What's a prez to do?Truman and the bomb

Harry Truman was stunned to learn he was president of the United States. “I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me,” he said to reporters regarding his reaction to the news that Franklin Roosevelt had suddenly died. Truman expressed condolences to Eleanor Roosevelt and asked if he could do anything for her. The president’s widow reversed the question. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she said. "For you are the one in trouble now.”

Truman had been vice president for less than three months. And Roosevelt had done little to prepare for the possibility that Truman would become president. World War II was in its final stages, and Roosevelt, though ailing, hoped he could hang on to the end. He didn't, felled by a stroke. Truman became commander in chief woefully underbriefed on what a wartime president needed to know.

He knew nothing of the biggest secret in American military history—the Manhattan Project, which was constructing an atom bomb. A test could happen within months; if it was successful, Truman would have to decide whether and how to use the bomb.

No human ever faced a more momentous decision, for no human ever wielded such a weapon as the successful test proved the atom bomb to be. During World War II, German, British and American bombers had rained destruction from the skies, leveling large parts of cities and killing many thousands of people. But the devastation so far had required thousands of planes and crews working for weeks and months. The atom bomb would enable one plane and one crew to flatten a city and kill most of its inhabitants within the blink of an eye.

Should Truman give the order to use the bomb? Could such destruction be justified militarily? Politically? Morally?

Presidential decisions are often lonely. “The buck stops here," read a small sign on Truman’s desk. This was the loneliest decision of all. 

Yet Truman had advisers and they gave him advice. Some said he should order the use of the bomb as soon as possible and as often as necessary to end the war. By this time Germany had surrendered; the target of the bomb would be Japan. Other advisers said the bomb was too terrible to be used. Truman might order the bomb to be dropped on a deserted island, with Japanese observers in attendance. Presumably they would recognize what was in store for them and would persuade their government to surrender. This course left open the possibility that if the Japanese did not surrender after seeing the demonstration, the bomb might be used against targets in Japan.

Truman weighed the advice and drew his own conclusions. He seems not to have been troubled by the ethics of the use of the bomb. War was war, and people got killed. Moreover this war—the American war against Japan—had been started by Japan, and with a sneak attack no less. Truman shed few tears for the Japanese, and he knew that most Americans were no more sympathetic. True, the atom bomb would kills lots of civilians, and the laws of war forbade killing civilians unnecessarily. But those laws had been broken so often in the war already that Truman paid them little heed. Anyway, a plausible argument existed that the bomb would save lives by bringing the war to a swift end.

This last argument appears to have been the crucial one for Truman. He issued a warning to the Japanese that if they did not surrender at once they risked utter destruction. The Japanese government ignored the warning. Truman ordered the bomb used against Hiroshima. The center of the city was vaporized and scores of thousands of people were killed.

The Japanese government still refused to yield. Truman order a second bomb used, against Nagasaki. The result was similar to that in Hiroshima. This time the Japanese government got the message and surrendered.

In the relief of the moment, complaints against Truman's decision to use the bomb were comparatively rare. Even the Japanese acknowledged that they might have lost more lives had the war been fought to a conventional —that is, nonnuclear—finish. Truman himself never admitted to second thoughts.

But as time passed and the horrors of World War II slipped into memory, and as a nuclear arms race took hold in the Cold War and gave rise to the possibility of far greater horrors in a World War III, Truman’s decision was more often challenged. His use of the bomb was characterized as a war crime. Alternative histories were sketched in which Truman had not used the bomb and the nuclear arms never occurred. 

Other opinionists countered that the nuclear arms race prevented World War III by raising its costs beyond any plausible benefit. They suggested that if the atom bomb hadn't been used in 1945 its bigger and more numerous successors would have been, wreaking far greater destruction. Truman did humanity a service, they said.

More than with most historical decisions, the final verdict on Truman and the bomb awaited future events. Each year that passed without a World War III lent plausibility to the contention that his use of the bomb, however regrettable in the short term, yielded a net benefit to humanity overall. But that verdict would reverse as soon as World War III began, if it ever did. Truman’s fate before the bar of historical justice hung in the balance, and it hung on the fate of the world.