In early August 1945 atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two bombs quickly yielded the surrender of Japan and the end of American involvement in World War II. By 1946 the two bombs caused the death of perhaps as many as 240,000 Japanese citizens(1). The popular, or traditional, view that dominated the 1950s and 60s--put forth by President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson-- was that the dropping of the atomic bombs was a solely military action that avoided the loss of as many as a million lives in the upcoming invasion of the island of Kyushu. In the 1960s a second school of thought developed--put forth by "revisionist" historians--that claimed the dropping of the bomb was a diplomatic maneuver aimed at intimating and gaining the upper hand in relations with Russia. Today, fifty years after the two bombings, with the advantage of historical hindsight and the advantage of new evidence, a third view, free of obscuring bias and passion, can be presented. First, the dropping of the bomb was born out a complex myriad of military, domestic and diplomatic pressures and concerns. Second, many potentially viable alternatives to dropping the bombs were not explored by Truman and other men in power, as they probably should have been. Lastly, because these alternatives were never explored, we can only conjecture over whether or not Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs was a savior of lives, and by extension, we may never know if Truman's monumental decision was a morally just one. The war in Asia had its roots in the early 1930s. Japan had expansionist aims in Eastern Asia and the Western Pacific, especially in Indochina.(2) In July of 1940 the United States placed an embargo on materials exported to Japan, including oil in the hope of curbing Japanese expansionism. Nevertheless, tensions remained high in Asia, and only increased in 1939 when Germany ignited World War II with an invasi...
