It seems like a turning point. A singular moment in history that, in retrospect, was not only inevitable but also unimpeachable. Most people would probably agree that atomic bombs, with their capacity to destroy entire cities, are terrible things. The vast majority of those people probably also believe that the first time a nuclear bomb was used on people – on Hiroshima, Japan, 70 years ago to the day – it was justified, because it helped end the second World War. But what if it didn't?



Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been turned into inflection points, looming large above the overall memory of WWII just like the mushroom clouds the bombs left after they were dropped. Both the use of the bombs themselves and the narrative that they ended the war are so seared into history that it's hard to consider any alternative.

But we tend to forget that the Cold War and all its attendant propaganda came right after the bombs were dropped. It was in US President Harry Truman's interest to squelch any sort of criticism of what must have been a terrible choice to make. As is evident, Truman and the general American view that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to the war, has become the conventional one.

Not for everybody though.

"I was against it on two counts," said Dwight D Eisenhower – Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during WWII and later, president of the US – in an interview to Newsweek in 1963. "First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."

Simply put, those who defend the bombs argue that if they hadn't been used, America would have been forced to invade Japan as it had promised to do, which would have led to the deaths of many more lives. Others have used more patronising arguments, like suggesting that the America's judicious use of the bombs demonstrated to the world the horrors of atomic warfare and so prevented others from using them. But the main argument remains this: it ended the war.



Except that particular war, with Allied Forces taking on Japan might have already been coming to an end. About two decades after the war, political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz became the most prominent of voices to argue that the US did not, indeed, have any reason to use the bomb. At least not if its aim was to get Japan to surrender.

As Ward Wilson summarised in a piece for Foreign Policy in 2013, there were three major problems with presuming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the Japanese surrender.

One: Japan's Supreme Council, which ultimately decided on the surrender, didn't convene to meet Hiroshima even after the Japenese foreign minister asked them to. Instead, the decision was taken at a Supreme Council meeting that began three days after Hiroshima but before the Nagasaki bombing.

Two: While we think of the atomic bombs as being singularly terrible, the US campaign against Japan in general that summer was brutal. Hiroshima wasn't even number one in terms of civilian deaths among the 68 cities bombed that summer and fourth in the number of square miles destroyed. The atomic bombs were massive, but they weren't a sudden spectre of mass destruction so much as a just a continuation of a few terrible months for Japan.

Three: The impending invasion, not of American troops, which wasn't expected till November, but of Soviet forces. For much of the war, the Soviets remained neutral against Japan, with the latter hoping Moscow could mediate. When Tokyo continued to fight after the fall of Adolf Hitler's Germany too, Soviet leader Josef Stalin declared war on Japan. As of August 9, when the surrender was announced, Soviet troops were just 10 days away from Japan – whereas the Americans had been destroying cities for months. Wilson, in fact, argues that it was Stalin, and not the atomic bombs, that ended the war.

Alperovitz's argument goes further than just arguing that the bombs didn't end the war. In The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Alperovitz argued that the surrender was essentially assured, only the terms had to be worked out. Truman refused to accept certain terms, like not trying the Japanese Emperor for war crimes, until he got to drop the bombs after which those conditions were granted. As Alperovitz explained in 2011, Truman was most likely looking ahead to the post-war period, when America would have to contend with a rival superpower in the USSR.
The United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.

Hundreds of documents later from Japan and the US would make it clear not only that it was the Russian troops that had at least as much of a role in pushing Tokyo to surrender, but also that top American military leaders from Eisenhower down didn't believe much more needed to be done to end the war – as long as the US didn't insist on dethroning the Japanese Emperor.

Alperovitz quotes William Leahy, the senior-most US military office on active duty in WWII and the man who presided over the US-UK Chiefs of military staffs during the war:
[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”