Reply #219: I'm suggesting he didn't break the locks

[zipplewrath]

The point of disagreement here is whether Truman can be credited with "opening pandoras box". By the time Truman was there, at the very least the locks had been broken, and more than just the US knew how to use it. About the best one can credit Truman with is finding the box open and saying "ooh, look, neat toys!". And even that is unfair. A more credible metaphor is that he was a man lost in the desert, thirsty, came upon some open water, and didn't notice it was salt water.

The truth is his use may have prevented actual nuclear war between the US and Russia. The honest truth is that even some of the men who engineered the original bombs, didn't completely understand what they had made. Feynman talks about it in his book, that he was probably the only guy to look at it with his "naked" eyes. Everyone else had some variation of welders goggles on, but he just jumped in a jeep and looked through the wind shield. At the distance they were, the only "rays" of which to be concerned would be filtered by ordinary glass. Even after we dropped those two, we had tests where we detonated bombs, and within hours had troops walking through the area. Folks just didn't completely understand what we had. Too many though of them as "just bigger bombs". Go read newspaper accounts in the days following. No one understood. The law of unintended consequences could have easily been at work here in that the use of them when we did, exposed to the world just how horrible these things were. We went through a similar cycle with mustard gas. First use exposed how dangerous and stupid of a weapon these things were and coming as they did towards the end of a war, instead of the beginning, gave "cooler heads" a chance to figure out that using them wasn't a great idea. (as and aside, it is quickly becoming obvious that these weapons are more of a burden than a power and I won't be surprise if in about 100 years, they are treated much like bio-chem weapons are today).

And there in lies the problem with all of this Monday morning quarterbacking. Today, we all have those "cooler heads" and can sit in easy judgement and make easy assertions. We can sit now and see that maybe the Japanese may have actually surrendered, even though at the time, they had demonstrated absolutely no propensity for doing anything like that. Today, the Japanese could have more quickly understood what such a weapon could do, without having one dropped upon them. But at the time, even after the first one was dropped, they could not quite come to the conclusions that "cooler heads" came to. Even after the second one was dropped there were serious forces in Japan attempting to fight on, and they weren't some small radical minority. Eisenhower's point of view existed because he fought the european theater, which was a completely different war. People surrendered, we were often greeted as liberators, and we could eat the food and drink the wine as we passed through. No such occurences happened in the pacific. Bodies of both sides were booby trapped by the japanese. White flags were ignored. Offers for surrender were often greeted with hostile fire. Water and food was poisoned. And by then of course we knew of the Rape of Nanking, the mass suicides, the Bataan death march, and the small acts of atrocities that were done to soldiers. (genitals and military tatoos were cut off and stuff into the mouths of dead soldiers for the medics to find). Eisenhower did not command through this, and it gave him a different point of view. Strangely, because of this he was probably a better assessor of the future than those that had suffered through the pacific campaign. Which is what "cooler heads" are really all about. But we should remember that we get to BE the cooler heads because of what other men who preceeded us did to get us here.