Big Six v. Little Boy : The Unnecessary Bomb
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/andrew-cockburn/big-six-v.-little-boy
Où il est pas mal question de Henry Stimson, l’homme qui dans Oppenheimer mène la petite réunion pour savoir quelles villes bombarder et raye Kyoto de la liste parce qu’il y a fait sa lune de miel.
Stimson, who had half-heartedly pressed for an investigation of the American role in the Dresden atrocity, was meanwhile enthusiastically supervising the development and plans for use of the atomic bomb, though permitting himself some private agonising over the prospect of ‘the terrible’, ‘the awful’, ‘the diabolical’. As a recipient of Clarke’s intelligence reports, he was cognisant of Japanese peace moves, and understood that the major obstacle was Emperor Hirohito, who felt implicitly threatened by the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender. An intercepted message to Tokyo’s ambassador in Moscow on 12 July 1945 stated: ‘His Majesty the Emperor ... desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated, but so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on.’ In response, Stimson supported an initiative to let the Japanese know that the emperor would be left unmolested on his throne. This was to be conveyed in an official message from the Allied leaders at a summit in Potsdam scheduled for mid-July.
But Stimson and other powerful figures who favoured this approach were outmanoeuvered by James Byrnes, a wily politician from South Carolina whom Truman had appointed secretary of state. As a senator, Byrnes had shepherded Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation through Congress, and as head of the Office of War Mobilisation controlled much of the country’s industrial economy. A master bureaucratic infighter, he had no truck with half-measures on the bomb’s use, such as prior warning or a demonstration. Any failure to deploy a potentially war-winning weapon, he asserted, would spark public outrage and lead to furious investigations in Congress regarding the $2 billion it had cost to develop. As is usually the case, domestic political considerations were the dominant factor in determining foreign policy. ‘The president would be crucified,’ Byrnes declared, if he settled for anything less than unconditional surrender. He steered an Interim Committee on bomb policy, established by Stimson, to decide that the weapon would be used as soon as it was available, without warning, on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes. Stimson was mollified by the suggestion that the target would principally be military, and took pride in removing the shrine-city of Kyoto from the target list.
