Two committees-the Target Committee and the Interim Committee-were convened to advise U.S. Killing civilians was the primary purpose of the Hiroshima bombing. But the archival record makes clear that such concerns were muted and rationalized away. Nonetheless, intuitive moral concerns and background legal principles were often raised, especially by Stimson. We find no evidence that anyone within the Truman administration undertook a formal legal analysis of the attack options in 1945. 6, 1945, were Japanese military personnel. Although Hiroshima contained some military-related industrial facilities-an army headquarters and troop-loading docks-the vibrant city of over a quarter of a million men, women and children was hardly “a military base.” Indeed, less than 10 percent of the individuals killed on Aug. 9, 1945, that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base … because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” Truman argued, in other words, that Hiroshima was a military target. The first myth was started by President Harry Truman when he announced on Aug. Our analysis exposes two other common myths about Hiroshima. What role did law play in the decision in 1945, and would such an attack be legal today? In our recent article, “ Why the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima Would Be Illegal Today ” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we focus on a slightly different set of questions.
deaths in the 1945 military records was significantly lower than the mythical half a million figure. But the serious historians studying this issue come to a different conclusion, finding that the range of estimates of U.S. Winston Churchill, in his memoirs, claimed instead that the invasion would have produced one million American fatalities and an additional 500,000 thousand allied fatalities. The Hopkins claim was the most recent inflation of estimates building on what Rufus Miles called the “myth of half a million American lives saved.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson originally claimed in his famous 1947 Harper’s article that an invasion was expected to produce “over a million American casualties to American forces alone” (emphasis added).
Hopkins, who claimed that the bombing saved an estimated 5-10 million Japanese civilians and 400,000-800,000 American soldiers who could have died in an invasion and was therefore “the lesser of two evils.” The Wall Street Journal, in contrast, published an op-ed by former Los Alamos laboratory official John C. Claude Eatherly, the pilot of the reconnaissance plane for the Enola Gay, who spent the rest of his life haunted by his role in what he considered an immoral attack. The New York Times published Anne Harrington’s moving story about Maj.
Earlier this month, the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, was no exception. Every year, in early August, new articles appear that debate whether the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 was justified.
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