[1] Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 128. Scientists never completely ruled out the possibility of this ultimate catastrophe. At the Trinity test, Enrico Fermi and others still contemplated the minuscule chance this could occur and James Conant, stunned by the “enormity of the light,” momentarily feared they had ignited the world. James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 232.

[2] Harry S. Truman, 1945: Memoirs: 1945 Year of Decisions, Vol. 1 (New York: New American Library, 1955), 21.

[3] Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 634-5.

[4] Harry S. Truman, “Why I Dropped the Bomb,” Parade, 4 December 1988. Bart Bernstein, who brought this article to my attention, cautions that Margaret Truman's editing may have influenced the wording.

[5] Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1980), 55.

[6] Sadao Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and Natioinal Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the Atomic Bomb Decision, 1945-1995,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 179. For an interesting discussion of Truman's repeated use of the “sleep” metaphor, see Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995), 176. Some scholars have suggested that Truman was more conflicted about this decision than he admitted. See Lifton and Mitchell, 148-9, 188-192 and Gar Alperovitz, “Was Harry Truman a Revisionist on Hiroshima?” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter 29(June 1998), 1-9.

[7] John W. Dower, “Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb, 37-51. For an expanded version of this analysis, see John W. Dower, “Three Narratives of Our Humanity,” in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 63-96.

[8] Lifton and Mitchell, 6-7. Truman's anger toward the Japanese surfaced frequently. Shortly after Nagasaki, Truman defended the bombings in a letter to the Federal Council of Churches, explaining, “I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.” Quoted in Barton J. Bernstein, “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 74(January/February 1995), 152.

[9] Michael S. Sherry, “Patriotic Orthodoxy and American Decline,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb, 143-4, 149; Lifton and Mitchell, 240.

[10] George H. Roeder, “Making Things Visible: Learning from the Censors,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb, 89.

[11] Barton J. Bernstein, “A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 42(June/July 1986), 38-40; Bernstein, “Reconsidering ‘Invasion Most Costly’: Popular-History Scholarship, Publishing Standards, and the claim of High U.S. Casualty Estimates to Help Legitimize the Atomic Bombings,” Peace and Change 24(April 1999), 220-248; Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches,” 182; Sherry, “Patriotic Orthodoxy and American Decline,”144. For one of many challenges to Bernstein's “low-end casualty estimates,” see Michael Kort, “Casualty Projections for the Invasion of Japan, Phantom Estimates, and the Math of Barton Bernstein,” Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations 34(December 2003), 4-12.

[12] Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 326. [Hereafter referred to as Decision.]

[13] Lane Fenrich, “Mass Death in Miniature: How Americans Became Victims of the Bomb,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb, 127.

[14] George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 14; Laura Hein and Mark Selden, “Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb, 25.

[15] Nozaki Yoshiko and Inokuchi Hiromitsu, “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga Saburo's Textbook Lawsuits”; Gavan McCormack, “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History”; Laura Hein and Mark Selden, “The Lesson of War, Global Power, and Social Change” all in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).

[16] Monica Braw, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Voluntary Silence,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb, 158.

[17] Hugh Gusterson, “Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb, 264,267.

[18] See Robert Jay Lifton, “The Image of ‘The End of the World’: A Psychohistorical View,” Michigan Quarterly Review 24(Winter 1985), 70-90; Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection (New York, 1979), especially chapters 22 and 23; Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Ira Chernus, Nuclear Madness: Religion and the Psychology of the Nuclear Age (Albany, 1991); James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New York, 1930); Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (Cambridge, 1933); Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (New York, 1929); Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York, 1929).

[19] For the full report of the Committee on Social and Political Implications chaired by James Franck, see the appendix to Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and A Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America: 1945-47 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 560-572.

[20] Jeremy Bernstein, Hans Bethe: Prophet of Energy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 73. Bethe and Teller recalled that immediate development of the hydrogen bomb was a principal topic of conversation between Oppenheimer and Compton in their summer 1942 meeting. Stanley A. Blumberg and Gwinn Owens, Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), 116-119.

[21] Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus; The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 188.

[22] Text of petition in Robert C. Williams and Philip L. Cantelon, eds., The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present 1939-1984 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 67.

[23] Quoted in Barton J. Bernstein, “Four Physicists and the Bomb: The Early Years, 1945-1950,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 18(No.2, 1988), 236.

[24] Henry L. Stimson diaries, May 31, 1945, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

[25] Bird and Sherwin, 293.

[26] John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace 1942-1946 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), 630.

[27] Harry S. Truman, 462.

[28] Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973), 5.

[29] Steve Kettmann, “Politics 2000,” www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/03/20/rice.

[30] For a discussion of the controversy sparked by McCullough's biography, see Philip Nobile, “On the Steps of the Smithsonian: Hiroshima Denial in America's Attic,” in Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1995), lxii-lxv. For a more reliable treatment of Truman, see Arnold S. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

[31] Harry S. Truman, 20.

[32] Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 265.

[33] Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc.), 208.

[34] Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, “The Fight Over the Atom Bomb,” Look 27(August 13, 1963), 20. For Groves's explanation to Truman, see Alperovitz, Decision, 780, n39.

[35] Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Random House, 1977), 62.

[36] See Alperovitz, Decision; Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race (New York: Random House, 1987); Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995). For somewhat more tempered views, see J. Samuel Walker, Prompt & Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1994).

[37] Douglas MacArthur to Herbert Hoover, December 2, 1960, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Post-Presidential Papers, Individual File Series, Box 129 G. Douglas MacArthur 1953-1964 folder [3212 (3)]. I thank Uday Mohan for bringing this letter to my attention. MacArthur's insistence on this point never wavered over the years. After a long talk with MacArthur in May 1946, Hoover had written in his diary: “I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.” Alperovitz, Decision, 350-51.

[38] Barton J. Bernstein, “The Struggle Over History: Defining the Hiroshima Narrative,” in Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1995), 142.

[39] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and Japan's Surrender in the Pacific War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 37.

[40] “Russo-Japanese Relations (13-20 July 1945), Publication of Pacific Strategic Intelligence Section, Commander-In-Chief United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, 21 July 1945, SRH-085, Record Group 457, Modern Military Branch, National Archives.

[41] Alperovitz, Decision, 27.

[42] Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 255-256.

[43] Ferrell, 53.

[44] Alperovitz, Decision, 415. Walter Brown wrote in his diary on July 24, 1945, “JFB told more about Jap peace bid to Russia. Japanese Ambassador to Russia warned his government that same thing which happened to Germany would happen to Japan if she stayed in the war. Emperor had said they would fight to the last man unless there was some modifications of unconditional surrender.” Hasegawa, 157; Richard Frank downplays the influence on U.S. policymakers of intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages signaling Japan's willingness to surrender if the U.S. guaranteed the status of the emperor, citing General John Weckerling's dismissive July 13 analysis in which Joseph Grew concurred. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, however, disputes Frank's interpretation, noting that Stimson, Forrestal, McCloy, and Naval Intelligence drew very different conclusions from Togo's July 12 telegram. Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999), 221-247; Hasegawa, 134.

[45] “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids,” New York Times, 30 August 1945, 1.

[46] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 160-165; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “The Atomic Bombs and Soviet Entry into the War Against Japan: Which Was More Important on Japan's Decision to Surrender in the Pacific War?” paper delivered at workshop “The End of the Pacific War Revisited,” Santa Barbara, California, April 2001.

[47] Ferrell, 53.

[48] Alperovitz, Decision, 124. In his “two-step logic,” Alperovitz argues that policymakers understood that the combination of Soviet declaration of war against Japan and mitigation of the demand for unconditional surrender would likely have produced Japanese surrender without use of the bombs. Alperovitz, Decision, 114-115.

[49] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 208.

[50] Ibid., 237.

[51] Groves, 271. Leahy made his ideas known to several people prior to the use of the bomb. It is likely, though not certain, that he expressed his views directly to Truman. For the circumstantial evidence supporting this thesis, see Alperovitz, Decision, 325-326.

[52] William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950), 441. Historians have discovered no convincing evidence that Leahy shared his ethical abhorrence of the atomic bomb with Truman or his military colleagues prior to its use on Hiroshima, but, for indications that he may have expressed his views, see Alperovitz, Decision, 324-326.

[53] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956: The White House Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 312-313.

[54] Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 426. After maintaining the accuracy of this account for over a decade, Ambrose informed Gar Alperovitz in 1995 that he now doubted that Eisenhower spoke directly to Truman, despite Eisenhower's insistence that he did so. See, Alperovitz, Decision, p.358.

[55] H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 598.

[56] “Giles Would Rule Japan A Century,” New York Times, 21 September 1945, 4.

[57] Barton J. Bernstein, “Hiroshima, Rewritten,” New York Times 31 January 1995, 21.

[58] Alperovitz, Decision, 359.

[59] Leahy, 384-385.

[60] Herbert Hoover to John Callan O'Laughlin, 8 August 1945, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, Post-Presidential Papers, Individual File Series, Box 171. For an extensive review of the conservative critique of the atomic bombings, see Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan, “An Extraordinary Reversal: American Conservatives and Hiroshima,” paper presented at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 9 January 1999.

[61] Medford Evans, “Hiroshima Saved Japan,” National Review, 14 February 1959, 525.

[62] Edward Teller to George Wald, December 12, 1969, “Teller, Edward” Folder, Box 19, George Wald Papers, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[63] Studies by Herbert Bix, Sadao Asada, Bart Bernstein, and Richard Frank cast doubt on the assertion that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender prior to Hiroshima, though Bix doubts they would have held out until the November start date for the invasion and Bernstein believes that a combination of factors would “very likely” have ended the war prior to November 1 without the atomic bombs. Groundbreaking recent scholarship by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, making use of Japanese, Russian, and American archival sources, demonstrates that Soviet entry into the war had a far more profound effect on Japanese leaders than did the atomic bombings. Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000), 487-530; Bix, “Japan's Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation,” Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995), 197-225; Sadao Asada “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender—A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review 67(November 1998), 477-512; Barton Bernstein, “Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory,” Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995), 227-273; Frank, Downfall; Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy; Hasegawa, “The Atomic Bombs and Soviet Entry into the War Against Japan.”

[64] Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

[65] Boyer, 5.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Donald Porter Geddes, ed., The Atomic Age Opens (New York: Pocket Books, 1945), 159.

[68] Boyer, 7.

[69] “Oxnam, Dulles Ask Halt in Bomb Use,” New York Times, 10 August 1945, 6.

[70] Lifton and Mitchell, 33.

[71] “Last Judgment,” Washington Post, 8 August, 1945, 4B.

[72] Arthur Compton to Henry A. Wallace, September 27, 1945. Copy in Arthur Compton Papers, Washington University in St. Louis Archives. I am grateful to Daniel Ellsberg for bringing this document to my attention.

[73] Felicity Barringer, “Journalism's Greatest Hits: Two Lists of a Century's Top Stories,” New York Times, 1 March 1999, C1; Ran Fuchs, “Journalism names Top 100 works of the century,” Washington Square News, 2 March 1999, 1.

[74] Harry S. Truman, 465.

[75] Nathan Reingold, “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Meets the Atom Bomb,” in Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley, eds., Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1985), 238-239.

[76] John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945 (New York: Random House), 766n.

[77] Wayne Phillips, “Truman Disputes Eisenhower on '48,” New York Times, 3 February 1958, 16.

[78] Bird and Sherwin, 332.

[79] Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston, 1960), 618.

[80] Stimson diaries, May 28, 1945.

[81] Morison, 618.

[82] Hershberg, 295.

[83] Stimson and Bundy, 629.

[84] Henry Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper's 194(February 1947), 107.

[85] Margaret Truman, 555.

[86] Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualty estimates very widely and are difficult to determine precisely. See John Dower, “Three Narratives of Our Humanity,” in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York:Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 79 Note 28. For somewhat lower estimates, see Frank, Downfall, 285-287.

[87] “Life on the Nuclear Edge,” Nation, 24 June 2002, 3.

[88] Lewis Mumford, “Gentlemen: You Are Mad!” Saturday Review of Literature 29(2 March 1946), 5.

[89] Dana Priest and Dana Milbank, “President Defends Allegation On Iraq: Bush Says CIA's Doubts Followed Jan. 28 Address,” Washington Post, 15 July 2003, 1.

[90] Daniel Ellsberg, “Introduction: Call to Mutiny,” in E. P. Thompson and Dan Smith, eds., Protest and Survive (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), i. For discussion of the occasions on which such used was considered, see pp. v-vi. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum lists several other occasions in which the U.S. considered using nuclear weapons, including against Soviet forces stationed in Iran in 1946, in response to the shooting down of an American plane over Yugoslavia later that year, at the inauguration of the president of Uruguay in 1948, to prevent Guatemala's aligning with the Soviet Union in 1954, when North Korea seized the American vessel Pueblo in 1968, and during the invasion of Syrian troops into Jordan in 1970.