Dirty Harry?
In San Francisco?
Apparently Harry was not totally responsible for dropping the second A bomb. Magazine: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1998 Section: PERSPECTIVES
The op-ed-style essay on these pages is by Stanley Goldberg a historian of science, an adviser to the Smithsonian Institution, a frequent contributor to the Bulletin, and a biographer of Gen. Leslie Groves, the man whodrove the Manhattan Project to completion. Goldberg died in October of 1996, before the piece could be published.
The manuscript is included in Hiroshima's Shadow, a book to be published
in June. The book--a 584-page collection of 81 essays (most of them
previously published)--is that rare item in intellectual history: a must-have for against Japan.
Information about Hiroshima's Shadow, edited by Kai Bird, a historian of Cold War-era foreign policy, and Lawrence Lifschultz, a noted foreign correspondent, can be obtained from The Pamphleteer's Press. Phone and fax:(203) 483-1429. E-mail pamphpress@i...
THE SECOND ATOMIC BOMB USED AGAINST THE JAPANESE in World War II exploded over Nagasaki at 11:00 a.m., August 9, local time. A day later in Washington, D.C., according to an entry in Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace's diary, President Harry Truman said at a cabinet meeting that"he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing,as he said, 'all those kids.'" In fact, the record of the sequence of events between July 25, the day the specific order to use the atomic bomb was issued, and August 10 strongly suggest that President Truman did not know about the attack on Nagasaki until after it happened.This is what we do know: On June 6, Truman approved the recommendation of the Interim Committee, chaired by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, that once it was tested, the bomb be used against Japan without warning. Then, on July 5, his diary recorded that he had given Stimson his "final order of the bomb's use," in which he told Stimson that he wanted it used on military targets and not on women and children. On July 23, 1945, when Truman was already in Berlin for the Potsdam conference, his diary recorded that the bomb would be used sometime between August 1 and August 10. The orders for dispatching the bombs to Japan were issued on July 25 by Gen. Thomas Handy, head of the Army Operations Department and acting army chief of staff in Gen. George C. Marshall's absence. (General Marshall was also in Potsdam.) There is no evidence that President Truman ever saw them. The orders were formally addressed to Gen. Carl Spaatz, commander of Strategic Air Forces. But though Handy signed the orders, they had actually been drafted the day before on orders of General Marshall, by Major Gen.Leslie R. Groves, the hard-driving commanding officer of the Manhattan Engineer District. Those orders were so carefully worded that they left considerable discretion to the field commander for the date, time of attack, and choice of target. That would seem to have given Gen. Carl Spaatz a free hand.The particulars would depend on local conditions. However, General Spaatz was not really in command of this operation. General Groves was. In a separate, Groves-drafted memo, approved by Marshall but not seen by Truman, the chain of command for authorizing the dropping of each atomic bomb began with General Groves. The orders Groves had drafted, which Marshall had approved, called for the first bomb to be dropped "after about 3 August" and the second and subsequent bombs to be "delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff."
Hiroshima was bombed on August 6. But as early as July 24, Groves began pressing, by cablegram, for the Los Alamos team on Tinian to speed up the delivery to Japan of the second bomb, originally scheduled for August11. Against their own better judgment, Manhattan Project scientists and engineers on Tinian suspended some of the tests originally planned, and sent off the second bomb in the early morning hours of August 9. The record showsno evidence of President Truman's involvement at any level.
BUT THERE ARE THINGS THE RECORD DOES SHOW. ON THE morning of August 10, the head of the Experimental Physics Division at Los Alamos, Robert F. Bacher, was supervising the loading of a completed plutonium core into a truck. The core was scheduled to be flown to San Francisco and then on to Tinian that day. The scheduled target was Kotura, on about August 20. As the loading process proceeded, Bacher saw, off in the distance, laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer running toward him, calling Bacher's name.Bacher responded immediately, informing Oppenheimer that he would be with him as soon as the core was on its way. That, Oppenheimer responded, was what he had to talk to Bacher about. He then told Bacher to stop loading the core. Oppenheimer had received an urgent phone call from Manhattan District headquarters in Washington, telling him that, on order of the president, under no circumstances were any more plutonium cores to be shipped to Tinian unless Oppenheimer received explicit orders to do so from President Truman. Since Truman could have given such an order at any time between July 24 and August 9, it strongly suggests that the bombing of Nagasaki came as a surprise to him. After July 24, the loop between Tinian and Washington included only General Groves and his representatives on the island.
There are two obvious interpretations to explain the pressure Groves exerted on his Tinian-based minions. The first is that he wanted to make sure that both types of atomic bombs were used before the end of the war so as to justify the expense. He may have been fearful that after the uranium bomb destroyed Hiroshima, the Japanese might surrender before the second,plutonium bomb could be used. On the other hand, Leslie Groves was a patriot. He might have speeded up the second bomb in the belief that the sooner it was used, the sooner the war would be over. My own conclusion is that both motivations are likely to have been operative.
Groves had not been a member of the Interim Committee, but as an invited guest he sat in on every meeting, including those in which the question of using the bomb on the Japanese had been debated. As Groves wrote to a close colleague shortly after the end of the war: "I had to do some good hard talking at times. One thing is certain--we will never have the greatest congressional investigation of all times."
He was absolutely right.
By Stanley Goldberg
John Lettiere, GM
Preferred Computing Inc.
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