Alex Wellerstein on the Atomic Bomb Decision, Truman's Accountability, and the Nuclear Taboo

Alex Wellerstein

Well, I'll start by highlighting that the first quote is actually several quotes I very quickly cop to taking completely out of context — not usually how you start a book as a historian. But I think that language is really important to understanding what Truman is about. It's this emotional, repetitive language over the course of his career. As I say at the beginning, if you heard that quote attributed to anybody else, you would not think for a second that they thought the atomic bomb was a good thing. To have it attributed to Truman is telling you something.

I never in a million years, when I started working on the history of nuclear weapons, thought I'd write a book about Harry Truman and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It felt like ground that had been gone over many times by many other people — what are the odds I'd have a new take worth listening to? But over the years I came to believe there was something missing, not just in the popular account, but in the scholarly ones too.

Alex Wellerstein

There are two ways people usually hear about the atomic bomb decision and Truman's role in it. The first is what we might call the orthodox or official story: Truman weighs the costs and benefits of using the bomb very carefully, and uses it to prevent the casualties that would come from an invasion. It's a heavy-hearted thing, but he does it because it ultimately saves lives — that's the version people involved in the decision, Truman himself included, put out into the world in his memoirs. The other version, sometimes called the revisionist version, says that people in the Truman administration, including Truman, didn't actually think the bomb was needed to end the war, and used it instead to scare the Soviets.

Like a lot of scholars, I reject both versions. Both have some evidence behind them, and both fail to live up to what the historical record actually shows when you look closely. For one thing, they both over-rationalise the process — they make it look as if people were actually deliberating over whether to use the bomb, when it was essentially never deliberated at all. What I try to do in this book is take that de-over-rationalising even further, and look at exactly what Truman himself knew, at any given point, and what he was actually involved with in the decision-making.

Historians have known for a while that Truman didn't decide to use the bomb — there was no deliberation of that sort. He wasn't asked. He didn't order it. It was done by other people, and he was kept in the loop, but he basically didn't interfere with plans that were already going forward. My argument is that he actually thought he knew more than he did about what was happening. If you look at what he knew, what he wrote, and how he talked about it, it looks an awful lot like Truman wasn't aware of some really key elements. In particular, the only discussion he actually took part in, where he weighed in on an atomic bomb policy proposal before it was used, was on the question of where the bomb should be dropped — specifically, whether Kyoto should be on the target list. After that discussion, where he agrees with the Secretary of War that they shouldn't bomb Kyoto, he seems to believe the decision he'd made was not to bomb a city — that he didn't understand Hiroshima was a city, and not, as he put it, a 'purely military target.' That's the crux of the book — Truman's original sin with the bomb, one way to think of it.

Alex Wellerstein

He walked into quite a lot. By his own account he was completely out of his depth — Roosevelt hadn't told him much of anything. Even more than that, though, some of these issues weren't being coordinated in what we'd think of as a normal bureaucratic way. Take the firebombing of Japan: the framework we usually bring to it is 'why did the US government want to do this, what was its rationale, what did the president think?' As far as I can tell, no president ever wrote or said anything about firebombing at all. The programme was started by Curtis LeMay himself, in Japan, without even asking his superior officers. It was far more decentralised, and once it happened, there doesn't seem to have been much clarity about whose authority it fell under anyway — is this an operational question, like where you put your troops, or a political, even moral, question?

That distinction matters a lot for the atomic bomb too. The bomb becomes something different from other weapons, and that's not obvious — it's a historical process, and Truman plays a big role in it. Even the Kyoto discussion is part of that. The military doesn't want to recognise the Secretary of War as somebody who can override an operational choice like where to drop the bomb, because that depends on weather and analysts and other things that aren't his job — his job, at that time, is passing legislation. So Stimson is trying to carve out that this is a different kind of question, and even goes to Truman to get backing, because it's not clear the military will otherwise listen to him. I don't think Truman thought the atomic bomb was just another weapon off the assembly line. That's also why I think he'd have been amenable to the idea that its first use shouldn't be on a city — that it should be done in a way that showed they understood this was a new direction in human history, even though that wasn't a unique view to him.

Alex Wellerstein

Me too. In the Truman literature, when he left office he was tremendously unpopular, thought of as a failed president. Then there was the Truman revivalism of the 1970s, casting him as the first Cold Warrior — in a bad spot, but he did all the right things. Then an anti-Truman backlash: yes, a Cold Warrior, but a bad one, responsible for the whole Cold War, conniving. The Truman I found in the sources was none of those — he's this almost everyman figure. There's a Time magazine article naming him Person of the Year in December 1945 that's amazing: it basically argues how unworthy he is to be the man of the year, that he's just this guy who bumbled in because Roosevelt died and because of Democratic Party horse-trading, so he happens to be the one holding the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. They even make fun of his name — 'the true man' — like a historical joke. In a way that's unfair, and in a way it's completely correct. He's a very human, relatable figure, and one wonders what it would have been like if Roosevelt had lived — Roosevelt was not a relatable figure, a crafty, upper-class political warrior, secretive, interested in being buddy-buddy with foreign powers. Eisenhower, later, is much more of a military guy, with more ideological conceptions about the Cold War. Truman is just not that.

What surprised me is that Truman isn't really a Cold Warrior until about 1950. From 1945 to 1950 he's about the most sympathetic, realistic voice you could imagine in the White House — he thinks the Soviets are jerks, but mostly that Stalin's a good guy and it's the people around Stalin who are the problem, that once they get the distrust and paranoia out of their system they'll see the United States is basically on their side, and that the two could carve up the world and each stay in their own area. It's not until the Korean War that he gets bitter about that. Even in 1949 he's telling people around him that he thinks they'll be done with the Cold War in two years and will probably be able to ban all nuclear weapons — which nobody but Truman thinks. He has these very idiosyncratic views, not shared by the people around him, but he's the president, so they matter.

Alex Wellerstein

What's amazing about some of these meetings is you'll have a memo or diary account of them trying to explain everything, and then you look at the times people left the meeting — because all of this is recorded — and this early meeting in April 1945 tried to give Truman the entire history and science of the Manhattan Project, which I can tell you from teaching the subject is a lot, in twenty-five minutes. Either these people could speak five times faster than you or I and still be understood, or there was a lot of gesturing and not much depth.

Very few presidents ever get into the weeds on nuclear weapons policy, because they don't have the knowledge to do it — I think it makes them uncomfortable, so they hand it to experts and say boil it down to a choice. Truman mostly does that. There are places where he hands things over entirely to his technical or diplomatic or military advisers. And then there are places where he lays down the law without anyone telling him that's the way to do it — those are the most interesting, because he's not operating from deep technical knowledge. He barely has an idea of what an atom is. What he does have are very simple, basic opinions — I don't mean that as derision — on things like what the military is likely to do, what Congress is likely to do, what other countries are likely to do, what the right thing for a state to do is. On the bomb, he has occasionally very strong, basically moral positions: you should not be planning to commit a genocide. He never worded it that way, but that's essentially how he feels about a third world war — we shouldn't do it, even if it's to our advantage, because that's not what the good guys do, and we are the good guys. That's in real opposition to how a think-tank type of that era approaches it — it's not a Herman Kahn kind of analysis. It's not deeply analytical. It's much more, again, everyman.

Alex Wellerstein

The firebombing has this interesting aspect: today we talk about it a lot, and it wasn't secret at the time — Curtis LeMay was giving press conferences about how much they'd destroyed. But at no point did any reporter ask Roosevelt or Truman what they thought about it, which is hard to imagine today. It doesn't seem to have been much of a point of discussion even within the military. The only person who occasionally tried to look into it was Stimson, and he was told it was fine — I don't know if he accepted that, or was just busy, or didn't feel he was in a political position to challenge it. We often assume that because they were firebombing, they didn't have moral qualms about destroying cities, and I'm not sure that's true — I think they could be firebombing and still have qualms about cities.

Marshall is really interesting: he's Chief of Staff, ostensibly the highest-ranking military figure, and people don't generally ask him what he thinks. When they do, his opinions aren't what you'd expect — he suggests at one point that maybe they just shouldn't use the atomic bomb at all, and that they shouldn't use it on cities. At the same time he says they could use chemical weapons against troops but not against cities, which isn't the usual way people divide these things up. When he got pushback, he just said, okay, whatever, and let it go — it was clear that wasn't the direction things were going.

I don't know how aware Truman was of the firebombing — it was in the newspapers, so he must have known to some degree. Stimson did go to him and suggest they were getting the reputation of outdoing the Nazis in atrocities, but Truman's opinion was never directly asked. Nobody went to him and said, should we keep doing this, yes or no? Even Stimson, essentially lobbying for restraint, never asked him to stop — he just raised some issues and qualms and moved on. My suspicion, just from being a human being — we don't have records that tell us this — is that asking somebody to do something and having them say no is a bigger defeat than simply putting the idea out there and hoping they act on it. I don't think Stimson felt it was his place to ask the president to stop something; if the president wants to stop it, the president can stop it. I think in peacetime it would have been different — we see a little of that with the hydrogen bomb, which Truman ultimately approves, but for domestic political reasons, with a heavy heart, and with the explicit sentiment that he doesn't plan to use it — they just need to build it, which arguably lessens the moral hazard.

Alex Wellerstein

It's hard to know how much public opinion follows what already happened and seemed to have worked, rather than shaping the decision beforehand. Stimson is interesting here because he kept a diary — hugely helpful — recording every thought he had. He was concerned with setting the conditions for outcomes he thought useful. He wasn't a fan of the extreme anti-Japanese sentiment, because in his mind that would get in the way of ending the war — he was a big proponent of clarifying to the Japanese emperor that the US wouldn't harm his position, that Japan could still run itself once demilitarised, partly because he thought that was what would be needed to get Japan to surrender. That got turned down by Truman, for complicated reasons but partly under the influence of James Byrnes — not a sentiment that wants to give the Japanese any concessions, given Pearl Harbor. It's interesting that Stimson — and Winston Churchill too — held this more conciliatory view. Stimson had been to Japan, thought of himself as something of a Japan expert, and hated the view that the Japanese were all fanatical, death-cult people. Some were, but not all, and not all of the ones in power — if you treat all of them as fighting to the last man, that's what you'll get; if you give the more reasonable ones a way out and some power, that gets you the end of the war.

I do think public opinion was part of some of these deliberations, but I don't think it's why they dropped the bomb. It didn't have a big impact on the decisions they made, because they already had other reasons for wanting to make those decisions.

Alex Wellerstein

Hoodwinking implies deliberate deception, and I don't think it was that. The whole context is this Kyoto question — there are some myths about it, that Stimson had been on his honeymoon there, that kind of thing. For whatever reason, when Stimson hears the list of atomic targets in May 1945, Kyoto is not only on the list but the military's top choice, and he almost instinctively objects. There are rationalisations he gives over time — it's a place of culture, mostly civilian, the old capital, the Japanese will be sad and it'll hurt our post-war relations — but it looks to me like an emotional response: he knows Kyoto, and he doesn't want it on the list.

The military — General Groves in this case — isn't interested in taking Kyoto off the list, and resents it; Groves later says he's happy Stimson did this, but calls it the only instance in which Stimson interfered with military planning. Stimson holds firm all the way through Potsdam, even as Groves keeps coming back to ask if Kyoto can go back on, and finally, as they're finalising the target list over teletype while Stimson's at Potsdam, Groves' people ask if Kyoto can go back on as a backup, just in case of weather. It's clear Groves isn't willing to back down, so Stimson goes straight to Truman and gets him to agree that Kyoto shouldn't be on the list — then he can write back to Groves that he's had it confirmed at the highest level. That takes Kyoto off, makes Hiroshima the number-one target, and adds Nagasaki to the list as the backup.

We have two accounts of that meeting — Stimson's diary and Truman's journal from Potsdam, both from the time. Stimson's diary makes it sound like he laid out a rational case: Kyoto is a historic, civilian city, not a real military target, and bombing it would cost us Japanese goodwill after the war. Truman's account of the same discussion is that he and the Secretary of War decided the first use of the bomb should be against a military target — that women and children shouldn't be the target, but sailors and soldiers — and he seems pleased with that. That's the context for how the confusion happens. What exactly Stimson said to Truman, we don't have a direct record of, but my suspicion, based on how Stimson justified keeping Kyoto off the list elsewhere, is twofold: Stimson would say whatever it took to keep Kyoto off the target list, and his whole argument rested on a division between a place like Hiroshima and a place like Kyoto — that Kyoto doesn't have military industry, and Hiroshima has military factories and army installations. That's true to a degree, but the military, even then, pointed out that Kyoto had military facilities too, and Hiroshima was a city too — the line wasn't as firm as Stimson would have drawn it. Stimson is trying to force an outcome, and I think it's plausible Truman misunderstood the discussion as being about whether to bomb a big city or a big military base, rather than a choice between two cities, and came away believing, per his journal, that they'd chosen a 'purely military target.' That language crops up in other things he writes, right up until the first photographs of Hiroshima arrive and it's clearly a city.

So it's not that Stimson set out to confuse Truman — Stimson set out with a different goal, to save Kyoto, and I don't think Truman realised he'd misunderstood the conversation. Truman is busy at the time — negotiating with Stalin — and doesn't ask for follow-up, doesn't reconfirm what he's understood. Put that way, it's not hard to see how a president could be misunderstood about something; presidents misunderstand things all the time, and this wasn't some formal briefing with all his advisers in the room — it's a one-on-one conversation with somebody who has a very definite goal going in. I don't think Stimson would have wanted to mislead Truman — that's just not his character — but I think it's totally possible he did.

Alex Wellerstein

By 8 August 1945, he a hundred per cent knows it's a city — that's the first day there are any reports from the Japanese mentioning a city, or casualties, and the first intelligence on what happened to the target, since it took two days for the smoke from the fires to dissipate enough to get a good photograph of Hiroshima. That morning, Stimson goes to Truman and shows him a report on the damage — clearly a city. What Truman was thinking, one can only guess. He's reporting terrible headaches and difficulty sleeping around this time. There's a photograph of him getting the report from Stimson, because the press was there — he's smiling, but behind his eyes, it doesn't look like a happy person to me; I've posted the photo on my website, people can judge for themselves. I think Truman would have been quite disturbed. He's not thrilled at the idea of killing, as he puts it, 'women and children' — that's one of what get called Trumanisms, repetitive phrases he uses throughout his life and career for talking about non-combatants.

You might ask about Nagasaki — Hiroshima is 8 August, Nagasaki is 9 August. If he doesn't want to bomb cities, why does he approve Nagasaki? I've found zero evidence that Truman knew a second bomb was coming. While he's getting his briefing from Stimson on the 8th, the Nagasaki plane is already taking off from Tinian. With the first bomb, Truman was told right before it was used and was very interested in the schedule; he referred to it simply as 'the atomic bomb.' The actual strike order — which I'm not sure Truman even saw — approved by Stimson and Marshall, describes the first bomb in detail but then says further bombs can be dropped as soon as they're available. He'd have been told once, early on, that they were planning to have two bombs ready by early August, but the one time he asked about the schedule at Potsdam, he was read a telegram saying the first 'of the tested type' would be ready around 1 August, the next about a week or more later. That's accurate as far as it goes — except there were two types of bomb, a tested type and an untested type, and at no point was he told there was also an untested type ready by 1 August. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were different bomb designs. I don't think Truman caught that; he's negotiating with Stalin, he's got other things on his plate, and those details would confuse most people today who know only a little about the bombings.

On 10 August, Truman tells his cabinet he has ordered the atomic bombings stopped, citing the children — he can't stand the thought of killing any more of them. If I'm trying to get inside his head, I see somebody who realises he isn't in control of this at all, and seizes control back.

Alex Wellerstein

My sense is Truman doesn't feel responsible for the firebombings the same way he does the atomic bombing — we could debate whether he should, but my sense is he doesn't, and that's an interesting distinction.

Alex Wellerstein

Truman's own writing makes it clear, again and again, that he thinks the atomic bomb, even before it's used, is special. At Potsdam he writes about it as maybe the end of the world prophesied in the Bible, maybe the most terrible invention in the history of mankind. By the time he leaves office in 1953, asked again whether it's really so bad, he says he doesn't think people get it — this thing is worse than biological and chemical warfare, the worst weapon ever made. We could disagree with him, but historically the important thing is that he really seems to believe it.

Alex Wellerstein

It's not a group decision, and that's Truman's own decision — part of his legacy. Starting the day after Nagasaki, he centralises any decision to use atomic weapons in himself, the president. At first that's just the arrangement; it eventually gets articulated as policy, though later than most people realise — there's no official US policy on who decides to use an atomic bomb until 1948, and even then it's one sentence: it's up to the president. There were other options floated at the time. I think the reason Truman does this is that he doesn't trust the military — he doesn't trust anybody, only himself — and he doesn't want these weapons used again. That's one of the things he repeats throughout his administration: his whole goal is to never use nuclear weapons again. That's not the standard version of Truman most people carry in their heads, but the exclusive presidential power to use nuclear weapons was created so that they wouldn't get used — which is not how it's talked about today, where the discussion is about whether the military could stop the president from using the bomb. That's exactly the flip of the situation in the 1940s.

Alex Wellerstein

Great question. Under Truman, he almost totally centralises everything in himself, because he doesn't trust the military. Under Eisenhower, things eventually flip — he maintains a lot of Truman's policies initially, but eventually goes the other direction entirely, and the military ends up with access to the weapons. Under Truman, after World War II, the military never has access to more than nine nuclear weapons out of hundreds, and they only get those nine in 1951, for political rather than operational reasons. Under Eisenhower, the military ends up with 90% of the stockpile. Partly that's because the weapons change — it's no longer possible to keep the nuclear and non-nuclear components separated the way they did in the 1940s — and partly because the Soviet Union now has hundreds of weapons, so the fear shifts: it's no longer that the military might start a war without permission, it's that we'll get caught with our pants down and destroyed. By the end of the 1950s, before Kennedy takes office, the military can wage nuclear war on a scale much bigger than in the 1940s, with essentially no involvement from the president — no locks on the weapons, no codes. People like Curtis LeMay say openly, even in the '40s, that if it looks like world war is coming, they're not going to let a political order from Washington, even from Eisenhower, stand in their way.

That's the situation Kennedy's people inherit, and they're horrified — they don't realise how much bigger the nuclear war plan is than they'd been told, since all the war planning is done in the Pentagon and not shared with the White House. They add locks to all overseas and eventually domestic weapons — the permissive action links — and try, not completely successfully, to centralise war planning within the executive branch, so the Joint Chiefs can't just make their own plans without White House input. The early war plans of the '50s and early '60s literally couldn't avoid nuking China even if China wasn't part of the war — the planners' logic was, are you telling me you'd let a giant communist power survive a world war? That's covered very well in Daniel Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Machine — he was personally involved in some of these discussions.

By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy has been trying to convince both Khrushchev and his own generals he's a tough guy not to be underestimated, while also being well aware that if the military blunders into nuclear war, there isn't much he himself can do to stop it — it's not a situation where, absent his order, everyone just stands there. They have their own people running things who don't fully trust Kennedy. That's one of the reasons the crisis is so dangerous: Kennedy only realises partway through that there are a lot of pathways to nuclear war he doesn't control. He can't actually guarantee the decision to avoid nuclear war under those conditions.

Alex Wellerstein

I think quite a lot. There are people you could imagine in power in 1950–51 — including Eisenhower, including Brian McMahon, a major Democratic politician planning to run for president in '52 who died of cancer first — who didn't have qualms about giving the military the weapons, or using them, and in fact disliked the idea that these weapons created unique moral hazards. In situations like the Korean War, the reason you're not using them isn't deterrence — the Soviet Union has a tiny arsenal it can't deliver over great distances. There was a contingent within the military pushing at the edges of 'maybe under certain circumstances,' and they're explicit, in classified hearings and diary entries, that they're worried about a taboo being created — the idea that atomic bombs are morally problematic, not usable weapons like any other. And they're clear that the most important person advocating that view is President Truman. There's a lot of scholarship, largely by political scientists, on why nuclear weapons haven't been used since World War II — deterrence and rational choice are part of the answer, but a big part is this belief that using them crosses a line, that the bar for their use is much higher than for other weapons, especially in non-deterrent situations, like the French at Dien Bien Phu, where using them wouldn't have risked being attacked back with nuclear weapons. If that belief played any role at all, having the first American president with nuclear weapons be one of the biggest subscribers to that taboo has to have had an impact. The irony of Harry Truman is that the only president who presided over the use of nuclear weapons in war may be one of the main reasons they haven't been used again.

Alex Wellerstein

It's easy, especially with nuclear weapons, to assume they're part of a big system that leads to certain outcomes — we've got all these weapons, all these self-interested rational actors, and they won't use them because it's not in their interest. That sounds great, assuming everyone sees it that way, which they may or may not, depending on the people. I think the point of my book is that it's easy to abstract away the individuals. There's been a healthy pushback in history against 'great man' history — the idea that individuals alone push history's trajectory — and that pushback is largely right. But on the other extreme, everything just happens, forces things emerge from, and it would happen one way or another no matter what; individuals don't matter. I think there's something to be said for individuals sometimes mattering a great deal. Specific people get into positions of power with specific mindsets and worldviews that aren't just the product of everyone around them — of their time, sure, what else could they be, but not reducible to it. What if they feel very strongly about women and children and the people around them don't? At the end of the day, if the system is set up so that the position of the one person at the top is the opinion everybody else bends around, then that person matters a lot.

There's relevance in that for thinking about Russia, or how worried we should be about Putin wanting to use nuclear weapons, or about China and Xi — part of the question is what does he think the situation is, what does he value, what does he not value. That's hard to get at, getting inside somebody's head, but we have to do it if we're going to think about these things seriously. We can't just assume they'll think about it the way we do — who knows who they've been talking to, how much they understand, how good their intelligence briefings are, whether they understand the weapons correctly. Those are harder things to grasp than is obvious.

Alex Wellerstein

Just that if people find the claims I make, delivered over a podcast, hard to believe — please read the book. These are big claims that require evidence, and I try to give that evidence; I've made practically every source easy to access online, through the footnotes, and I'm setting up documents on my own website with some of the key primary sources for people to look at. This is an area where we're fed certain stories about how the atomic bombs were used, and we weave them into our worldviews seamlessly, so anything suggesting an alternative seems surprising. But I think people will be surprised there's another way to look at this.

Alex Wellerstein

Thank you so much, I really appreciate that.