Source: WWICS
August 12, 2005
A decade ago, heated controversy marked the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. Some historians said the bomb had been necessary to end the war and save hundreds of thousands of American lives, while revisionists insisted that Japan had been on the verge of capitulating and would have offered a surrender if only the Truman administration had facilitated it. Since that contentious anniversary, a “middle ground” school of thought about the bombing has emerged. Writing in Diplomatic History (April 2005), J. Samuel Walker, the historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, surveys the recent literature. It seems that Japanese leaders were not, in fact, ready to surrender when the bomb was dropped on August 6, but had it (and the second A-bomb, dropped on Nagasaki three days later) not been used, they might have become reconciled to surrender before the U.S. invasion that was planned for 12 weeks later. ... Drawing on Soviet as well as Japanese sources, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, parts company with many other “middle grounders,” says Walker, “by arguing that the bombing of Hiroshima was less important in convincing the Japanese to surrender than Soviet entry into the war.” But in Hasegawa’s view, neither of itself was a “knockout punch.”
