Could the U.S. Have Ended World War II With a ‘Demonstration’ Bomb?
By Evan Thomas, Aug. 5, 2023, WSJ
To end WWII, was it necessary to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, killing roughly 200,000 people? Instead, couldn’t the U.S. have vividly shown the power of its new weapon by blowing up a deserted Japanese island—or maybe the top of Mount
Fuji—to shock Japan into surrendering? In the movie “Oppenheimer,” the suggestion of staging a demonstration comes up only briefly, almost in passing. The full story is more complicated and surprising, and it has meaningful implications for the
alarming spread of nuclear weapons today.

The men in charge of building the atomic bomb could be cold-blooded. “Some tender souls are appalled at the idea of the horrible destruction which this bomb might wreak,” Navy Capt. William “Deak” Parsons, the chief of ordnance for the Manhattan
Project, wrote to his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves, in September 1944. These “tender souls,” scoffed Parsons, were pushing for a “demonstration”—setting off a bomb in a desert or on an island in the Pacific, and inviting the enemy to watch. Such a
demonstration would be a “fizzle,” Parsons wrote Groves. It would make a big flash, but “even the crater would be disappointing.”

In late May 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and a group of top officials and scientists advising President Harry Truman briefly discussed staging a demonstration of the bomb. But they summarily dismissed the idea. What, someone asked, if the
Japanese attacked the plane carrying the bomb? What if the bomb was a dud? What if the Japanese brought American POWs into the drop area? What if the Japanese were simply not impressed? J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project’s Los
Alamos Laboratory, himself seemed to reinforce this last point, saying that witnesses would see “an enormous nuclear firecracker detonated at great height doing little damage.”

The president’s advisers felt a sense of urgency because the alternatives to dropping the bomb seemed grim. In June, Truman signed off on preparations for a massive invasion of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, scheduled for Nov. 1. Army Chief of
Staff George C. Marshall estimated over 30,000 American casualties in the first month, but he was lowballing the true figure. After the U.S. learned, from intercepted cables, that Japan was waiting for the American invasion with a million defenders and 7,
000 kamikaze suicide planes, more realistic estimates ranged from 200,000 to one million Americans killed.

Fearing such enormous casualties, U.S. Navy and Army Air Force officials wanted to blockade and bomb Japan into submission, which would have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths from starvation and disease. To hasten Japan’s surrender, Stimson
proposed letting the Japanese keep their emperor as a figurehead if they capitulated first, but his suggestion was rejected by Truman and his Secretary of State, Jimmy Byrnes.

Some scholars have seen a tragic lost opportunity in Truman’s refusal to make a peace offer before dropping the atomic bomb. Truman’s (and especially Byrnes’s) motivation, they say, was to intimidate the Russians. But the diaries and records of
Japanese officials strongly suggest that the Japanese military, which controlled the government, would have regarded a peace offering as a sign of weakness and a further incentive to fight to the death. These men were fanatical but not utterly irrational.
By massively bleeding the Americans, the military leaders of Japan hoped they could avoid an American (and possibly Russian) occupation of their nation—not to mention trials for their own war crimes.

In fact, even after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs—on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9—the Japanese weren’t prepared to surrender unconditionally. They still demanded that the U.S. allow Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as
a deity, to remain sovereign. Japanese military leaders wanted to fight on even after the second bomb fell on Nagasaki, and some officers began fomenting a coup to take over the Imperial Palace.

The American Army Air Force commander in charge of bombing Japan, Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, suggested dropping a third atomic bomb, this time in the vast area of Tokyo—some 20 square miles—already burned out by American fire-bombing raids in
March and May. Spaatz was in effect proposing a demonstration. He wanted Japanese leaders to be in the “scare radius” of the bomb—close enough to see the flash but not so close as to be killed. “It is believed,” he cabled his boss in Washington,
Gen. Hap Arnold, “that the psychological effect on the government officials still remaining in Tokio [as he spelled it] is more important at this time than destruction.” In fact, even if dropped on a burned-out area, an atomic bomb would have spread
deadly radioactive fallout, a phenomenon not well-understood at the time.

In Washington Spaatz’s idea was initially rejected, but it apparently caught President Truman’s attention. According to a report from the British embassy in Washington, at about noon on Aug. 14, as the Japanese appeared to be dithering over whether
to surrender, Truman “remarked sadly” to British officials “that he now had no alternative but to order the atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo.” A third bomb would be ready for delivery by Aug. 20.

Fortunately, a few hours later Truman learned that the Japanese had accepted America’s surrender terms. A small peace faction, led by Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, had finally persuaded the emperor to defy the militarists. Hirohito would
remain on the throne, but he would be subject to the Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not the other way around.

Oppenheimer hoped that the horror of the atomic bomb would make the world renounce nuclear war, and he has been proved right—so far. But with Russia and China building up their nuclear forces, the threat is once again growing.

In 1945, only the U.S. had the bomb. Now nine nations have nuclear weapons far more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Even in a “limited” nuclear war between the U.S. and China, or Israel and Iran, or India and Pakistan, studies and
wargames predict that millions of people would die. We can only hope that it doesn’t take the use of nuclear weapons to demonstrate their horror to a new generation.

Evan Thomas is the author of “Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of WWII,” published by Random House earlier this year.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/could-the-u-s-have-ended-world-war-ii-with-a-demonstration-bomb-e8c5bbe5

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