Clifton Daniel is right about bombing his grandfather on Hiroshima (‘He felt he had to do it’, August 4). “That was not a decision!” Harry S Truman told me when I interviewed him in July 1963 at the Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. I was a postgraduate student and had come to ask him about Hiroshima, the case study at the center of my recently completed dissertation on presidential decision-making. In a stroke, the very core of my research was cut through by the friendly old man.
Truman, who had become President of Hiroshima just a few weeks before the sudden death of Franklin D Roosevelt, told me how the advisers of FDR, in particular the venerable Secretary of War, Henry L Stimson, convinced him that the dropping of the atomic bomb on humans was an initiative that would bring the war in the Pacific to a rapid end, without the need for a prolonged invasion of the Japanese islands at the cost of a million more lives. When I asked Truman about the dangers of nuclear radiation, or whether the bomb was actually used to impress or frighten the Soviets, all this was dismissed as the dreams of people who were not present and speculated about things they were ‘. t power to judge. “All the atomic bomb was,” said Truman, “was a great bomb to end the war. And it ended, too!”
I told him I always had visions of the American president passing the corridors of the White House, like Lincoln during the Civil War, weighed down by the pressure of the job. Truman lake. “I never lost sleep over a decision I had to make,” he said, adding confidentially, “Your Winston was the same, you know!”
When I left, Truman told me that if I wanted to focus on a real decision – the biggest, most important one he had ever made as president – I should have turned my attention to the US entrance a few years later. Korea.
Daniel Snowman
Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London
• Whether the bombing of Hiroshima or the entry of the Soviet Union into the war was the crucial event for causing the Japanese surrender can never be definitively settled (Hiroshima at 75: bitter row remains over US decision to bomb to fall, 5 August). However, little is said about the motives for the second bombing, on Nagasaki, three days later. A few argued that it was necessary to reinforce Hiroshima’s message. After all, the military and scientific imperative was to test another bomb design – “Fat Man”, an explosion type with plutonium, as opposed to the uranium of Hiroshima’s “Little Boy”. I think that, for such reasons, destroying a particularly civilian city makes it even more of a war crime, if possible, than bombing Hiroshima.
Frank Jackson
Former Co-President, Campaign for World Disarmament
