The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Among historians of World War II it is now a commonplace that Japanese power disintegrated rapidly in the spring and summer of 1945-that from the..." (more)
Key Phrases: cumulative devastation wrought, surrender formula, atomic bomb story, United States, Interim Committee, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Historian Alperovitz argues that America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan was motivated by politics rather than by military necessity.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The president of the National Center for Economic Alternatives argues that against all advice President Truman was persuaded to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by incoming Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who saw the bomb as an important tool for dealing with the Soviets after the war.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 864 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 6, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067976285X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679762850
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #443,579 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I buy much of it, because my father was there, March 27, 2006

By	Graham M. Flower (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My Father was drafted out of Harvard Graduate school. He scored very highly on IQ tests and was given a very sensitive job in the Ultra Code breaking project. He reported to a Lt General in the US army and was classified as an Army Intelligence officer. The story he told me before this book was ever published is identical to the general outlines of the story as related here by Alperovitz. He has always said that the Japanese were clearly looking to end the war a couple of months before the bomb was dropped. He also said that the general US military command was of the opinion that the Invasion of Japan was not going to be necessary Regardless of the presence of the Atom bomb or not. He cannot speak to what might or might not have been going on in Washington DC but he himself read the decrypts of Japanese messages being sent to intermediaries whom were charged with approaching the Americans with the intent to discontinue the war. He has said that the general consensus of the upper echelons of the military was that the bomb was used to intimidate the Russians who were behaving quite menacingly rather than to save American lives which might be lost in an invasion. He also said that he was always surprised that "nobody wrote a book about it". He was unaware of Alperovitz's work until I found it while in college.

49 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard work to get through -- but worth the trip, February 8, 2000

By	John F. Valinote (Bedford , NY United States) - See all my reviews

In an age when Truman has become the everyman's president, this book shines an extremely focussed light on what certainly is his most important decision. This book is not for the feint of heart. The story is told by reconstructing minute sequences of events from May through August of 1945 in order to unravel how the decision was made to deliver atomic weapons Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It uses excerpts from every written form of communication that has been found by historians in the past 50 years.

The book is very interesting on three levels. First, it immerses the reader in the flow of information that actually existed for the president an his closest advisors. Second, it highlights for the reader the two most vexing problems for the president -- how to handle the Japanese surrender AND how to handle the Soviets stanglehold on Eastern Europe. Third, it honestly confronts the myths that have explained why the Americans dropped the bomb and how it has been rationalized as the "right thing to do."

If you are a person that believes that the bomb saved "500,000 to a million American casualties and ended the war" and are willing to learn that this may not be true, read this book. Be warned though, it is very unsettling when one has believed this all ones life. I know I have been somewhat shocked.

All this said, the book could be called pedandic to a fault. There is much repetition because many of the key communications are used over and over to make numerous points. On the other hand, the repetition does keep the key stuff close to the uninitiated reader (me).

40 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Overlooks major works and a very large body of evidence, April 15, 2007

By	David Ahlstrom "Professor - The Chinese Unive... (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In spite of a large bibliography, Alperovitz's book managed to overlook some of the best scholarly work on the subject of the Pacific war, the intelligence on the Japanese High Command, and the decision processes in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations on the use of strategic bombing. That alone makes me wonder about the author's bias; a serious academic study as this book claims to be should not be so careless in its scholarship.

But before quickly summarizing some of those arguments (another Amazon reviewer has given a nice list of some of the major substantive arguments for the use of nuclear weapons to end the war), it is important to point out that this book fails because it is not accurate in some of its critical facts, and is also a very incomplete counterfactual history of the end of the Pacific War.

More specifically, the author does a poor job in assessing proximate alternative decisions. This is a must for any work claiming to examine "the Decision" about something. Decision-making is a specialty research area of mine, and one of the first axioms you learn in management or economics is that all decisions have alternatives, including a no-decision, and all decisions carry benefits, costs, and opportunity costs, vis-a-vie other decisions, and these MUST be assessed in comparison. If you fail to do that, you are failing to analyze the decision in question. On this, all major decision-making scholars across multiple disciplines are in agreement.

Alperovitz's book fails totally and utterly on this point of comparative assessment. This alone would make this book impossible for me to recommend, having spent about 20 years in this field studying and writing about major strategic decisions in business, governments, and the military around the world.

Before finishing my review of this book, let me also quickly say to of the Amazon readers that are a little slow or sloppy in their reading that this book review is not intended to give my own personal views about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor any other view about nuclear power and its use then or today. If you read my review carefully, you will see I have not given my own personal views on this - this is a review of Gar Alperovitz's interesting but deeply flawed and incomplete book - nothing more, nothing less.

Most of the arguments concerning the decision to use the atomic bomb in WWII make two large and necessary assumptions that must hold if their argument is to have any validity: First, that Japan was ready to surrender and in fact was planning to do so and that "surrender" was explicitely or implicitely, the self-evident alternative to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and second that such surrender terms were acceptable to the U.S., Britain, the USSR, and China. Neither assumption can be reasonably defended with the use of accepted tests for historical facts and counterfactual argumentation. And the 'surrender option' was simply not realistic for many reasons that have been covered well elsewhere. The point is, that the alternative, proximate alternatives were not covered well in Alperovitz's book, and they needed to be. Comparative assessment is an absolute must when assessing any "decision" as this book claims to.

It would take a book to summarize why the above two assumptions (and many other statements made by Alperovitz in this book) are unsustainable or flatly incorrect. I will just summarize a few; other amazon reviewers have done a good job of outlining additional evidence that needs to be considered (and was mostly overlooked in this book). First consider why the "surrender option" was not seen as a realistic alternative for Truman, Churchill, General Chiang, Mao, Stalin, and other Allies at that time?

1) If Japan was really "getting ready to surrender" before the first atomic bomb was dropped (as several Amazon reviewers have mused), why didn't they surrender after the first bomb was dropped? Why did it take a second bomb? And even then, after the second bomb, there was still debate, and it was very close (the war minister did not want to surrender; the army did not want to surrender with millions of men under arms and well supplied in China, etc.). Such an action doesn't sound like a country that was "getting ready to surrender." Alperovitz barely touches this question - a remarkable oversight for a scholarly work and a question that has generated a great deal of debate.

2) If the main decision-makers (the Japanese military - particular army officers) were "getting ready to surrender", then why did they try to steal the Emperor's recording of his surrender message, and even to kidnap the Emperor himself before that message could be broadcast to the Japanese people? If they were getting ready to surrender, why were the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa even fought? Why did the Japanese fight to almost the last man on both islands? Funny behavior for a country that was "getting ready to surrender."

To assess the use of the atomic bombs in 1945, realistic comparative assessments must be made. A 'surrender scenario' by Japan was unrealistic and would not have been accepted by the Allies. Stalin for one, had been promised a free hand on the boarder lands with Japan and expected land, machinery and other equipment, and islands (some of which he took) for agreeing to, and finally entering the war against Japan. Chiang was also expecting concessions, as was Mao. An armistice or related negotiated conditional surrender was seen as out of the question by all decision-makers involved, going back to Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca conference in early 1943. A conditional surrender would not have been possible, nor would a WWI style armistice. No decision-maker of that day would have even dreamt of creating a replay of Versailles. Some amazon readers have proposed that this should have been tried. A WWII Versailles could not even so much as be proposed - Versailles was (and generally still is) seen at the main cause of WWII, and something to be strongly avoided.

3) In terms of other weakly discussed options (e.g. invasion, another related assumption often cavalierly accepted was the casualty assumptions in the low tens of thousands for an invasion of Kyshuu made based on one intelligence report given to Truman in the summer of 1945. Then, after this single intelligence report is accepted on face value (and other major reports of the day ignored) authors in this genre quickly make the enormous and wholy unjustified leap of logic that Truman accepted that lone, low-casualty report. Read Truman's main biographer on that topic - you won't find a shread of evidence that Truman accepted a single lone intelligence report for such low numbers of casualties upon an Allied invasion of Japan. There were many other reports from a variety of sources, including from General MacArthur's staff that put expected US casualties well into the hundreds of thousands, not to mention Japanese and civilian casualties (and often overlooked are the continuing casualties in China, and the famine that was going on ALL around SE Asia and in China). If you had been the decision-maker in 1945, what would you have believed (especially after Iwo Jima and Okinawa - minor islands compared to the main islands of Japan)? How would you have weighed all of that evidence pointing to major numbers of deaths in Japan - military and Civilian, Allied and Japanese, and Southeast Asian and prisoner of war and other inturnees (numbering in the hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions if you include the slave labor camps of various kinds)? I have personally interviewed over one dozen survivers of Japanese prison camps, other interred in camps and towns in China and SE Asia, others that were machine gunned at point blank range and spared though luck or providence, and one thing that all of them stated was that in 1945, people in China, SE Asia, and the prison camps were starving to death (some were sucombing early to beri-beri and cholera). No telling how large the death toll would have been, but even 1 in 100 in these various places would have put the largely civilian death toll at about 100,000-200,000 - just from starvation diseases in 1945-6.

There is an enormous amount of evidence that Japan was not going to surrender, at least not in any way remotely acceptable to the U.S., Britain, and China (somehow the Chinese and their wishes get lost in these atomic bomb arguments - Japan's conditional surrender was totally unacceptable to both Mao and Chiang and that also had to play into Truman's decision). Some of that further evidence includes the large and increasing number of casualties suffered by both sides in battles as the war progressed and neared the Japanese homeland (including the large numbers of civilian casualties and civilian participation at the periphery of the battles), the intelligence reports that the military hierarchy in Japan was not ready to surrender and beliefs that the military wanted to at least try once to beat back the US invasion back as Japanese samurai had done to the Mongolian invaders some 700 years before. Indeed some of the most horrific battles of WWII (and several other wars) occurred when one side had essentially lost but was not ready to give up. This all strongly adds to the evidence that the decision-makers had at that time about Japan's likelihood of surrender.

The main alternative decisions were not assessed properly by Alperovitz. On this point alone, this book fails to answer one of its research questions about the validity of the decision to use atomic weapons or even strategic bombing on Japan. The death toll would have almost certainly been higher with an invasion. Many civilians would have been killed also as they were training to kill invaders with various weapons including... Read more ›