Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of. In the only uses of nuclear weapons in war, and on the order of President Harry S. Truman, the American bomber Enola Gay attacked Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945 and the Bock's Car struck Nagasaki on 9 August. Blast, heat, and radiation from these attacks took over 200,000 lives, mostly civilians. In concert with Soviet entry into the Pacific war, and compounding years of destruction to Japan, the bomb's use forced Japan's capitulation and ended World War II.

The bomb's secret development had originated in fears of a Nazi atomic bomb; its eventual use against a defeated Japan derived from differing, even competing, considerations. The war's ferocity sanctioned atomic attack: By 1945 both Allied and Axis powers had abandoned most restraints on attacking civilians; atomic bombing seemed a small step beyond the ongoing fire‐bombing of Japan. Racial hatreds between Japanese and Americans had stirred exterminationist fantasies, and Truman justified the attacks as acts of revenge as well as victory. Some leaders sought the attacks in order to threaten the Soviet Union; others hoped the bomb's awful power would compel Soviet‐American cooperation. The reason later cited as paramount—the desire to avoid American casualties in an invasion of Japan—did not dominate official deliberations at the time. In retrospect, however, the widespread assumption that the bomb had shortened the war deepened the American public's gratitude for its use. Japan's leaders also bore responsibility by continuing a war they knew to be futile.

Just as differing forces shaped the bomb's use, Americans derived competing truths from it. Depending on who was telling the story, it came to signify America's martial triumph and moral righteousness, its racism and technological fanaticism, its entry into an agonizing nuclear age, its fate if undefended, its threat to others if unrestrained. Cold War politics encouraged uncritical acceptance of the bomb's use and censorship of the historical record about atomic decision‐making, research, and experimentation. As late as 1994, after the Cold War's end, opposition by veterans’ groups and others convinced that the bomb's use was necessary and wholly justified forced cancellation of the National Air and Space Museum's plans to incorporate competing stories in a display of the Enola Gay.
See also Manhattan Project; Nuclear Strategy; Nuclear Weapons.

Bibliography

Paul Boyer , By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1985.
Michael S. Sherry , The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, 1987.

Michael S. Sherry