Oppenheimer

By Wade Lee Hudson

After watching the feature film, “Oppenheimer,” on the Criterion channel I viewed the PBS documentary, “The Day After Trinity,” and the following documentary about its production. I then did some research on the issues these films raise.

The backdrop for the decision to bomb Hiroshima was America’s apparently unusual demand for unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan. 

As Gideon Rose, the editor of the mainstream Foreign Affairs magazine and author of How Wars End, writes that in the history of war, unconditional surrender “is pretty unusual. Clausewitz — the great military theorist — defined war as the continuation of politics with the addition of other means — military force. So, the way to think about the end of a war is not a boxing match with a knockout, but rather as a political relationship that essentially continues with actual force no longer being used.”

The United States, however, demanded total surrender from Germany and Japan. This goal enabled the West to establish liberal democracies with free markets open to Western businesses in those countries, which countered Soviet Communism, as domestic anti-Soviet political pressure intensified.

To help achieve this objective, America relentlessly carpet-bombed cities in both countries, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The History Channel says the Dresden bombing in Germany “was intended to terrorize the civilian population locally and nationwide. It certainly had that effect.”

In 2013. Foreign Policy (at the time owned by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) reported that before Truman dropped the Bomb, American carpet bombing had already partially or completely destroyed 68 Japanese cities, made an estimated 1.7 million people homeless, killed 300,000, and wounded 750,000. Dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima made it “second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th.” They conclude, “From the contemporary Japanese perspective, however, it might not have been so easy to distinguish the Bomb from other events. It is, after all, difficult to distinguish a single drop of rain in the midst of a hurricane.”

That’s one reason dropping the Bomb on August 6 is probably not what persuaded Japan to surrender on September 2. Rather, the decisive factor was likely Stalin’s declaration of war against Japan on August 8. The Soviet Union had been neutral in this war and Japan had hoped Stalin would help mediate more favorable terms for its inevitable surrender. Stalin’s declaration erased that hope.

The United States knew Germany was trying to build an A-bomb and raced to build it first. Many of those working on the project assumed the target was Germany. When Germany surrendered in early 1945, many of them wanted to pause the project. But Truman still decided to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

America had decided not to carpet bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki so it could better demonstrate the bomb's power on unspoiled territory and people — even though the July 16 Trinity test had proven it and more such tests could have driven home its reality. 

One principal said the Manhattan Project was like “a Machine” moving forward inexorably. The United States had amassed a wide array of inter-connected finely honed parts, the best of the best, all geared toward its goal. To stop this Machine and not “waste” the enormous financial investment would have taken enormous willpower.

After the war, Oppenheimer was guilt-ridden and fearful for the future. As perhaps the most famous man in the world, he lobbied furiously for a new international authority to oversee the development of atomic weapons. 

The United States, however, insisted on keeping its weapons program running until a new arms-control system was functional. The Soviet Union opposed this American monopoly and the arms race was underway. When the two superpowers began arms control negotiations in the 1960s, Oppenheimer said it was twenty years too late. 

Now, China has built up an arsenal that may be large enough to destroy every major American city and the threat of nuclear Armageddon remains.