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Sometimes, something happens that is so awful that we find ourselves rationalizing it, talking as if it had to happen, to make ourselves feel better about the horrible event. For many people, I believe, President Truman's dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, were two such events. After all, if the leader of arguably the freest country in the world decided to drop those bombs, he had to have a good reason, didn't he? I grew up in Canada thinking that, horrible as it was, dropping the atomic bombs on those two cities was justified. Although I never believed that the people those bombs killed were mainly guilty people, I could at least tell myself that many more innocent people, including American military conscripts, would have been killed had the bombs not been dropped. But then I started to investigate. On the basis of that investigation, I have concluded that dropping the bomb was not necessary and caused, on net, tens of thousands, and possibly more than a hundred thousand, more deaths than were necessary.
What I write below will not come as a surprise to those who are particularly well-informed about the issue: the Gar Alperovitzes, Barton Bernsteins, Dennis Wainstocks, and Ralph Raicos of the world. But it did come as a surprise to me and will surprise, I believe, many of the people reading this article. There were four surprises: (1) how Truman himself couldn't seem to keep his story straight about why he dropped the bomb and even whom he dropped the first one on; (2) how strong the opinion was among the informed, including many military and political leaders, against dropping the bomb; (3) how strong a case can be made that the Japanese government was about to surrender and that the U.S. insistence on unconditional surrender had already delayed their surrender for months; and (4) how the proponents of dropping the bomb systematically and successfully convinced Americans that dropping the bomb saved many American lives. On the third issue, in particular, I highlight a May 1945 memo to President Truman from former President Herbert Hoover, the person who founded the Hoover Institution, at which I am proudly, given his views on this, a research fellow.
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