UW Professor: Americans Supported Nuclear Attacks 60 Years Ago

Aug. 5, 2005 -- While the decision to drop nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago is viewed with controversy today, the bombings were popular decisions in the United States at the time, according to William Moore, professor in the University of Wyoming Department of History.

"President Truman's military analyst told him a ground invasion would take hundreds of thousands of American lives," he says. "At that time, America was not willing to surrender even 100 lives if there was a weapon that could prevent it."

Aug. 6 marks the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Three days later on Aug. 9, a second nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The nuclear attacks were designed to force Japan to surrender.

In 1995, politicians and WWII veterans disapproved of a 50th-anniversary Smithsonian exhibit that portrayed the bombings as the first in a series of negative events that included the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

"I think critics of the exhibit tended to see it as the end of something (World War II), not the beginning of something (the Cold War). There are two ways to look at it," Moore says.

As a historian, Moore studies events of the past in the context in which they occurred. He says it is difficult to impress on his students the resentment Americans had toward the Japanese during WWII.

"The attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March bred an intense contempt and hatred for Japan at the time," Moore says, noting that the harm inflicted on Americans by the Japanese is not always considered in today's discussion of the 1945 nuclear attacks.

Clearly, Moore adds, American leaders knew in July of 1945 (before the bombings) that the Japanese were willing to enter into discussions about a surrender to the U.S. But U.S. leaders and the American public at the time believed the Japanese were capable of great duplicity.

"During the previous negotiations, Japan launched the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor," Moore says. "The prevailing assumption is that the Japanese would do anything to resist takeover."

President Truman claimed to never have had second thoughts about his decision to expedite the end of the war with the use of the bombs. For Truman, his administration and the American public, dropping the bombs meant the war would come to an end and American lives would be saved. However, at that time, even the scientists who developed the bombs didn't fully understand the nuclear technology they had created.

The first successful test of a nuclear bomb by the U.S. occurred on July 16, 1945, just three weeks before they were used in war.

"The physicists considered the atomic bomb not just as a 'big bomb,' but instead, as a weapon in an entirely different category," Moore says. "But no one would understand until years later that the radiation would have long-term effects."

Although the cost to the Japanese was steep, some say the event has served as a deterrent to future use of atomic bombs in wartime.

"Scholars have argued the bombings chastened world leaders from dropping atomic bombs," Moore says. As evidence, he notes the Cold War was resolved without using any nuclear bombs. "The fact the bombs were dropped demonstrated these are horrible weapons and human beings are capable of using them on one another," he says.

"On balance you can make the choice that says we have learned something from this, but that's easy to say from my office in Laramie, Wyoming, in 2005," he says.

Academics, politicians, veterans and activists all have differing views on the morality of the U.S. decision in 1945 to detonate two nuclear bombs. Regardless of whether it is seen as right or wrong, according to Moore, all agree the event will remain one of the most important of the 20th century.

Posted on Friday, August 05, 2005