# data[].attributes.body
www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/virtual/VirtualMuseum_e/visit_e/est_e/panel/A2_2/2101.htm

# data[].attributes.headline
"Nicknamed for Its Assigned Pilot, Fred Bock, the Nose Art on      'Bockscar,' Tracing the Bomber's Path From, Utah to Nagasaki, Japan Was      Applied after the War Ending Mission. World War II: Second Atomic Bomb That      Ended the War."

# data[].attributes.subject
"Nicknamed for Its Assigned Pilot, Fred Bock, the Nose Art on      'Bockscar,' Tracing the Bomber's Path From, Utah to Nagasaki, Japan Was      Applied after the War Ending Mission. World War II: Second Atomic Bomb That      Ended the War."

# data[].attributes.body
www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-second-atomic-bomb-that-ended-the-war.htm

# data[].attributes.headline
"America's Reaction to the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and      Nagasaki."

# data[].attributes.subject
"America's Reaction to the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and      Nagasaki."

# data[].attributes.body
users.dickinson.edu/~history/product/steele/seniorthesis.htm

# data[].attributes.body
The physicists saw immediately what might be done with the new
reaction.  Hungarian emigré physicist Leo Szilard told his American
patron Lewis Strauss on January 25, 1939, that nuclear energy might be a
means of producing power, and mentioned "atomic bombs" (2). The young
Berkeley graduate student Philip Morrison remembered that "when fission was
discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert
Oppenheimer's office [at Berkeley] a drawing—a very bad, an execrable
drawing—of a bomb" (3). "These possibilities," commented American
theoretician Robert Serber, "were immediately obvious to any good
physicist" (4). Within months of the German discovery, the Italian Nobel
laureate Enrico Fermi would stand at his panoramic office window high in
the physics tower at Columbia University, look down the gray winter length
of Manhattan Island alive with vendors and taxis and crowds, cup his hands
as if he were holding a ball and say simply, "A little bomb like that, and
it would all disappear" (5).

Why would these men of good will, who
believed themselves to be members of a peaceful international community of
scientists, want to build a weapon of mass destruction? Always and
everywhere in that first round of nuclear proliferation the same reason
repeats: because possession of such a weapon appeared to be the only
defense against an enemy similarly armed.  Deterrence had already been
debated publicly and at length during the 1930s in the context of aerial
bombardment. It found its first documented expression in the context of
nuclear weapons in a secret report prepared early in 1940 as a warning to
the British government by two emigré physicists, Otto Frisch (again) and
Rudolf Peierls, a report that also first laid out on paper the basic design
and operation of an atomic bomb. "If one works on the assumption," the two
physicists wrote, "that Germany is, or will be, in the possession of this
weapon, it must be realized that no shelters are available that would be
effective and could be used on a large scale. The most effective reply
would be a counter-threat with a similar bomb. Therefore it seems to us
important to start production as soon and as rapidly as possible, even if
it is not intended to use the bomb as a means of attack" (6).

The
world was at war. The new tool of nuclear energy, like all tools, might
also serve as a weapon. In the course of the Second World War, every major
industrial nation began a program to build atomic bombs: the Germans, the
British, the French before their surrender, the Soviets, the Americans, the
Japanese. But nuclear-weapons development required a massive commitment of
government funds, funds that would have to be diverted from the
conventional prosecution of the war. If atomic bombs could be built, they
would be decisive, in which case no belligerent could afford not to pursue
them. But making that judgment depended on two corollary assessments: the
first, whether or not such weapons were inventible—whether nature would
allow such an explosion to proceed; the second, whether or not the enemy
was capable of producing them in time to affect the outcome of the war.
Both assessments depended critically on how much scientists trusted their
governments and how much governments trusted their scientists.

Trust
would not be a defining issue later, after the secret, the one and only
secret—that the weapon worked—became known. This first time around,
however, it was crucial, as the Russian physicist Victor Adamsky, who
worked on the Soviet bomb, has pointed out:

The tension [between the
scientists and their governments, Adamsky writes,] stemmed from the fact
that there existed no a priori certainty of the possibility of creating an
atomic bomb, and merely for clarification of the matter it was necessary to
get through an interim stage: to create a device (the nuclear reactor) in
order to perform a controlled chain reaction instead of the explosive kind.
But the implementation of this stage requires tremendous expenses,
incomparable to any of those previously spared for the benefit of
scientific research. And it was necessary to tell this straight to your
government, making it clear that the expenses may turn out to be in vain—an
atomic bomb may not come out....The American nuclear scientists...addressed
the President...directly and described that complicated situation to
him....  After a number of procrastinations which are inevitable even
in a democratic society, a decision was taken in the USA to make the
research as comprehensive as required by logic, disregarding the
[un]certainty of the final result.

...There was [no such confidence
and mutual understanding] in Germany (7).

In the United States the
trust was there, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt duly authorized a
full-scale Anglo-American nuclear weapons program on October 9th, 1941. In
Germany the trust was not there on either side, and the German program
fragmented and stalled.  After 1942, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn,
Richard von Weizsächer turned their attention to building a nuclear reactor
and the bomb went by the board. Nor did the German scientists believe the
Allies could do what they themselves had not judged feasible (8).

The
French program was stillborn. The Soviets, fighting for their lives against
an almost overwhelming German invasion, put their early work on hold, not
entirely convinced of its importance, and revived it in 1943 after the Red
Army pushed back the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and espionage revealed the
extent of the developing programs in Britain and the United States. The
Japanese saw that a bomb program was beyond their resources, estimated
incorrectly that it was also beyond American resources, and scaled down
their efforts to laboratory studies of uranium isotope
separation.

The Anglo-Americans knew very little of these
developments. Until 1944, they raced against an imaginary German clock,
calculating that from the discovery of fission forward, the Germans might
have at least a two-year lead.  Then another and more terrible clock
ticked off the project's hours: the clock of the war itself, of the young
men dying on the battlefields of Europe and Russia and the bloody Pacific
beaches. The Germans, the British, the French had used poison gas in the
last Great War, as they all said, to shorten the war and save lives; Robert
Oppenheimer, recruiting scientists for a secret laboratory in New Mexico
where the first bombs would be designed and built, whispered that he
couldn't tell them what they would be doing, but he could tell them that
their work would end the war and save lives.

Before Oppenheimer began
recruiting, Szilard, Fermi and their colleagues at Columbia and then at the
University of Chicago had to accomplish the intermediate step Adamsky
mentions: they had to build an experimental nuclear reactor to prove that
it was possible to achieve a controlled chain reaction in uranium. This
would be a slow-neutron chain reaction, multiplying in thousandths of a
second and relatively easy to control, not the microsecond fast-neutron
chain reaction that would proceed in a bomb, but fission was the source of
the energy in both arrangements.  The reactor design Szilard and Fermi
worked out and jointly patented was a spherical assembly large as a two-car
garage of graphite blocks drilled with blind holes into which would be
inserted pucks or slugs of uranium oxide or metal.  They needed
700,000 pounds of highly purified graphite; all the uranium metal they
could get, which turned out to be 12,400 pounds; and some 80,000 pounds of
oxide. None of these materials could be bought off the shelf; their
manufacture had to be developed and subsidized.The "secret" of the bomb
would turn out to be industrial production on an enormous scale—2.2
billion-dollars-worth by the end of the war in 1945 dollars, about the same
as it cost twenty years later to go to the moon. What began as a table-top
experiment on a laboratory bench in Germany in 1938 became, in the United
States, an industry comparable in scale to the United States automobile
industry of the day (9). Niels Bohr had gone back to Denmark in 1939 secure
in the conviction that no nation could afford to build such an industry in
time of war. The United States not only did so; it did so redundantly,
pursuing three different and expensive paths to accumulating the necessary
quantities of fissionable materials. The Manhattan Project, as the program
to build atomic bombs was named, commanded a higher priority for materials
and staff than any other program of the war—not because anyone thought the
atomic bomb would win the war, but because its sole possession by an enemy
might turn Allied victory abruptly into defeat.

Fermi called his
construction a "pile" because it was made that way, by piling up layers of
uranium-slugged graphite bricks crosswise one on top the other to achieve a
critical mass. The pile would not only prove the chain reaction; it would
also be a model cauldron for transmuting from uranium the first manmade
element, plutonium, Berkeley radiochemist Glenn Seaborg's discovery,
several times more fissionable than uranium itself. Fermi's pile went
critical in a doubles squash court under the stands of Stagg Field at the
University of Chicago on December 2, 1942, one year almost to the day after
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Scientists at the Metallurgical
Laboratory of the University of Chicago determined the parameters of the
site where plutonium would be produced for the first atomic bombs.
Thirty-three-year-old Army Corps of Engineers Colonel Franklin T. Matthias,
known to his friends as “Fritz,” wrote the requirements into his
diary after a meeting at DuPont’s home offices in Wilmington, Delaware, on
December 14, 1942: The site needed to be spacious enough to accommodate a
manufacturing area of approximately 12 by 16 miles, with no public highway
or railroad nearer than 10 miles, no town of greater than 1,000 population
nearer than 20 miles, an available water supply of at least 25,000 gallons
per minute and an electrical supply of at least 100,000 kilowatts. Matthias
looked in the Grand Coulee area of Washington and at several sites in
Tennessee before flying over Hanford in an Army observation plane. “I
came back over [the] Horse Heaven [Hills],” he remembered many years later—
“in the area northeasterly from Plymouth—and over Rattlesnake
Mountain to the Hanford site from the west, and I got over that mountain,
and I had looked at everything else, and I knew that was it, right then.”
His boss, Brigadier General Leslie Richard Groves, agreed, and the
Corps of Engineers began land appraisals at the Hanford site in January
1943.

The first great question was what kind of cooling system to use
in the production reactors that would be built and operated at Hanford to
make plutonium. Graphite would serve as moderator, uranium metal as fuel.
The fission chain reaction would release tens and hundreds of thousands of
kilowatts of energy, and since these reactors were being built to breed
plutonium, that energy would not be used to make steam to generate
electricity but would have to be transferred away. The first chain reaction
in the natural-uranium squash court pile at the University of Chicago had
operated with a barely positive reactivity of 1.006, so conserving neutrons
was an important consideration. Helium, which absorbed no neutrons at all,
was the coolant of choice at first, but Hungarian theoretical physicist
Eugene [Vegner] Wigner, trained as an engineer, held out for water despite
its neutron-scavenging propensities because it would be simpler and thus
faster to engineer. Wigner judged that they would improve reactivity in the
big production reactors with purer materials. He was convinced that Nazi
Germany was ahead of the United States in bomb development. Wigner even
moved his family out of Chicago in December 1943, when he estimated the
German head start might have given them atomic bombs by then—which he
thought Germany would, logically, drop first on the Met
Lab.

Eventually Enrico Fermi, General Groves and DuPont’s Crawford
Greenewalt came round to once-through water cooling. Wigner designed an
elegant reactor: a three-story assembly of graphite blocks drilled through
with a cylindrical lattice of channels into which could be inserted slugs
of uranium metal clad with aluminum. Water from the Columbia River would
flow through the channels around the slugs for cooling, and when the slugs
had been sufficiently exposed to the pile’s neutron flux to breed about a
dime’s weight of neptunium, element 93, per ton of uranium, they could be
pushed out the back into a cooling pool, where the neptunium would quickly
decay to plutonium, element 94.

When Crawford Greenewalt returned
with Fermi the next morning, September 28th, he wrote later, he
“found that the pile had died according to prediction, but had
mysteriously come to life starting at about 1 a.m. today. The reactivity
had increased steadily,” Greenewalt continues, “and at 7 a.m. they
started controlling the power at 0.2 MW.  From this time on the
activity kept increasing….During the night an attempt had been made to find
leaks but neither conclusively or successfully.” They continued trying to
check for leaks, but by now they had come to believe that something was
poisoning the reaction, and that evening, to test their suspicion, they
raised the power to 9 MW, Greenewalt wrote in his diary, “and the
earlier phenomenon repeated itself almost exactly: the reactivity first
flattened off, then decreased…. At midnight we dropped the power again to
0.2 MW and when I left at 2:30 a.m. the loss of reactivity was decreasing
and looked definitely as though it was going to turn up.”Which brings up
one of the mysteries I mentioned. The B Reactor at Hanford was the first to
go critical, late in the evening on September 26th, 1944. Early the next
morning the power was increased to 9 megawatts and held there. Then, to
everyone’s surprise and consternation, the reactivity began slowly to
decrease, at a rate that would drop the reaction below criticality at about
six in the afternoon. To slow any possible water leak they reduced the
pressure, which dropped the power to 200 kilowatts, but the reactivity
continued to decline, at which point they decided to shut the reactor down
and hunt for leaks.

Since the reactivity seemed to be cycling with
the increase and then decrease of the poison, they thought of two possible
explanations: either the reactor’s radiation was causing some substance to
deposit on the slugs and tubes—which the cooling water then dissolved off
when the pile power was reduced—or some short-lived fission product was
decaying to a longer-lived radioactive daughter with a large appetite for
neutrons. From the data on the changes in the pile reactivity Greenewalt
plotted the half-life of the daughter at 11.7 hours, but, he wrote, they
“couldn't think of any reasonable radioactive process which would
produce the results.”By the morning of Friday, September 29, however,
physicist John Wheeler had solved the mystery. The offender was a fission
chain after all. The most likely, Wheeler thought, was 6.6-hour iodine 134
decaying to 9.1-hour xenon 135. The loss of reactivity the xenon had caused
meant it had thirty times the appetite for neutrons of any isotope
previously known. Wheeler calculated that they could override the poisoning
by increasing the pile’s reactivity by 1.3 percent, which they could do by
loading more channels with slugs—up to 1,500 channels and, if necessary,
2,000.

Why was the reactor built with extra, unused channels? The
accepted explanation, which I think may have come from postwar
reminiscences by Fritz Matthias, is that DuPont engineers were conservative
and wanted to leave a margin of safety in case a problem cropped up. In
contrast, [Vegner] Wigner, trusting his calculations and wanting to move
ahead as fast as possible to beat the Germans, had designed a lattice—the
horizontal cylindrical arrangement I mentioned—that made optimum use of the
minimum necessary number of channels. But it wasn’t simply DuPont
conservatism that led Crawford Greenewalt to order extra channels drilled
through the corners of the cubical graphite structure. John Wheeler had
assured Greenewalt that there were no unknown decay products that would
poison the chain reaction, and Greenewalt seems to have accepted Wheeler’s
assurances. (Wheeler’s overconfidence may explain why he hustled so quickly
to identify the isotopes that DID cause the poisoning.)

The final
products – two paths to the bomb. Little Boy was an enriched uranium device
like Iran was attempting to make and Fat Man was a separated plutonium
device similar to what North Korea has developed.

# data[].attributes.headline
"The Ethics of War: Hiroshima and Nagasaki after 50 Years." 

# data[].attributes.subject
"The Ethics of War: Hiroshima and Nagasaki after 50 Years." 

# data[].attributes.body
Mr. Pavlik is director of The Freeman Op-Ed Program
at The Foundation for Economic Education. He is editor
of Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn, to be
published by FEE next month.

The first use of an atomic bomb in
warfare took place on August 6, 1945. The weapon was dropped on the
Japanese city of Hiroshima by the U.S. bomber Enola Gay,
instantaneously destroying four square miles in the middle of the
population center. The blast killed 66,000 men, women, and children, and
injured an additional 69,000. A full 67 percent of Hiroshima’s buildings,
transportation systems, and urban structures were destroyed.

The next
(and only other) atomic bomb to be dropped in warfare was detonated over
the Japanese city of Nagasaki three days later. That blast killed 39,000
civilians and injured another 25,000; 40 percent of the city was destroyed
or unrepairable. The Japanese government surrendered to the U.S. government
on August 10, 1945.

Since the last “good war,” a debate has
ensued over the moral legitimacy of the use of nuclear weapons,
particularly against civilians. The critics hold that it is a crime to
incinerate civilians en masse; defenders commonly claim that the bombing
was necessary to bring the war to a close, thereby saving countless
American lives.

Most of those who make this claim do so in earnest.
The problem is that this defense is both historically false, and taken to
its logical conclusion, extremely dangerous.

But a discussion of the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot proceed without an overview of the
imperialist motives for Japanese military aggression, which reflected the
age-old drive for power through military intimidation and conquest. The
Japanese desired a series of conquests, to constitute the Greater East
Asian Co-Prosperity sphere. This involved, most importantly, penetration
into Korea, Manchuria, China, French Indochina, Malaya, and
Burma.

What was clearly not their goal was a prolonged conflict with
the United States or any of the other Allied Powers. After establishing
their Asian imperium and a defensive perimeter, the Japanese expected to
reach a negotiated peace.

It should be clear that the attack on the
American military base at Pearl Harbor was not a part of the long-term
planning of the Japanese government. Indeed, conservatives and
isolationists have long held the view that the Roosevelt administration
provoked the Japanese into their aggressive stance as a back door to war in
Europe.

Consider the facts leading up to the attack: Roosevelt had
made a commitment to Churchill that the United States would enter into the
Asian conflict if the British were attacked; the United States was shipping
munitions to both Russia and Great Britain; Roosevelt had placed an embargo
on oil and metals against Japan; and in the most egregious example, had
sent the “unofficial” Flying Tigers to attack the Japanese in China
in 1941. All were violations of U.S. neutrality and acts of
belligerency.

Vocal critics on the Old Right—such as John T. Flynn
and Harry Elmer Barnes—held that the Roosevelt administration was aware of
the attack in advance, both from decoded transmissions and intelligence
reports. The weight of history has ironed out the appearance of radicalism
from the latter contention. Whatever the truth of the Pearl Harbor affair,
an extended war with the United States was not a desire of the
Japanese.

Japanese Objectives

Apologists for the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki need to consider the overall thrust of
the Japanese objectives. These objectives do not square with the notion
that Japan was intractably set into a policy of mortal combat with the
Americans. Not that the Japanese were not willing to fight—they did so for
four bloody and grueling years. Yet the oft-repeated claim that the
Japanese were willing to sacrifice every last individual before ending the
war is nonsense.

In reality, the Japanese were willing to end
hostilities with the United States as quickly as they began. Startlingly
neglected is the January 1945 offer of the Japanese government to
surrender. As the eminent English jurist Frederick J.P. Veale pointed out
in Advance to Barbarism,

“Belatedly it has been
discovered that seven months before it [the atomic bomb] was dropped, in
January 1945, President Roosevelt received via General MacArthur’s
headquarters an offer by the Japanese Government to surrender on terms
virtually identical to those accepted by the United States after the
dropping of the bomb: In July 1945, as we know, Roosevelt’s successor,
President Truman, discussed with Stalin at Bebelsburg the Japanese offer to
surrender.”

Clearly, then, the bomb did not have to be dropped to
save the lives of American soldiers. The war in the Pacific could have
ended prior to the European conflict. One suspects that the conflagration’s
extension beyond the confines of necessity had more to do with the politics
of war than military strategy. The fact that consultation with Stalin
played a key role in the decision tends to implicate both what historian
William L. Neumann pointed to as “the historic ambitions of Russia in
Asia” and “the expansionist element in Stalinist
Communism.”

The Japanese offer to surrender came at a time when
surrender made sense. Consider the strange apology for the bombing offered
by the historian Robert R. Smith, the logic of which may escape even the
most alert reader:

“Allied air, surface, and submarine
operations had cut the home islands from all sources of raw materials. The
effective and close blockade of the Allies established around the home
islands would ultimately have made it impossible for the Japanese to supply
their military and civilian components with even the bare essentials of
life. An early surrender was inevitable, probably even without the impetus
supplied by the atomic blasts. It was better for both the Allies and the
Japanese the end came when it did.”

Even if the Japanese had showed
no signs of surrender and had remained obstinate in belligerency, the
notion that the most human carnage possible must be inflicted on the
civilians of an enemy government to force a surrender and minimize the
losses of one’s own troops is perverse. Consider the consequences of
adopting a policy of total war. Logically, if you expect an enemy to pursue
this strategy, you will do everything in your power to do the same before
the enemy has the opportunity to annihilate you.

It’s a step beyond
the Cold War policy appropriately referred to as Mutually Assured
Destruction. These doctrines place their backers alongside such military
strategists as Ghengis Khan, Attila the Hun, and the Assyrian King Tigleth
Pileser who delighted in the erection of pyramids of human skulls. To adopt
this justification for the bombing is to ask any putative future enemy to
assume we mean to destroy him and to alert him to the necessity of killing
as many American civilians as is possible before we do the same to
him.

Indeed, by this logic, the United States should have dropped
nuclear weapons in the heart of Christendom to bring Germany to her knees
as quickly as possible, a prospect that any civilized person must
contemplate with horror. Yet, this was how many of the scientists working
on the bomb, including Albert Einstein, hoped the American government would
use it.

The Canons of Warfare

Many opponents of the use of
the bomb point to the canons of civilized warfare in Europe, developed over
1,500 years. Again, Veale explains: “the fundamental principle of
this code was that hostilities between civilized people must be limited to
the armed forces engaged,” and in his book he lists a splendid array of
examples of European leaders holding to these principles, even at the price
of victory.

In fact, the professional conduct of European soldiers
was such that in 1814 Marshal Davout was reproached sternly and threatened
with a “war crime trial” for his ugly treatment of the residents of
Hamburg before his surrender—not by the Prussians, but by his own people.
He was charged with having “rendered the name of Frenchman
odious.”

The crucial flaw in relying on the European military codes
as an attack on the bombing of the Japanese is implicit in the explanation
provided by Veale. By “civilized people,” the European codes referred
only to Europeans. That is, the rules and restrictions of civilized warfare
applied only to so-called “secondary” wars, or intra-European wars,
and not to “primary” wars that involved the clash of European and
non-European powers. In the latter case, the limitations on aggression
against civilians literally had no bearing on the conduct of the
belligerents.

A number of cases that have a special bearing on our
subject come to mind. The Japanese city of Kagoshima was destroyed by the
British Navy under Admiral Kuper in 1863 for the sole purpose of winning
trade concessions. So the rules of conduct in war only extended so far. Nor
was America shy about using military aggression against the Japanese. The
United States had a long history of belligerent tactics against Japan,
starting with the “gunboat diplomacy” of Commodore Perry in 1854.
U.S. ships were also involved in the destruction of the city of Shimonoseki
in 1864, an operation essentially directed in the interests of British
imperialism.

In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt was not above
sending the United States fleet to the very shores of Japan. This type of
militaristic diplomacy formed the basis of the foreign policy of Franklin
Roosevelt, who was also a committed Sinophile. Much of the administration’s
early naval build-ups and movements in the Pacific, starting as early as
1934, were aimed at intimidation of the Japanese. Roosevelt’s policy rested
on Western and U.S. precedent.

In fact, it seems plausible at first
glance to argue that by the centuries-old standards of European civilized
conduct in war, the bombing of Japan was an acceptable method of battle.
(Incidentally, the use of atomic weapons against Germany was not and could
never be.) For obvious reasons, contemporary defenders of the bombing are
loath to broach this defense, as it smacks of the twentieth-century heresy
of racism. But there is also a caveat to this argument.

However much
the doctrine of the sanctity of noncombatant life was limited in practice,
there existed a long tradition in European ethics that held that the
killing of noncombatants was morally offensive and wrong. Christianity, the
faith of the West, is a religion imbued with a limited universalism in
content, derived from the belief that Christ died on the cross for all men.
Hence, the moral teachings of the Christian faith regarding the sanctity of
human life can reasonably be understood to have been intended to apply
universally.

Saint Augustine, Huguccio, and Grotius

Saint
Augustine held that taking the life of a noncombatant was murder. Even
before Christianity had begun its penetration into the Northern lands of
Europe, fundamental teachings regarding the conduct of war were being
developed. Nor did these doctrines change with the development of Catholic
teaching throughout Europe and the emergence of Thomistic Scholasticism. As
early as the twelfth century, Huguccio, a professor at Bologna, had revised
the patristic teachings regarding natural law in his Summa of 1188. There
he developed the notion that private property was a natural right, not
subject to the interference of private persons or the state, under normal
conditions.

This fundamentally libertarian teaching laid the
groundwork for the ethical considerations of the rights of noncombatants in
war. Indeed, the early twentieth-century international agreements regarding
the rules of war were an outgrowth of this doctrine, based largely on the
natural law analysis of the Dutch Scholastic Hugo Grotius. In fact, the
work of Grotius is foundational to understanding both the Hague and Geneva
Conventions.

Grotius identified four fundamental precepts of natural
law, from which he developed his theory of international law. They were:
(1) no person or body of persons, including the state, may legitimately
initiate violence against another person or body of persons; (2) no person
or body of persons may seize the property of another; (3) both persons and
bodies of persons are bound by contracts or treaties that they might enter
into; (4) no person or body of persons may commit a crime.

These
libertarian postulates were extremely influential. Through practice and
judicial development, nuances and adaptations were made in the rules of
conduct. However, they were derived from Christian teachings that were
meant to apply universally.

Critics of the bombing have made a strong
moral case against the action. This is why the defenders of the bombing use
strongly moralistic terms themselves. One of the results is possibly the
most bizarre and obviously wrong.

Most veterans and defenders of the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claim that whatever the reasons for the
bombing and its support, racism was not among them. This is simply not
true. The U.S. War Department and related agencies that specialized in
producing hate propaganda and lies developed specifically racialist attacks
on the Japanese.

Propaganda films, shown to theaters across the
country, whipped Americans into war hysteria with films attacking the
Japanese with their “grinning yellow faces.” American movie audiences
were encouraged to cheer as they watched images of the “upstart
yellow dwarfs” meeting their timely ends. The government played on and
encouraged prejudice and specifically racial animosity against the
Japanese. To be fair, the Japanese held—and still hold—similar views of
Americans, views not discouraged by their government.

The most
revealing aspect of this latter point is not that racism was involved in
drumming up the war spirit, but rather that the truth of the matter has
been so thoroughly obscured.

Oddly enough, many apologists are
conservatives, who should be the first to recognize that the essence of
government is its monopoly on violence. This is a paramount consideration
in their analysis of the role of the government in domestic affairs.
Consistency demands that conservatives begin to apply their principles
across the board—to foreign policy as well as domestic policy. The
alternative is the road we now travel, and it leads to total war and the
total state.

# data[].attributes.body
The Department of Energy traces its origins to World
War II and  the Manhattan Project effort to build the first atomic
bomb. As the direct descendent of the Manhattan Engineer District, the
organization set up by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop and build the
bomb, the Department continues to own and manage the Federal
properties at most of the major Manhattan Project sites, including Oak
Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In a
national survey at the turn of the millennium, both journalists and the
public ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb and the end of the Second
World War as the top news stories of the twentieth-century. The Manhattan
Project is the story of some of the most renowned scientists of the century
combining with industry, the military, and tens of thousands of ordinary
Americans working at sites across the country to translate original
scientific discoveries into an entirely new kind of weapon. When the
existence of this nationwide, secret project was revealed to the American
people following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most were
astounded to learn that such a far-flung, government-run, top-secret
operation existed, with physical properties, payroll, and a labor
force comparable to the automotive industry. At its peak, the project
employed 130,000 workers and, by the end of the war, had spent $2.2
billion.

The legacy of the Manhattan Project is immense. The
advent of nuclear weapons not only helped bring an end to the Second World
War but ushered in the atomic age and determined how the next war, the
Cold War, would be fought. In addition, the Manhattan Project became the
organizational model behind the remarkable achievements of American "big
science" during the the second half of the twentieth century. Without the
Manhattan Project, the Department of Energy, with its national
laboratories--the jewels in the crown of the nation's science
establishment, would not exist as it does in its present form.

The
Department of Energy is proud of and feels a strong sense of responsibility
for its Manhattan Project heritage. Following the end of the Cold War, the
Department began a process to thoroughly document the project and preserve
and interpret--in place, if possible, in a museum or other setting if
necessary--the historically significant physical properties and artifacts
from the Manhattan Project era. In the 1990s, the Department developed
a list of eight Manhattan Project properties, designated
as "Signature Facilities, that provided the essential core for
successfully interpreting the Manhattan Project mission of developing an
atomic bomb. In 2011, the Department joined with the Department of the
Interior in recommending to Congress the establishment of a Manhattan
Project National Historical Park, with three sites at Oak Ridge, Hanford,
and Los Alamos. In December 2014, Congress passed the National Defense
Authorization Act of 2015, which included provisions authorizing the Park
to be located at the three sites. President Obama signed the National
Defense Authorization Act into law on December 19, 2014. On November 10,
2015, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and Secretary of Energy Ernest
Moniz signed the Memorandum of Agreement between the two agencies defining
the respective roles in creating and managing the park. The agreement
included provisions for enhanced public access, management, interpretation,
and historic preservation. With the signing, the Manhattan Project National
Historical Park officially was established.

The Department has
developed and made available to the public, in print. online, and on
display, a variety of Manhattan Project historical resources,
including histories, websites, reports, and document collections. On July
16, 2013, the 68th anniversary of the Trinity test of the world's first
nuclear weapon, the Department launched The Manhattan Project:
Resources, a web-based, joint collaboration between the Department’s Office
of Classification and Office of History and Heritage Resources. The site is
designed to disseminate information and documentation on the Manhattan
Project to a broad audience including scholars, students, and the general
public. The Manhattan Project: Resources consists of two parts: 1) a
multi-page, easy to read and navigate "history" providing a comprehensive
overview of the Manhattan Project, and 2) the full-text, declassified,
35-volume Manhattan District History commissioned by General Leslie Groves
in late 1944. The new site brings together an enormous amount of material,
much of it never before released.

In conjunction with the opening of
the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, the Department on November
10, 2015, launched the K-25 Virtual Museum website. The site
features a timeline chronicling the road to the atomic bomb via East
Tennessee, a K-25 site tour where the visitor can "walk" through decades of
skyline changes, a glimpse of daily life in the construction camp known as
Happy Valley, and a preview at preservation efforts planned to commemorate
the K-25 Manhattan Project site.

# data[].attributes.body
Lise Meitner (1878-1968)The mother of nuclear
power

The brilliant Lise Meitner was the mother of nuclear power, but
you've probably never heard of her!  Her research contributed greatly
to the discovery of nuclear fission. It could even be said that even though
she didn't find all the pieces herself she most certainly put the puzzle
together.

Why isn't she more famous

Unfortunately,
this is because of a glaring oversight by the Nobel Committee who awarded
the prize to her colleague Otto Hahn who won the prize for chemistry.
Sadly, her name wasn't even mentioned at the ceremony. This mistake
has never been admitted by the Committee and some people believe it was one
of the biggest oversights the Nobel committee has ever made.

Meitner
was the second woman to gain a higher degree in Austria. Back in those
days, women were not allowed into higher education so it was a big
deal.  She later moved to Berlin to continue her studies.  It was
here that she met chemist Otto Hahn. In 1912 Meitner and Hahn moved to the
new and cutting edge Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.

Meitner
worked in a cupboard next to the lab without pay for a year as a 'guest'.
It wasn't until she was offered work elsewhere that they gave her a
permanent position.  Meitner and Hahn worked together closely and in
1917 they discovered a new element: protactinium.  As her research
continued she became part of the scientific race to try and create an
element heavier than uranium. This sparked the initial stages toward the
discovery of nuclear power, but no one involved suspected the huge impact
it would have.

Meitner was Jewish, and this was not a good thing to
be in 1930s Germany! When World War Two began in 1938, Meitner fled just in
time to escape Hitler's death camps.  She travelled to Sweden and
continued her research although she had little equipment or
resources.  She kept in touch with Hahn who was still trying to create
ultra heavy elements. At the time Hahn was working with Fritz
Strassmann.

Meitner, Hahn and Strassmann kept on getting results that
were baffling. Every time they stuck a neutron onto a heavy Uranium nucleus
they seemed to end with something that was lighter! Meitner realised that
the extra neutron wasn't sticking to the uranium, but smashing it in two
smaller pieces and soon realised it had the potential to unleash
unimaginable amounts of energy. In 1938, this was considered impossible by
every respectable scientist.

A certain Albert Einstein had
also been following Meitner's work and in 1939 he wrote a letter to the
American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, explaining what it meant.
Einstein feared that Germany would make an atomic bomb before the allies.
This led directly to the setting up of the 'Manhattan' project that
developed the first atomic bomb only six years later.

Meitner always
regretted her part in the creation of the atomic bomb, also called the
'destroyer of worlds'. She refused to work on the project. When she heard
about Hiroshima she was devastated.

She carried on with her research
and helped produce one of the first peacetime nuclear reactors.  It
wasn't until 1966 that Meitner really received any attention.  During
her 60 years of work in the field of atomic physics she wrote 128 articles,
and served on the United Nations Committee on atomic energy. In 1992 it was
announced that she would have an element named after her, meitnerium.
So there you are, Lise Meitner, probably the best scientist you'd never
heard of!

# data[].attributes.headline
 "Spies Who Spilled Atomic Bomb Secrets." 

# data[].attributes.subject
 "Spies Who Spilled Atomic Bomb Secrets." 

# data[].attributes.body
Despite being an ally during World War II, the
Soviet Union launched an all-out espionage effort to uncover the military
and defense secrets of the United States and Britain in the 1940s. Within
days of Britain's highly classified decision in 1941 to begin research on
building an atomic bomb, an informant in the British civil service notified
the Soviets. As the top-secret plan to build the bomb, called the Manhattan
Project, took shape in the United States, the Soviet spy ring got wind of
it before the FBI knew of the secret program's existence. Barely four years
after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945,
the Soviet Union detonated its own in August 1949, much sooner that
expected.

The Soviets did not lack for available recruits for spying,
says John Earl Haynes, espionage historian and author of Early Cold
War Spies. What drove these college-educated Americans and Britons to
sell their nations' atomic secrets? Some were ideologically motivated,
enamored of communist beliefs, explains Haynes. Others were motivated by
the notion of nuclear parity; one way to prevent a nuclear war, they
reasoned, was to make sure that no nation had a monopoly on that awesome
power.

For many years, the depth of Soviet spying was unknown. The
big breakthrough began in 1946 when the United States, working with
Britain, deciphered the code Moscow used to send its telegraph cables.
Venona, as the decoding project was named, remained an official secret
until it was declassified in 1995. Because government authorities did not
want to reveal that they had cracked the Russian code, Venona evidence
could not be used in court, but it could trigger investigations and
surveillance hoping to nail suspects in the act of spying or extract a
confession from them. As Venona decryption improved in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, it blew the cover of several spies.

Investigations
resulted in the execution or imprisonment of a dozen or more people who had
passed atomic secrets to the Soviets, but no one knows how many spies got
away. Here are some of the ones we know about.

# data[].attributes.headline
70-years-after-atomic-bomb-test-new-mexico-residents-still-affected/.      Accessed 13 Mar. 2017.  An unknown blast shook the desolate New Mexico      desert on July 16, 1945, unsettling the historic Hispanic village of      Tularosa.Most residents lacked phones and radios, so they relaxed when      Army officials said it was just an ammunition explosion - despite the      raining ash.They didn't learn scientists from the then-secret city      of Los Alamos successfully detonated the first atomic bomb at the nearby      Trinity Site until after the U.S. announced it had dropped the weapon on      Japan a month later, helping end World War II."It was a source      of pride," Tina Cordova, a former Tularosa resident whose father was 3      years old during the Trinity Test.Play VIDEO1945: U.S. uses      world's first atomic bomb on HiroshimaIt became a source of anger after      many residents developed cancer and blamed it for their health      problems.Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the test that took      place as part of the Manhattan Project, the secretive World War II      program that provided enriched uranium for the atomic bomb. While the state      holds commemorative events, Tularosa residents press for acknowledgement      and compensation from the U.S. government.Cordova, co-founder of the      Tularosa Basin Downwinders, said the aftermath caused rare forms of cancer      for many of the 30,000 people living in the area. Residents weren't told      about the dangers of the test site and often picnicked there and took      artifacts, including the radioactive green glass known as "trinitite," she      said.Play VIDEOAtomic bomb labs may be made a national      parkResearchers from the National Cancer Institute are studying past and      present cancer cases in New Mexico that might be related to the      test."It's not about anti-nuclear protests," said Cordova, a cancer      survivor. "We want recognition from the U.S. government that they did this      to us, that they came here and did this test. And that they walked away and      left us for 70 years to deal with it on our own."Vera      Burnett-Powell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's      Radiation Exposure Compensation Act program, did not immediately return a      phone message and email from The Associated Press.Cordova's father,      Anastacio "Tacho" Cordova, suffered multiple forms of cancer. He died in      2013, and she believes his illnesses were related to Trinity's      aftermath.During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos scientists worked      to develop the weapon that was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima      and Nagasaki.19 PHOTOSLooking Back at the Dawn of the Atomic      AgeIt involved three research and production facilities at Los Alamos;      Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. President Barack      Obama signed federal legislation last year to preserve sites that      helped with the bomb's creation.Retired physicist Duane Hughes, who      gives tours at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in      Albuquerque, said the history of the Trinity Test is important because it      helped end the war and set the stage for a Cold War arms race."I      don't know if anyone thought it was a failure," said Hughes, who is      scheduled to give a lecture Thursday about the Trinity Test. "It really      changed the history of the world."Meanwhile, writers with the WGN      America show "Manhattan" are tackling questions about Trinity for its      upcoming second season. The series follows a group of Los Alamos scientists      as they face moral quandaries involving the bomb.The show doesn't      seek to preach but hopes to demonstrate the project's complexities,      "Manhattan" creator Sam Shaw said. He didn't want to give away too many      details of the upcoming season but said writers couldn't ignore the plight      of residents from nearby towns like Tularosa."Some of the aspects of      that story ... still exist on the horizon for us and for this show," Shaw      said. "But the story from the beginning, I think, has been as much about      secrets and secrecy as it has been about a weapon." 

# data[].attributes.subject
70-years-after-atomic-bomb-test-new-mexico-residents-still-affected/.      Accessed 13 Mar. 2017.  An unknown blast shook the desolate New Mexico      desert on July 16, 1945, unsettling the historic Hispanic village of      Tularosa.Most residents lacked phones and radios, so they relaxed when      Army officials said it was just an ammunition explosion - despite the      raining ash.They didn't learn scientists from the then-secret city      of Los Alamos successfully detonated the first atomic bomb at the nearby      Trinity Site until after the U.S. announced it had dropped the weapon on      Japan a month later, helping end World War II."It was a source      of pride," Tina Cordova, a former Tularosa resident whose father was 3      years old during the Trinity Test.Play VIDEO1945: U.S. uses      world's first atomic bomb on HiroshimaIt became a source of anger after      many residents developed cancer and blamed it for their health      problems.Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the test that took      place as part of the Manhattan Project, the secretive World War II      program that provided enriched uranium for the atomic bomb. While the state      holds commemorative events, Tularosa residents press for acknowledgement      and compensation from the U.S. government.Cordova, co-founder of the      Tularosa Basin Downwinders, said the aftermath caused rare forms of cancer      for many of the 30,000 people living in the area. Residents weren't told      about the dangers of the test site and often picnicked there and took      artifacts, including the radioactive green glass known as "trinitite," she      said.Play VIDEOAtomic bomb labs may be made a national      parkResearchers from the National Cancer Institute are studying past and      present cancer cases in New Mexico that might be related to the      test."It's not about anti-nuclear protests," said Cordova, a cancer      survivor. "We want recognition from the U.S. government that they did this      to us, that they came here and did this test. And that they walked away and      left us for 70 years to deal with it on our own."Vera      Burnett-Powell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's      Radiation Exposure Compensation Act program, did not immediately return a      phone message and email from The Associated Press.Cordova's father,      Anastacio "Tacho" Cordova, suffered multiple forms of cancer. He died in      2013, and she believes his illnesses were related to Trinity's      aftermath.During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos scientists worked      to develop the weapon that was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima      and Nagasaki.19 PHOTOSLooking Back at the Dawn of the Atomic      AgeIt involved three research and production facilities at Los Alamos;      Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. President Barack      Obama signed federal legislation last year to preserve sites that      helped with the bomb's creation.Retired physicist Duane Hughes, who      gives tours at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in      Albuquerque, said the history of the Trinity Test is important because it      helped end the war and set the stage for a Cold War arms race."I      don't know if anyone thought it was a failure," said Hughes, who is      scheduled to give a lecture Thursday about the Trinity Test. "It really      changed the history of the world."Meanwhile, writers with the WGN      America show "Manhattan" are tackling questions about Trinity for its      upcoming second season. The series follows a group of Los Alamos scientists      as they face moral quandaries involving the bomb.The show doesn't      seek to preach but hopes to demonstrate the project's complexities,      "Manhattan" creator Sam Shaw said. He didn't want to give away too many      details of the upcoming season but said writers couldn't ignore the plight      of residents from nearby towns like Tularosa."Some of the aspects of      that story ... still exist on the horizon for us and for this show," Shaw      said. "But the story from the beginning, I think, has been as much about      secrets and secrecy as it has been about a weapon." 

# data[].attributes.body
10 May
1945 Manhattan Project Target Committee met at Los Alamos, New Mexico,
United States to compile a list of potential atomic weapon targets in
Japan.

10 May 1945 Women's Army Corps typists at Manhattan District
headquarters began preparing press kits on the Manhattan Project for use
after an atomic bomb had been dropped.

11 May 1945 The Target Committee of the Manhattan Project, led by
Robert Oppenheimer, decided the best targets of the atomic bomb were Kyoto,
Niigata, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura.

18 May 1945 Specially-modified American B-29 bombers arrived at
Tinian, Mariana Islands in preparation of future atomic bomb missions.

20 Jul 1945 The US Army Air Force began launching B-29 bomber raids,
each with very few planes, against Japanese cities. The goal of such
missions was to make such small raids a frequent occurrence to increase the
success rate of the planned atomic bomb missions.

24 Jul 1945 General Henry Arnold, head of the USAAF, was presented
with a top-secret memorandum specifying possible targets recommended for
attack with atomic bombs.

25 Jul 1945 The final wartime shipment of uranium-235 left the
Clinton Engineer Works in Tennessee, United States, reaching Tinian,
Mariana Islands by C-54 transport aircraft 3 and 4 days later. This
specific shipment of uranium-235 was used for the Little Boy bomb destined
for Hiroshima, Japan.

25 Jul 1945 US General Carl Spaatz was ordered to prepare for the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, or Nagasaki in Japan; the
target date was set for some time after

3 Aug-5 Aug 1945 The US Twentieth Air Force's meteorological service
predicted good weather, on the following day, over the four targets
(Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki in Japan) selected for attack with
atomic weapon "Little Boy".

6 Aug 1945 Hiroshima, Japan was destroyed by the first atomic bomb,
"Little Boy". About 70,000 to 80,000 were killed immediately, while about
70,000 were injured.

8 Aug 1945 A limited rail service resumed in Hiroshima, Japan.

8 Aug 1945 Manhattan Project scientist Dr. Harold Jacobsen predicted
Hiroshima's devastated centre would remain dead, "not unlike our conception
of the moon", for 70 years.

8 Aug 1945 US President Truman threatened Japan with further nuclear
devastation during a radio address.

9 Aug 1945 B-29 bomber Bockscar dropped the atomic bomb "Fat Man" on
the city of Nagasaki, Japan, killing 40,000 to 75,000 immediately.

27 Aug 1945 In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, those who have been
exposed to the highest doses of radiation were already dead, but the number
suffering from radiation sickness kept rising. More than half the survivors
who were within 1.2 miles of the blast are severely scarred, with increased
risk of hepatitis, liver damage, and thyroid and heart disease.

17 Sep 1945 The Makurazaki Typhoon hit Japan, killing more than 2,000
people and flooding large areas. Flood waters brought radiation-free
topsoil and sand to the devastated cities destroyed by the American atom
bomb attacks.

6 Aug 2010 US Ambassador to Japan John Ross became the first US
official to attend the annual atomic attack memorial ceremony at Hiroshima,
Japan. He did not speak at the ceremony.

9 Aug 2011 Deputy chief of the US embassy in Tokyo James Zumwalt
became the first US official to attend the annual atomic attack memorial
ceremony at Nagasaki, Japan. He offered a wreath of flowers to Japanese
Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

# data[].attributes.body
70-years-after-atomic-bomb-test-new-mexico-residents-still-affected/.
Accessed 13 Mar. 2017.  An unknown blast shook the desolate New Mexico
desert on July 16, 1945, unsettling the historic Hispanic village of
Tularosa.

Most residents lacked phones and radios, so they relaxed when
Army officials said it was just an ammunition explosion - despite the
raining ash.

They didn't learn scientists from the then-secret city
of Los Alamos successfully detonated the first atomic bomb at the nearby
Trinity Site until after the U.S. announced it had dropped the weapon on
Japan a month later, helping end World War II.

"It was a source
of pride," Tina Cordova, a former Tularosa resident whose father was 3
years old during the Trinity Test.

Play VIDEO1945: U.S. uses
world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima

It became a source of anger after
many residents developed cancer and blamed it for their health
problems.

Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the test that took
place as part of the Manhattan Project, the secretive World War II
program that provided enriched uranium for the atomic bomb. While the state
holds commemorative events, Tularosa residents press for acknowledgement
and compensation from the U.S. government.

Cordova, co-founder of the
Tularosa Basin Downwinders, said the aftermath caused rare forms of cancer
for many of the 30,000 people living in the area. Residents weren't told
about the dangers of the test site and often picnicked there and took
artifacts, including the radioactive green glass known as "trinitite," she
said.

Play VIDEOAtomic bomb labs may be made a national
park

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute are studying past and
present cancer cases in New Mexico that might be related to the
test.

"It's not about anti-nuclear protests," said Cordova, a cancer
survivor. "We want recognition from the U.S. government that they did this
to us, that they came here and did this test. And that they walked away and
left us for 70 years to deal with it on our own."

Vera
Burnett-Powell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act program, did not immediately return a
phone message and email from The Associated Press.

Cordova's father,
Anastacio "Tacho" Cordova, suffered multiple forms of cancer. He died in
2013, and she believes his illnesses were related to Trinity's
aftermath.

During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos scientists worked
to develop the weapon that was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.

19 PHOTOSLooking Back at the Dawn of the Atomic
Age

It involved three research and production facilities at Los Alamos;
Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. President Barack
Obama signed federal legislation last year to preserve sites that
helped with the bomb's creation.

Retired physicist Duane Hughes, who
gives tours at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in
Albuquerque, said the history of the Trinity Test is important because it
helped end the war and set the stage for a Cold War arms race.

"I
don't know if anyone thought it was a failure," said Hughes, who is
scheduled to give a lecture Thursday about the Trinity Test. "It really
changed the history of the world."

Meanwhile, writers with the WGN
America show "Manhattan" are tackling questions about Trinity for its
upcoming second season. The series follows a group of Los Alamos scientists
as they face moral quandaries involving the bomb.

The show doesn't
seek to preach but hopes to demonstrate the project's complexities,
"Manhattan" creator Sam Shaw said. He didn't want to give away too many
details of the upcoming season but said writers couldn't ignore the plight
of residents from nearby towns like Tularosa.

"Some of the aspects of
that story ... still exist on the horizon for us and for this show," Shaw
said. "But the story from the beginning, I think, has been as much about
secrets and secrecy as it has been about a weapon."

# data[].attributes.headline
"The Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

# data[].attributes.subject
"The Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

# data[].attributes.body
Controversy is Alive and Well

The ongoing struggle
to present the history of the atomic bombings in a balanced and accurate
manner is an interesting story in its own right, and one that has
occasionally generated an enormous amount of controversy. In 1995,
anticipating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the
Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum planned a display around the
fuselage of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the first
bomb, for its museum on the National Mall. That exhibit would place the
invent

Mar. 2017. On August 6, 1945, after 44 months of increasingly brutal
fighting in the Pacific, an American B-29 bomber loaded with a devastating
new weapon appeared in the sky over Hiroshima, Japan. Minutes later, that
new weapon—a bomb that released its enormous destructive energy by
splitting uranium atoms to create a chain reaction—detonated in the sky,
killing some 70,000 Japanese civilians instantly and leveling the city.
Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb over the city of
Nagasaki, with similarly devastating results. The following week, Japan’s
emperor addressed his country over the radio to announce the decision to
surrender. World War II had finally come to its dramatic conclusion.

The
decision to employ atomic weapons against Japan remains a controversial
chapter in American history. Even before the new President Harry S. Truman
finalized his decision to use the bombs, members of the President’s inner
circle grappled with the specifics of the decision to drop the new weapon.
Their concerns revolved around a cluster of related issues: whether the use
of the technology was necessary to defeat an already crippled Japan;
whether a similar outcome could be effected without using the bomb against
civilian targets; whether the detonation of a second bomb days after the
first, before Japan had time to formulate its response, was justified; and
what effect the demonstration of the bomb’s devastating power would have on
postwar diplomacy, particularly on America’s uneasy wartime alliance with
the Soviet Union.

ion of atomic weapons and the decision to use them against civilian
targets in the context of World War II and the Cold War, provoking broader
questions about the morality of strategic bombing and nuclear arms in
general.

The ongoing struggle to present the history of the atomic
bombings in a balanced and accurate manner is an interesting story in its
own right. . . .

The design for the exhibit quickly triggered an
avalanche of controversy. Critics charged that it offered a too-sympathetic
portrayal of the Japanese enemy, and that its focus on the children and
elderly victims of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki encouraged
visitors to question the necessity and morality of the weapons. As
originally written, those critics alleged, the exhibit forwarded an
anti-American interpretation of events surrounding the bombs’ use. That
such a message was to appear in a national museum amplified the
frustrations of critics (especially veterans’ groups), who believed that
the exhibit should not lead museumgoers to question the decision to drop
the bomb or to portray the Pacific war in morally neutral terms.

In
place of the original exhibit, veterans’ organizations offered a
replacement exhibit with a very different message. Their proposed exhibit
portrayed the development of the atomic weapons as a triumph of American
technical ingenuity, and the use of both bombs as an act that saved
lives—the lives of American soldiers who would otherwise have had to invade
the Japanese home islands, and the lives of thousands of Japanese who
would, it was assumed, have fought and died with fanatic determination
opposing such an invasion. The revised exhibit removed the questioning tone
of the original, replacing it with more certainty: the use of the bombs, it
argued, was both necessary and justified.

When the controversy died
down, the Smithsonian elected not to stage any exhibit of the aircraft
fuselage.

The historians who produced the original exhibit stood accused
of historical revisionism by their critics, of needlessly complicating
patriotic consensus with moral concerns. The fallout from the controversy
led to loud, public debate in the halls of Congress and, ultimately, to the
resignation of several leaders at the museum. When the controversy died
down, the Smithsonian elected not to stage any exhibit of the aircraft
fuselage. Years later, the plane went on display at the Smithsonian’s
Udvar-Hazy Center outside Washington, DC, where it resides now, accompanied
by a brief placard detailing its technical specifications.

The Textbook
Approach

Because the use of the atomic weapons evokes such passionate
responses from Americans—from those who believe that the use of the bombs
was wholly justified to those who believe that their use was criminal, and
the many people who fall somewhere in between—it is a particularly
difficult topic for textbooks to discuss. In order to avoid a potentially
treacherous debate, textbooks have often adopted a set of compromises that
describe the end of the war but avoid or omit some of the most difficult
parts of the conversation.

A 1947 history textbook, produced just two
years after the bombings did just this, sidestepping the controversy by
presenting the story at a distance and refraining from interpretation or
discussion of civilian casualties: “The United States unveiled its
newest weapon, demonstrating twice—first at Hiroshima and then at
Nagasaki—that a good-sized city could almost be erased from the map in one
blinding flash. Confronted by this combination of forces, Japan surrendered
August 14.”

“If the war dragged on and Americans had to invade
Japan, it might cost a million lives…life for life, the odds were that [the
atomic bomb] would cost less.”

Later textbooks made other compromises.
The 2005 textbook A History of the United States adopts a
familiar tone, arguing that President Truman based his decision to drop the
bomb mainly on a complex calculus of the cost in human lives if the war
were to continue: “Should the United States use the atomic bomb? No
one knew how long Japan would hold out.” That uncertainty forced American
planners to assume the worst: “If the war dragged on and Americans
had to invade Japan, it might cost a million lives. The atomic bomb,
President Truman knew, might kill many thousands of innocent Japanese. But
life for life, the odds were that it would cost less.”

A 2006
textbook, The Americans, suggests that the decision to drop the
bomb occurred largely outside moral concerns: “Should the Allies use
the bomb to bring an end to the war? Truman did not hesitate. On July 25,
1945, he ordered the military to make final plans for dropping two atomic
bombs on Japan.” The paragraph on the decision concludes with a compelling
quote from the President himself: “Let there be no mistake about it.
I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt it should
be used.”

Other recent textbooks have labored to present this
often-contentious topic in a more nuanced manner. The 2007
textbook American Anthem describes the decision-making
process as an involved one, observing “Truman formed a group to
advise him about using the bomb. This group debated where the bomb should
be used and whether the Japanese should be warned. After carefully
considering all the options, Truman decided to drop the bomb on a Japanese
city. There would be no warning." The carefully written passage does not
suggest that the question of whether to use the bomb against
civilian targets was part of the debate; it describes the inquiry as
focused on where to drop the bomb and whether a warning would
precede its use.

More recent textbooks often offer viewpoints from
other perspectives—including Japanese civilians, who suffered the legacy of
atomic fallout for decades after the original explosion—from a morally
neutral stance, inviting (or directly asking) readers to make their own
judgments. Besides offering a description of Truman’s decision-making
process, the American Anthem textbook includes a passage of
equivalent length that describes the destruction on the ground, anchored by
a quote from a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb. It also features a
“Counterpoints” section that contrasts a quote from Secretary of War
Henry Stimson supporting the bomb’s use with one from Leo Szilard, an
atomic physicist, characterizing the use of the bombs against Japan as
“one of the greatest blunders of history.”

What the Documents
Reveal

A discussion that focuses primarily on the need to employ the bomb
in order to save lives—the lives of Japanese civilians as well as those of
American soldiers—is incomplete. In fact, as the documentary record shows,
there was a good deal of debate over the use of the weapons during the
summer of 1945, much of which focused on more complex issues than the lives
that would be saved or lost in ending the war.

A discussion that focuses
primarily on the need to employ the bomb in order to save lives—the lives
of Japanese civilians as well as those of American soldiers—is
incomplete.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied
forces in Europe and one of the architects of the successful campaign
against Germany, was one of the dissenters. After the war, Eisenhower
recalled his position in 1945, asserting that “Japan was defeated
and… dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” Eisenhower’s objection
was, in part, a moral one; as he noted, “I thought our country should
avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I
thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my
belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender
with a minimum loss of 'face.'" Eisenhower recalled that his objection
found an unreceptive audience with Secretary of War Henry Stimson. In
Eisenhower's own words, Stimson was “deeply perturbed by my attitude,
almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions.” (In a
separate document, Stimson himself concurred with Eisenhower’s conclusion
that there was little active American attempt to respond to Japan’s peace
feelers to prevent the use of the atomic weapons: “No effort was
made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in
order not to have to use the bomb.”)

The year after the Japanese
surrender, the U.S. government released its own Strategic Bombing Survey,
an effort to assess the effectiveness of dropping bombs on civilian
populations, including the firebombs used in Europe and the Pacific, and
the atomic weapons detonated over Hiroshima and Tokyo (see Primary Source
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey [1946]). Its findings suggested that the
bombs were largely superfluous, and that Japan’s surrender was all but
guaranteed even without the threat of invasion. “Based on a detailed
investigation of all the facts,” the SBS concluded, “and supported by
the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the
Survey's opinion that . . . Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic
bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and
even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Though firm in its
assertions, the SBS received widespread criticism from many quarters for
drawing conclusions far beyond the available evidence. (Many critics noted,
rightly, that the SBS was itself hardly a disinterested document, since it
was produced by an organization with an interest in emphasizing the
effectiveness of conventional airpower.)

The compromises 21st-century
textbooks have struck appear understandable if not necessary.

The
Strategic Bombing Survey’s conclusions highlight another important factor
in the decision to employ the bombs against Japan: the message such a
display would send to Josef Stalin. Uneasy allies in the war against
Germany, Russian forces joined the war in Japan in August 1945.
Contemporary observers noted that the demonstration of the deadly new
weapon’s considerable might had the additional effect of warning Stalin
that the U.S. would exercise considerable power in the postwar period.
Furthermore, dropping two bombs only days apart had the added benefit of
convincing the Russians that the U.S. possessed a formidable supply of the
new weapons; when in fact, the U.S. nuclear arsenal was entirely depleted
after the two attacks on Japan.

A survey of primary sources from the
summer of 1945 and the months afterward reveals a variety of opinions,
arguments, and justifications regarding the use of atomic weapons.
Embracing the variety of opinions while also presenting a narrative that
depicts the decision and its effects from multiple perspectives is a
near-impossible task. Given how controversial the story of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki has proved to be, the compromises 21st-century textbooks have
struck appear understandable if not necessary.