From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Could the U.S. Have Ended World War II With a ‘Demonstration’ Bomb?   
   By Evan Thomas, Aug. 5, 2023, WSJ   
   To end WWII, was it necessary to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities,   
   killing roughly 200,000 people? Instead, couldn’t the U.S. have vividly   
   shown the power of its new weapon by blowing up a deserted Japanese   
   island—or maybe the top of Mount    
   Fuji—to shock Japan into surrendering? In the movie “Oppenheimer,” the   
   suggestion of staging a demonstration comes up only briefly, almost in   
   passing. The full story is more complicated and surprising, and it has   
   meaningful implications for the    
   alarming spread of nuclear weapons today.   
      
   The men in charge of building the atomic bomb could be cold-blooded. “Some   
   tender souls are appalled at the idea of the horrible destruction which this   
   bomb might wreak,” Navy Capt. William “Deak” Parsons, the chief of   
   ordnance for the Manhattan    
   Project, wrote to his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves, in September 1944. These   
   “tender souls,” scoffed Parsons, were pushing for a “demon   
   tration”—setting off a bomb in a desert or on an island in the Pacific,   
   and inviting the enemy to watch. Such a    
   demonstration would be a “fizzle,” Parsons wrote Groves. It would make a   
   big flash, but “even the crater would be disappointing.”   
      
   In late May 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and a group of top officials   
   and scientists advising President Harry Truman briefly discussed staging a   
   demonstration of the bomb. But they summarily dismissed the idea. What,   
   someone asked, if the    
   Japanese attacked the plane carrying the bomb? What if the bomb was a dud?   
   What if the Japanese brought American POWs into the drop area? What if the   
   Japanese were simply not impressed? J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the   
   Manhattan Project’s Los    
   Alamos Laboratory, himself seemed to reinforce this last point, saying that   
   witnesses would see “an enormous nuclear firecracker detonated at great   
   height doing little damage.”   
      
   The president’s advisers felt a sense of urgency because the alternatives to   
   dropping the bomb seemed grim. In June, Truman signed off on preparations for   
   a massive invasion of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, scheduled for   
   Nov. 1. Army Chief of    
   Staff George C. Marshall estimated over 30,000 American casualties in the   
   first month, but he was lowballing the true figure. After the U.S. learned,   
   from intercepted cables, that Japan was waiting for the American invasion with   
   a million defenders and 7,   
   000 kamikaze suicide planes, more realistic estimates ranged from 200,000 to   
   one million Americans killed.   
      
   Fearing such enormous casualties, U.S. Navy and Army Air Force officials   
   wanted to blockade and bomb Japan into submission, which would have resulted   
   in millions of Japanese deaths from starvation and disease. To hasten   
   Japan’s surrender, Stimson    
   proposed letting the Japanese keep their emperor as a figurehead if they   
   capitulated first, but his suggestion was rejected by Truman and his Secretary   
   of State, Jimmy Byrnes.   
      
   Some scholars have seen a tragic lost opportunity in Truman’s refusal to   
   make a peace offer before dropping the atomic bomb. Truman’s (and especially   
   Byrnes’s) motivation, they say, was to intimidate the Russians. But the   
   diaries and records of    
   Japanese officials strongly suggest that the Japanese military, which   
   controlled the government, would have regarded a peace offering as a sign of   
   weakness and a further incentive to fight to the death. These men were   
   fanatical but not utterly irrational.   
    By massively bleeding the Americans, the military leaders of Japan hoped they   
   could avoid an American (and possibly Russian) occupation of their   
   nation—not to mention trials for their own war crimes.   
      
   In fact, even after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs—on Hiroshima on Aug. 6   
   and Nagasaki on Aug. 9—the Japanese weren’t prepared to surrender   
   unconditionally. They still demanded that the U.S. allow Emperor Hirohito,   
   whom the Japanese regarded as    
   a deity, to remain sovereign. Japanese military leaders wanted to fight on   
   even after the second bomb fell on Nagasaki, and some officers began fomenting   
   a coup to take over the Imperial Palace.   
      
   The American Army Air Force commander in charge of bombing Japan, Gen. Carl   
   “Tooey” Spaatz, suggested dropping a third atomic bomb, this time in the   
   vast area of Tokyo—some 20 square miles—already burned out by American   
   fire-bombing raids in    
   March and May. Spaatz was in effect proposing a demonstration. He wanted   
   Japanese leaders to be in the “scare radius” of the bomb—close enough to   
   see the flash but not so close as to be killed. “It is believed,” he   
   cabled his boss in Washington,   
    Gen. Hap Arnold, “that the psychological effect on the government officials   
   still remaining in Tokio [as he spelled it] is more important at this time   
   than destruction.” In fact, even if dropped on a burned-out area, an atomic   
   bomb would have spread    
   deadly radioactive fallout, a phenomenon not well-understood at the time.   
      
   In Washington Spaatz’s idea was initially rejected, but it apparently caught   
   President Truman’s attention. According to a report from the British embassy   
   in Washington, at about noon on Aug. 14, as the Japanese appeared to be   
   dithering over whether    
   to surrender, Truman “remarked sadly” to British officials “that he now   
   had no alternative but to order the atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo.” A third   
   bomb would be ready for delivery by Aug. 20.   
      
   Fortunately, a few hours later Truman learned that the Japanese had accepted   
   America’s surrender terms. A small peace faction, led by Japanese Foreign   
   Minister Shigenori Togo, had finally persuaded the emperor to defy the   
   militarists. Hirohito would    
   remain on the throne, but he would be subject to the Supreme Allied Commander,   
   Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not the other way around.   
      
   Oppenheimer hoped that the horror of the atomic bomb would make the world   
   renounce nuclear war, and he has been proved right—so far. But with Russia   
   and China building up their nuclear forces, the threat is once again growing.   
      
      
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