Jekyll and Hyde

The Truman administration’s decision to use the atomic bomb remains contested ground in history. Fifty years have passed, in which scholars, theologians, and laypersons alike have argued incessantly over the morality of using atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Charges of genocide have met indignant replies pointing to military necessity. Further charges, suggesting that there were other options for ending the war besides the bomb, and that Harry Truman knew it, have faced rebuttals claiming Japan was anything but on the verge of surrender. And within the historiography, consensus continues to elude scholars on such basic issues as why the United States used the bomb. Was it primarily used to end the war? Or was it used, as Gar Alperovitz has argued for the past 30 years, as a means to intimidate the Soviet Union?1 The argument, like life, has indeed been a tale of sound and fury. But for Americans involved in it, it has come to signify everything; for the debate on Hiroshima is a debate on self-definition. Was the United States

Nuclear weapon · Operations research · Political science · Engineering · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

• Unconditional Surrender and the American Case Against the Modification of a Controversial Policy (1943–1945)

  Joe Majerus•International Journal of Military…•2020

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