“If the war dragged on and Americans had to invade Japan, it might cost a million lives…life for life, the odds were that would cost less.” Confronted by this combination of forces, Japan surrendered August 14.” A 1947 history textbook, produced just two years after the bombings did just this, sidestepping the controversy by presenting the story at a distance and refraining from interpretation or discussion of civilian casualties: “The United States unveiled its newest weapon, demonstrating twice-first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki-that a good-sized city could almost be erased from the map in one blinding flash. In order to avoid a potentially treacherous debate, textbooks have often adopted a set of compromises that describe the end of the war but avoid or omit some of the most difficult parts of the conversation. The revised exhibit removed the questioning tone of the original, replacing it with more certainty: the use of the bombs, it argued, was both necessary and justified.īecause the use of the atomic weapons evokes such passionate responses from Americans-from those who believe that the use of the bombs was wholly justified to those who believe that their use was criminal, and the many people who fall somewhere in between-it is a particularly difficult topic for textbooks to discuss.
Their proposed exhibit portrayed the development of the atomic weapons as a triumph of American technical ingenuity, and the use of both bombs as an act that saved lives-the lives of American soldiers who would otherwise have had to invade the Japanese home islands, and the lives of thousands of Japanese who would, it was assumed, have fought and died with fanatic determination opposing such an invasion. In place of the original exhibit, veterans’ organizations offered a replacement exhibit with a very different message. That such a message was to appear in a national museum amplified the frustrations of critics (especially veterans’ groups), who believed that the exhibit should not lead museumgoers to question the decision to drop the bomb or to portray the Pacific war in morally neutral terms. As originally written, those critics alleged, the exhibit forwarded an anti-American interpretation of events surrounding the bombs’ use. Critics charged that it offered a too-sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese enemy, and that its focus on the children and elderly victims of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki encouraged visitors to question the necessity and morality of the weapons. The design for the exhibit quickly triggered an avalanche of controversy. The ongoing struggle to present the history of the atomic bombings in a balanced and accurate manner is an interesting story in its own right. Their concerns revolved around a cluster of related issues: whether the use of the technology was necessary to defeat an already crippled Japan whether a similar outcome could be effected without using the bomb against civilian targets whether the detonation of a second bomb days after the first, before Japan had time to formulate its response, was justified and what effect the demonstration of the bomb’s devastating power would have on postwar diplomacy, particularly on America’s uneasy wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. Truman finalized his decision to use the bombs, members of the President’s inner circle grappled with the specifics of the decision to drop the new weapon. The decision to employ atomic weapons against Japan remains a controversial chapter in American history. World War II had finally come to its dramatic conclusion. The following week, Japan’s emperor addressed his country over the radio to announce the decision to surrender.
dropped a second atomic bomb over the city of Nagasaki, with similarly devastating results.
Minutes later, that new weapon-a bomb that released its enormous destructive energy by splitting uranium atoms to create a chain reaction-detonated in the sky, killing some 70,000 Japanese civilians instantly and leveling the city. On August 6, 1945, after 44 months of increasingly brutal fighting in the Pacific, an American B-29 bomber loaded with a devastating new weapon appeared in the sky over Hiroshima, Japan.