say there were not decisions made along the line. There were lots of decisions made, about the type of bomb being built, the kind of fuzing used for it (which determines what kinds of targets it would be ideal against), the types of targets… Truman wasn’t part of these. His role was extremely peripheral to the entire endeavor. As General Groves put it, Truman’s role was “one of noninterference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.”1

Truman was involved in only two major issues relating to the atomic bomb decision-making during World War II. These were concurring with Stimson’s recommendations about the non-bombing of Kyoto (and the bombing of Hiroshima instead), which I have written about (and now published about) at some length. The other is the (not-unrelated, I argue) decision on August 10, 1945, to halt further atomic bombings (at least temporarily) because, as he put it to his cabinet meeting, “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”2

It was never a question of “bomb or invade”

Part of the “decision” narrative above is the idea that there were only two choices: use the atomic bombs, or have a bloody land-invasion of Japan. This is another one of those clever rhetorical traps created in the postwar to justify the atomic bombings, and if you accept its framing then you will have a hard time concluding that the atomic bombings were a good idea or not. And maybe that’s how you feel about the bombings — it’s certainly a position one can take — but let’s be clear: this framing is not how the planners at the time saw the issue.

The plan was to bomb and to invade, and to have the Soviet invade, and to blockade, and so on. It was an “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to ending the war with Japan, though there were a few things missing from the “everything,” like modifying the unconditional surrender requirements that the Americans knew (through intercepted communications) were causing the Japanese considerable difficulty in accepting surrender. I’ve written about the possible alternatives to the atomic bombings before, so I won’t go into them in any detail, but I think it’s important to recognize that the way the bombings were done (two atomic bombs on two cities within three days of each other) was not according to some grand plan at all, but because of choices, some very “small scale” (local personnel working on Tinian, with no consultation with the President or cabinet members at all), made by people who could not predict the future.3

Soldiers on Tinian prepare to load the “Fat Man” bomb for the second atomic bombing mission. Source: National Archives (77-BT-174).

While we are on the subject, we should note that many of the casualty estimates on the invasion have become grossly inflated after the war ended. The estimates that the generals accepted at the time, and related to Truman, were that there would be on the order of tens of thousands of American casualties from a full invasion (and casualties include the injured, not just the dead). That’s nothing to scoff at, but it’s not the hundreds of thousands to even millions of deaths that have sometimes been invoked. Be wary of this kind of counterfactual casualty estimation, especially when it is done in the service of a conclusion that is already agreed upon. It’s easy to imagine the worst-case scenarios that didn’t happen, and to use these to justify the awful things that did happen. This is bad reasoning, and a bad approach to moral thinking — it is a particularly insidious form of “ends justify the means” reasoning which can justify damned near anything in the name of imaginative alternatives.

All that being said, I want to just say that I’m not necessarily saying that other alternatives should have been pursued. That’s not really a position I feel comfortable staking out, only because I can’t predict what would have happened if they had done other things as well. One can easily imagine the Japanese deciding to keep fighting even in spite of everything, just compounding the death and leading into a pretty grim postwar world. Frankly, when one looks at the chaotic Japanese decision-making that went into their actual surrender (more on that in a minute) it is actually quite clear that they only barely surrendered when they did. So I would not want to say, “they should have done it another way” with any confidence. But I do think it is important to point out that none of it was inevitable, and that some of the justifications for why they did it are quite overstated.

Separately, it is worth pointing out, because this is often obscured, that the invasion of Kyushu was not scheduled to begin until November 1945. There are many framings of this that make it look like the invasion was about to start immediately after the atomic bombings, and this just isn’t the case. The invasion of Honshu had not yet been authorized, but would not have begun until early 1946. This doesn’t change whether they would be awful or anything like that, but the tightening of the timeline, to make it seem like both were imminent, is part of the rhetorical strategy to justify using the atomic bombs.

There were many reasons that the Americans wanted to drop the atomic bombs

There are two main explanations given to why the Americans dropped the atomic bombs. One is the “decision to use the bomb” narrative already outlined (end the war to avoid an invasion). The other, which is common in more left-leaning, anti-bombing historical studies, is that they did it to scare the Soviet Union (to show they had a new weapon). This latter position is sometimes called the Alperovitz thesis, because Gar Alperovitz did a lot of work to popularize and defend it in the 1980s and 1990s.4 It’s older than that, for whatever that is worth.5

Time magazine covers from 1945: Stalin, Truman, Hirohito. Each kind of tacky in their own way.

When I talk to students about the atomic bombings, I usually have them tell me what they know of them. Maybe 80% know the “decision to use the bomb” narrative (we could probably call this the Stimson narrative if we wanted to be consistent).6 I chart this out on the whiteboard, highlighting the key facts of it. A few in each class know the Alperovitz narrative, which they got from various alternative sources (like Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States documentary). We then discuss the implications of each — what does believing in either make you feel about World War II, the atomic bombings, about the United States as a world power today?

And then I tell them that historians today tend to reject both of these narratives. Which makes them want to throw their hands up in frustration, I am sure, but that’s what scholarship is about.

I’ve written a bit on this in the past, but the short version is that historians have found that both of these narratives are far too clean and neat: they both assume that the nation had a single driving purpose in using the atomic bombs. This isn’t the case. (And, spoiler alert, it’s almost never the case.) As already noted, the process had many different parts to it, and no single “decision” at all, and so one can find historical figures who had many different perspectives. What is interesting is that for those involved in the making of the bomb, and the highest-level decisions about its use, almost all of those perspectives converged on the idea of using it.

So there certainly were people who hoped it would end the war quickly to avoid invasion. There were also those who hoped it would end the war before the Soviets declared war on the Japanese, giving the US a freer hand in Asia in the postwar period. (More on that in a moment.) There were also those who considered it “just another weapon” and attached no special significance to its use.7 And there were those who took the entirely opposite approach, seeing it as a herald of a future nuclear arms race, and who believed that the best first use of the bomb ought to be the one that laid bare its horrible spectacle. (Personally, I find this position the most historically and intellectually interesting — the idea that by using the bombs on cities in World War II, you’d prevent nuclear weapons from being ever used in anger again.)

And there were those who thought that one of the “bonuses” of using the bomb was to scare the Soviets. It’s not just a “revisionist” (a term I hate) idea — one can document it pretty easily (and Alperovitz does).8 This strain of thinking was particularly prominent in the thinking of Secretary of State James Byrnes, whose advocacy of “atomic diplomacy” against the Soviets was explicit. It’s not a goofy idea. The question is whether it is the whole story — and it’s not. 

Where both the Stimson and Alperovitz narratives fail is that they insist that there were only singular reasons to use the atomic bomb. But there were many people involved with it, and thus many different motivations. That’s not a problem if you want to argue for or against the atomic bombings — but implying it is just one or the other is a misrepresentation of this history, and also of how people generally operate. People are complicated.

It isn’t clear the atomic bombs ended World War II

My least favorite way in which the end of World War II is discussed goes along these lines: “The atomic bombs ended World War II.” My second-least favorite way is a weaker variant that is becoming more common: “A few days after the atomic bombs were dropped, the Japanese surrendered.” Note the latter doesn’t really say the bombs did it… but implies it very strongly. 

Scholars have known for a long time that the end of World War II was an immensely complicated event. Several events happened within the space of a few days, including:

  • The bombing of the city of Hiroshima
  • The Soviet declaration of war against the Japanese, and subsequent invasion of Manchuria
  • The bombing of the city of Nagasaki
  • Internal friction within the Japanese high command
  • An attempted coup by junior military officers
  • An offer of surrender that still maintained the status of the Emperor
  • A rejection of this offer by the Americans
  • An increase of American conventional bombing
  • An acceptance of unconditional surrendered by the Emperor himself

If I tried to write out all of the events that the above encapsulate, this post would get very long indeed. The point I want to make, though, is that it isn’t some simple matter of “atomic bombs = unconditional surrender.” Even with two atomic bombs and the Soviet invasion, the Japanese high command still didn’t offer unconditional surrender! It was a very close thing all around, and it strikes me as impossible to totally disentangle all of the causes of their surrender.

I think it is fair to say that the atomic bombs played a role in the Japanese surrender. It is clear they were one of the issues on their mind, both those in the military who wanted the country to resist invasion as bloodily as possible (with the hope of making the Allies accept more favorable terms for Japan), and those who wanted a diplomatic end of the war (though even those did not imagine accepting unconditional surrender — they wanted to preserve the imperial house).

Russian image of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, 9 August-2 September 1945. There’s something about all that red that, I think, underscores how disastrous the Japanese would have seen this.

It is also clear that the Soviet declaration of war and subsequent invasion of Manchuria loomed largely in all of their minds as well. Which is more important? Could we imagine the same results occurring if one hadn’t occurred? I don’t know. It’s complicated. It’s messy. Like the real world.9

There are some who believe the war could have been ended without the atomic bombings (especially the bombing of Nagasaki, which does not appear to have changed things in the minds of the Japanese high command). I’ve never been totally convinced of their arguments; they strike me as a bit overly optimistic. But I think it is also clear that the Soviet role deserves far more attention than it typically gets in American versions of this story; it is easy to document its impact. And then again, one can ask how much would have been changed if the unconditional surrender requirement had been modified earlier on, like some American advisors had urged. The tricky thing about history, though, is you can’t just rewind it, change a few variables, and run it forward again. So it’s hard to have any confidence about such predictions.

Still, it’s worth noting that the relationship between the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender is a complicated one. In the US, claiming the atomic bombs ended the war has historically been a way of writing the Soviets out of the picture, as well as making the case for the use of the bombs stronger. I think both of these make for bad history.

The bombings were controversial in their time

While the majority of Americans supported the atomic bombings at the time — they were, after all, told they had ended World War II, saved huge numbers of lives, and so on — it is worth just noting that approval was not universal, and that people questioning whether they had to be used, or whether they had ended World War II, were not fringe. Some of the most critical voices about the atomic bombings came from military figures who, for a variety of reasons, would come out against the bombings in the years afterwards. The US Strategic Bombing Survey, a military-led assessment of bombing effectiveness in World War II, concluded in July 1946 that:

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no [American] invasion had been planned or contemplated.10

Which is a pretty shocking statement to read! I’m not saying you have to agree with it; you’re not bound by isolated judgments of the past, and there are good reasons to doubt the reasoning of the USSBS (they were acting in part out of fear that the atomic bombs would overshadow conventional bombing efforts and undercut their desire for a large and independent Air Force). But I think it is useful to point out that doubtful voices are not a recent thing, nor are they exclusively associated with the “obvious” points of views (like those sympathetic to Communism or the Soviets). The past is complicated, and the people in the past were complicated as well. I have frequently observed that the people who tell us not to impose present-day judgments on the past are unaware that many of these same judgments were made in the past as well.

In conclusion: talk to historians!

Nothing I have written above is, I don’t think, terribly unknown to historians doing active work on this topic. They might have different takes on these things than I do (in fact, I know many of them do), and that’s fine. Historians disagree with each other. That’s part of the fun of it, and why it is an active area of research. There are lots of historical interpretations, lots of historical narratives, lots of juicy stories and hot takes.

But you wouldn’t know this from most historical coverage of the atomic bombings, especially when anniversaries roll around. There are probably non-insidious reasons for this. I get that journalists don’t have time to read every piece of scholarship that has come out since the last 5 year anniversary, or even since the 1990s (most of the mythical discussions are stuck in the “culture wars” version of the atomic bomb story, best exemplified by the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay controversy of 1995). Journalists work on lots of topics, I get it.

Hello Kitty at the Atomic Bomb Dome

Something I saw for sale at a gift shop in the Grand Prince Hotel, Hiroshima, in 2017. Aside from its oddness, I like to use it when teaching to talk about how the bombings can mean different things to different people — this is the Hiroshima dome as a symbol of peace, not a symbol of destruction.

But journalists — you can reach out to us! There are many historians doing interesting work on these topics. Just get in touch. We’ll talk to you. And one question you should always ask any historians you contact is: “who else should I talk to?” Because some of us historians are more prominent than others (in that our names and websites come up when you Google them), but that doesn’t mean we’re the only ones out here. We’ll happily put you in touch with scholars who are well-known within our discipline, but harder to see outside of it. Because they’ve got interesting things to say, too.

And if you really aren’t sure who those might be, the author list of this 2020 volume from Princeton University Press (in which I published my article on Kyoto) is a good place to start!11

Why do this? Because a) it’s better history, b) these historical narratives are tied to a lot of other narratives (like debates about the morality of war, for example), and c) because provocative, interesting, hot stories will practically write themselves if you talk to scholars working on the cutting-edge of this work. Let us help you! It’s win-win!

There are other things, of course, that a journalist ought to know — but these things, for me, stand out the most as the “big picture” issues that I still see coming up again and again, despite the fact that the scholarship has been beyond them for decades now. Those who do not know the past, at the very least, are in danger of repeating the same bad versions of the past…!

General news update: The COVID-19 crisis dramatically complicated my teaching and research productivity over the last semester, and I’ve been digging myself out of a work-hole ever since. The good news is that some very interesting things are in the works. And I should be posting a few more blog posts this summer! 

  1. Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harper, 1962), 265. On the role of technical choices constraining policy choices, see  Sean L. Malloy, “‘The Rules of Civilized Warfare’: Scientists, Soldiers, Civilians, and American Nuclear Targeting, 1940-1945,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 501-505. [↩]
  2. Henry A. Wallace diary entry of 10 August 1945 found in Henry A. Wallace, The Diary of Henry Agard Wallace, January 18, 1935-September 19, 1946 (Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corp. of America, 1977), 162. [↩]
  3. On this, see Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). [↩]
  4. Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995). [↩]
  5. See e.g. Patrick Blackett’s Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (London, Turnstile Press: 1948): “So we may conclude that the dropping of atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.” I bring this up not so much to slight Alperovitz — he defends the thesis with far better access to archives and material than someone like Blackett had — but just to point out that these ideas are not so “new” as people sometimes make them out to be. [↩]
  6. Stimson’s Harper’s article in 1946 laid out the “orthodox” version of this narrative. Stimson had considerable input into the article from others, including Leslie Groves and James Conant, and had written it to counter mounting criticism of the atomic bombings. Whatever one thinks of Alperovitz’s thesis, the chapters in his book on the crafting of the Stimson article and the shaping of this narrative are excellent. See Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, part IV, “Managing History.” [↩]
  7. Again, see Gordin’s Five Days in August on this. [↩]
  8. What I hate about the term “revisionism” is that its use implies that all history that up-ends or alters an accepted narrative is somehow motivated by a political bias of some sort. Which is nonsense. Historians have good reasons to revise and argue against accepted narratives — and use evidence to do so. When scientists can find a new explanation for something, we praise them for their novelty; when historians do it, we chastise them for telling us something different than what we learned in grade school. I prefer to speak in terms of good and bad history, strong and weak arguments. Some new history is strong, some is weak. Some old history is strong, some is weak. Whether it is new or old is not really the important part. [↩]
  9. The best explication of this view, and perhaps the best “one-stop shop” for learning about the complexities of the end of World War II, is Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). One of these days I will finally write up some more detailed thoughts on the “Hasegawa thesis” — but whatever one thinks of that, Hasegawa’s explication of the events is detailed and nuanced, and that makes it a very worthwhile read. [↩]
  10. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War) (Washington, D.C., 1 July 1946 [↩]
  11. Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry, eds., The Age of Hiroshima (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). My article, “The Kyoto misconception: What Truman knew, and didn’t know, about Hiroshima,” is chapter 3. [↩]

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