blog.nuclearsecrecy.com Open in urlscan Pro
162.241.224.65  Public Scan

Form analysis
2 forms found in the DOM

GET https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" class="searchform" action="https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/">
  <div>
    <label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search for:</label>
    <input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s">
    <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search">
  </div>
</form>

POST #

<form action="#" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8" id="subscribe-blog-blog_subscription-2">
  <div id="subscribe-text">
    <p>Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. You can unsubscribe anytime.</p>
  </div>
  <p id="subscribe-email">
    <label id="jetpack-subscribe-label" class="screen-reader-text" for="subscribe-field-blog_subscription-2"> Email Address </label>
    <input type="email" name="email" required="required" value="" id="subscribe-field-blog_subscription-2" placeholder="Email Address">
  </p>
  <p id="subscribe-submit">
    <input type="hidden" name="action" value="subscribe">
    <input type="hidden" name="source" value="https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/">
    <input type="hidden" name="sub-type" value="widget">
    <input type="hidden" name="redirect_fragment" value="blog_subscription-2">
    <button type="submit" name="jetpack_subscriptions_widget"> Subscribe </button>
  </p>
</form>

Text Content

RESTRICTED DATA

The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
Redactions


HENRY STIMSON DIDN’T GO TO KYOTO ON HIS HONEYMOON

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 24th, 2023

The city of Kyoto was the only great city of Japan to be spared serious bombing
during World War II, despite being among the top targets preferred for the
atomic bomb, thanks to the unprecedented and extraordinary efforts by the
Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to protect it. I have written at length on
this, and why I have come to think that the issue of Kyoto is actually the key
to understanding quite a lot about Truman and the bomb, both prior to and after
its use. Whenever the issue of Kyoto comes up in popular discussions, however,
one other assertion always arises: that Stimson saved Kyoto because he spent his
honeymoon there.

Stimson was not invited by Truman to attend the Potsdam Conference — his rivals,
like Byrnes, appear to have gotten him excluded — but the “old man” showed up
anyway, with this defiant look on his face. Truman would tell him that he was
glad, as Stimson was Truman’s primary conduit of information about the Trinity
test and the atomic bomb.

This is used for one of the very few deliberately humorous notes in Christopher
Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) film, which came out last week. I am in the process
of writing a longer review of that, and will probably post something else on it
here, but it has served as an instigator for me to push out a blog post I had
been working on in draft form for several months about this question of the
“honeymoon.” As the post title indicates, my conclusion, after spending some
time looking into this, is that the honeymoon story is more probably than not a
myth. Stimson did go to Kyoto at least twice in the 1920s, but neither trip
could be reasonably characterized as a honeymoon, and explaining his actions on
Kyoto in World War II as a result of a “honeymoon” is trivializing and
misleading.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nolan’s portrayal of Stimson is, well, not very charitable. Within the narrative
construction of the film, Stimson exists to emphasize a growing theme of
Oppenheimer becoming sidelined as a “mere” technical expert by the military and
government officials. In the one meeting that Stimson appears (it is a
fictionalized version of the May 31, 1945, meeting of the Interim Committee that
Oppenheimer attended as a member of a Scientific Panel of consultants),
Oppenheimer strains to get Stimson and others to see the atomic bomb as
something worth taking seriously as a weapon and long-term problem. (This was
the same meeting in which Oppenheimer reports on the Scientific Panel’s
conclusions against a demonstration of the bomb.)

In the film, Stimson expresses some skepticism at the impressiveness of the bomb
(Oppenheimer has to convince him otherwise), shoots down any suggestions about
warning the Japanese ahead of it, impresses on the men there that the Japanese
are intractably committed to war in the face of defeat, and then agrees that the
atomic bomb might save American lives. He then, at the end, looks over a list of
12 possible targets, and without fanfare or opposition removes Kyoto from the
list, smiling and saying it was an important cultural treasure to the Japanese,
and incidentally, where he and his wife had their honeymoon. In both showings of
the film, this gets a big laugh. We’ll come back to that laugh.

Stimson’s opening statement to the Interim Committee meeting on May 31, 1945.

The reality of Stimson, and that meeting, is a lot more complicated than that.
One could unpack each of the various components of that meeting as depicted in
the film (they are all wrong in some way), but I would just emphasize that
Stimson was probably the most high-placed government official to see the atomic
bomb in the kinds of terms Oppenheimer cared about. Stimson was the
highest-ranked government official to closely follow the atomic bomb’s
development, and cared deeply about it as a wartime weapon and as a long-term
issue. (His interest in the atomic bomb was essentially the only reason he had
not retired from his office.) He absolutely did not believe the Japanese were
intractable (he was one of those advocating for a weakening of the terms of
unconditional surrender, because he understood the Japanese need to protect
their Emperor, even before the MAGIC decrypts showed concrete evidence of this
as a sticking point), he absolutely did not frame the atomic bomb’s usage as
something that would save American lives. To give a sense of Stimson’s mindset,
here is how Stimson opened the May 31, 1945, Interim Committee meeting,
according to the minutes:

> The Secretary [Stimson] expressed the view, a view shared by General Marshall,
> that this project should not be considered simply in terms of military
> weapons, but as a new relationship of ·man to the universe. This discovery
> might be compared to the discoveries of the Copernican theory and of the laws
> of gravity, but far more important than these in its effect on the lives of
> men. While the advances in the field to date had been fostered by the needs of
> war, it was important to realize that the implications of the project went far
> beyond the needs of the present war. It must be controlled if possible to make
> it an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to civilization.1

Could one imagine a sentiment more aligned with that of Oppenheimer’s? Anyway, I
digress — but my point is to emphasize that the movie does Stimson dirty here,
in turning him into a dummy stand-in representing “the powers that be” and how
much their interests could diverge from Oppenheimer’s. In reality, Oppenheimer’s
positions were pretty well-represented “at the top” for quite some time; making
him into an “outsider” here, I think, obscures the reality quite a bit. There
will be more on this in my actual review.2

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But let’s get back to the question of Kyoto and the alleged “honeymoon.” I don’t
mention the “honeymoon” story in my own work, because I’ve never been able to
substantiate it, despite trying. I am quite interested in the events that led to
Kyoto being “spared” from the atomic bombing (and all other bombing) in World
War II. I believe, and will be writing quite a bit more on this in my next book,
that this incident has not been taken seriously enough by historians. For one
thing, it was the only targeting decision that President Truman actually
directly participated in, when he backed Stimson in removing it from the list.
For another thing, the fact that Truman was involved at all was because Stimson
was (correctly) afraid that the military (in the personage of Groves and his
subordinates) would not recognize his authority as a civilian to make
“operational” decisions of this sort. So it is an important moment in the
question of civilian-military relations regarding nuclear weapons. And I believe
there is other significance to the Kyoto incident that I have written on
elsewhere, and will write on more in the future. The point I’m trying to make is
that perhaps more than others, I have really wanted to get into the ins-and-outs
of the Kyoto question, including Stimson’s motivations, for some time now. 

Target map of Kyoto, June 1945, with atomic bomb aiming point indicated, from
General Groves’ files — a sign of how far along the plans were for Kyoto to be
the first target of the atomic bomb. For more on the non-bombing of Kyoto, see
my 2020 article.

I’ve come to the conclusion, after digging and digging, that the “honeymoon”
story is false both in its strict sense (in the sense that Stimson did not
“honeymoon” there, under any reasonable definition of “honeymoon”) and in its
broader sense (attributing his actions on Kyoto during the war simply to that is
misleading). I was suspicious of it early on, when I found that no serious
sources actually asserted this apparently-verifiable fact, and because it has
a “too clever by half” feeling to it. It feels like a “fact” that was a factor
tailor-made for catchy headlines and click-bait news stories, the notion that an
entire city and the million people who lived there were saved by the fortunate
fact of a pleasant trip of a single man. Now, history often does have such
coincidences and idiosyncrasies, to be sure. But you’ve got to be on the watch
for fake ones, for half-rumors that get elevated to the status of full facts —
especially when such “simple” explanations get used at the expense of
interrogating more complex ones. 

None of the serious, scholarly accounts of the Kyoto incident mention that he
took a honeymoon there. Stimson himself never claimed this in any of his
published writings, from what I have been able to find. There are, as well,
several biographies and even an autobiography of Stimson. Thanks to the
essential service of the Internet Archive, perusing these quickly is a trivial
task. Here are the ones I looked at, searching for any discussion of a honeymoon
to anywhere, coming up with nothing: 

 * Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (Rutgers
   University Press, 1954)
 * Robert Ferrell,  Frank B. Kellogg, Henry L. Stimson (Cooper Square
   Publishers, 1963)
 * Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950
   (Knopf, 1990)
 * Sean Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the
   Bomb Against Japan (Cornell University Press, 2008)
 * Elting Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry
   L. Stimson (History Book Club, 2003 [1960])
 * David F. Schmitz, Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man (Scholarly Resources,
   2001)
 * Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (Harper
   and Brothers, 1948)

Now, not all of the above are as equal in rigor or quality as the others. (Of
them, Morison, Hodgson, and Malloy are the ones which dive deepest into his
early life.) And yet not one of the above authors has any indication towards the
“honeymoon” story. Would not a single of the above authors found it an
interesting thing to point out, had they come across any positive proof of it?
And it is not that the above do not discuss the Kyoto incident — many of them
do, although they do not take it as centrally important as I do. It is often
discussed in terms of the apparent contradiction of Stimson’s “old values” (not
bombing cities) with his advocacy of the atomic bomb use in general. If the
Kyoto “honeymoon” story was true, surely that would inform such a discussion. In
addition to the above, I also looked at scholarly articles in JSTOR, and it
shows up in the work of no scholars of World War II history, either. 

The photo of Henry Stimson used for his 1917 passport application. Scanned by
Ancestry.com.

Did Stimson have a honeymoon? Yes. But to where? That is somewhat unclear, but
it doesn’t sound like Asia. Henry Lewis Stimson married Mabel Wellington White
in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1893, after a long and difficult
five-and-a-half-year courtship. The delayed marriage was in part to Stimson
wanting to secure a solid career “position,” which by 1893 he had done: he had
been, at the age of 25, made full partner in the law firm of the famous and
prestigious Elihu Root, and his star would just continue to rise from them
onward. Their wedding was of sufficiently high social class to carry a notice in
both the New York Times and the New York Sun. The only indication that they took
any kind of honeymoon that I have found comes from the Times‘ announcement,
which mentions that: “The wedding tour of Mr. and Mrs. Stimson will last several
weeks.”3 

It is hard to get a firm sense of where Stimson may have gone in this period.
This is several years before he began keeping a daily diary (he started in 1909,
and it was originally not very verbose in any event). Morison says that “from
1893 through 1903 he went either to Canada or, more frequently, to the old
stamping ground in the West.” He mentions trips to Europe, including a climbing
of the Matterhorn in 1896, and hiking in Montana. He mentions no trips to Asia
in this period, and no honeymoon. Again, one would think, especially given his
later high involvement with the affairs of several Asian nations, that if
there was such a trip, it would have been noticed and noted. Again, none of the
above biographies of Stimson imply that he honeymooned in Asia, nor his
autobiography.



The end of Stimson’s 1926 “Trip to Orient” diary, in which he mentions his
arrival to Kyoto: “Kyoto at 6. [???] room a delicious dinner at Miyako Hotel.
October 3rd. Beautiful day devoted to sightseeing.”

In the summer of 1926 — over thirty years after their wedding — Stimson and his
wife (ages 59 and 60) engaged on what he called in his diary the “Trip to
Orient.” They started out from New York City by train in late June, crossing
through various parts of Canada in July, making various stops along the way to
Vancouver. By July 10, they were at sea, crossing the Pacific on a ship. Over
the course of July and August, he tracked his progress: Yokohama, Kobe, Shanghai
(“very hot”), Nanking (“very hot”), and finally, on August 3, Manila. From here,
most of his time was spent in the Philippines, either in meetings in Manila, or
traveling to different cities for more meetings. 



This was not really a pleasure trip. Stimson treated it largely as a
“fact-finding” mission regarding complicated diplomatic relations with regards
to Asian nations and the United States, and had been invited by the Governor
General of the Philippines, General Leonard Wood, a friend of Stimson’s. He
documented this trip extensively, in over 80 pages of hand-written notes, mostly
about conversations he had with people in the Philippines (including the rather
dubious views about the “self-governing” potential of different races of man
offered up by the Governor General — a reminder of the colonial and imperial
nature of this endeavor). On the basis of his mission, in that impressively
inexpert way of elite politics in the 1920s (apparently being rich and smart and
connected with other rich and smart people was enough to make one a regional
expert) was sufficient to later get him audiences with the President, would lead
to Stimson becoming Governor General of the Philippines in two years, and
Secretary of State after that. So it was quite an important trip for him.

In mid-September the Stimsons began the return trip, which was more leisurely
and included stops in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, Kobe, and Kyoto. In China and
Japan, he visited temples, dined with Americans and locals. He describes many
things he saw, in all of these cities, as “beautiful.” He arrived in Kyoto on
October 6, and wrote that he had a “delicious dinner at Miyako Hotel.” The next
day, October 3, he describes a “beautiful day devoted to sightseeing,” mentions
a Buddhist monastery and temple “on high hill” (“Kiyumizu“), mentions going into
Gion, and other things that are still fun to do there. Then the diary
ends, which is both frustrating and remarkable, given that his time in Kyoto is
what we care about, and that he documented pretty much every aspect of the trip
in detail except Kyoto. Through other evidence, we know that on October 5, the
Stimsons boarded a ship at Yokohama which arrived in San Francisco on October
20, so he could not have spent too much more time in Kyoto.4

The brief mention of Kyoto in Stimson’s 1929 diary, and his stay (for a second
time) at the Miyako Hotel.

Three years later, in March 1929, the Stimsons spent the night in Kyoto. This
visit came when Stimson was returning to the United States having ended his
position as Governor General of the Philippines, in order to be sworn in as
Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State. It was basically an overnight stay:
according to his diary, they arrived around 6pm, went to their hotel, and were
on a train to Tokyo by 8:15am. 

I would not call any of the above a “honeymoon” under even a broad definition of
the term. Certainly Stimson did not appear to call it this in anything he ever
said or wrote, which is really what matters. It is also not at all clear, from
the above, that Kyoto was particularly “special” to Stimson in any particular
way. His 1926 diary entry seems to reflect he had a nice time there. But it
doesn’t contain anything that “cracks the code.” (“Sure would hate to see this
city ever bombed!”) 

I am absolutely fine with suggesting that Stimson had a really nice time in
Kyoto, and that he saw it as something wonderful, and that these resonances
played a part in his later decision. It is a remarkable city — I visited it
myself for several days in 2016, and one can see why it is regarded as an
important cultural monument today, with its ancient temples, castles, streets,
districts, and so on. (Some of this specialness is a little circular: Kyoto is
one of the only major cities in Japan that has significant pre-war architecture
and infrastructure because Stimson had it spared.) 

But let us posit that Stimson had a special attachment to it because of his
trip(s) there. That is not, I don’t think, a totally satisfactory answer to why
he went to such lengths to keep it off of the target list — nor, I would say,
were his professed reasons, which related to avoiding the postwar animosity of
the Japanese — but let us, for the sake of argument, accept that it played a
role. This is still something different than saying that his took a “honeymoon”
there. It is a rather significant trip (in 1926, anyway) that involved a lot
more than sightseeing, and his acquaintance with Asia was not superficial. It
was not some kind of kooky coincidence, and in any event, the reasons behind
Stimson’s actions on Kyoto were more significant than just having a nice time
with his wife.5 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So where did the “honeymoon” story come from? I haven’t definitively traced the
source, but it seems to come purely out of the world of journalism. If you
search for “Stimson + Kyoto + honeymoon” in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Archive (which is not comprehensive, but has many major newspapers in it), the
first relevant entry is a bit of British journalism from 2002 (which describes
it as his “second honeymoon,” an interesting qualifier). It appears in another
British newspaper in 2006, and then “jumps the pond” to the Wall Street Journal
in 2008. None of these stories attribute the statement to any source, or any
expert, in particular.

A photo I took in the Gion district of Kyoto, 2017. 

Forgive me for implying that these are not what I would consider particularly
strong cases of journalistic research. I have not found any invocations of this
trope in any databases I have access to (which are considerable). All of which
makes me suspect this is a very recent (~20 years old) myth, one propagated by
journalists and the Internet into the realm of “fact.” If I had to guess,
calling his 1926 trip a “second honeymoon” was a bit of inventive flourish used
by a journalist that, because of its potency as an idea, became repeated and
repeated until it took status as fact.6

So why does this matter? Let’s get back to the Nolan film and that audience
laugh I mentioned. Why laugh? Why is it funny, or interesting, to assert that
Stimson scratched Kyoto off the list because he honeymooned there? Because it is
discordant: one is talking about something of great historical importance and
tremendous weightiness (the atomic bombings of Japan) being influenced by the
idiosyncratic coincidence of an old man having fond memories of a city. It is
deeply unexpected, because it pushes against the idea of the targeting of the
Japanese cities as being part of a strictly rational, strategic process.

And so here’s the rub, for me: the removal of Kyoto was due to the idiosyncratic
sensibilities of a single person (however inscrutable), and the targeting
process was less strictly rational and strategic as most people think. But it
was not quite as arbitrary and capricious as “Kyoto was spared because of a
honeymoon” would imply, and the trivializing of the sparing of Kyoto obscures
the actually weighty issues regarding authority (who decides the targets of an
atomic bomb?) and Truman’s actual role in the bombings (far less than people
think). There’s an interesting and important story here, and treating it for a
laugh is, well, annoying to me, to say the least. But more to the point, we
should stop repeating the honeymoon myth. If I were giving an alternative
framing for journalists (and others) to use, it would be this: “For reasons both
personal and strategic, Stimson fought to remove Kyoto from the target list, and
to keep it off the list after the military repeatedly tried to put it back on.”
That gives Stimson a bit more credit, for one thing, and also invites further
interest, rather than closing the door with a too-clever-by-half explanation.

 1. “Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting,” (31 May 1945), copy in
    Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946,
    microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records
    Administration, 1980), Roll 4, Target 6, Folder 3, “Interim Committee and
    Scientific Panel.” This entire folder is so interesting that I have opted
    to, unusually, upload it. []
 2. Also, they did not give the actor playing Stimson, James Remar, a mustache.
    I counted three prominently “missing mustaches” — characters whose
    appearances were quite defined by their mustaches in real life, but whose
    actors did not have any: Henry Stimson, Richard Tolman, and Kenneth Nichols
    (in his postwar visage). In each of these cases, the roles were relatively
    minor, but it’s mysterious to me why they wouldn’t have had them grow one,
    or use some makeup. In the case of Tolman, I feel it would have made him
    stand out a bit more from the crowd, as his presence is used in a
    non-trivial way in the plot of the film, but he has only one speaking line.
    The actor playing Nichols is quite small and a “babyface,” which makes it a
    little hard to see him as a hard-nosed Nichols, especially when he is in his
    postwar role. This is not really meant as a serious critique, but is the
    kind of thing that puzzled me, given that the film put a lot of emphasis on
    small details. []
 3. “Weddings Yesterday,” New York Times (7 July 1893), 4. []
 4. For this account, I both looked at Hodgson’s book, which describes some of
    it, but then also turned to Stimson’s diary: The Henry Lewis Stimson
    Diaries, microfilm edition retrieved from the Center for Research Libraries,
    original from Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven,
    Connecticut. His “Trip to the Orient” is labeled as volume 6a of his
    diaries. The date of his return trip aboard the S.S. President Taft I got
    from a manifest on Ancestry.com. []
 5. I don’t want to take the time here to go into my own theory of what Kyoto
    meant for Stimson, but let us just say I find more compelling an
    interpretation which sees Kyoto as a symbolic representation of Stimson’s
    guilt about the burning of Japan in general, which he was not a fan of.
    Stimson could not spare Japan, for many reasons, but he could spare Kyoto.
    Stimson attempted, at various times, to rationalize this — he could hardly
    convince anyone with that kind of emotional and vague argument — but my
    sense is that the rationalizations came after the decision. Of all of the
    speculations about Stimson’s motivations for Kyoto, the most interesting
    ones are contained in Otis Cary, “The Sparing of Kyoto: Mr. Stimson’s ‘Pet
    City,’” Japan Quarterly (Oct.-Dec. 1975), 337-347, which suggests that it
    was the affection of a “ward” of the Stimson’s for Kyoto that pushed him in
    that direction, but even that seems a little too “literal” for making sense
    of Stimson’s actions. []
 6. And Wikipedia may be partially to blame as well, in a process that XKCD’s
    Randall Munroe calls Citogenesis. Perhaps this post will be dubbed
    sufficiently rigorous to change how it discusses the matter? We shall see.
    One of the tricky aspects of Wikipedia’s internal epistemology is that for
    an issue like this, where a myth is asserted by not-great sources but not
    explicitly debunked by good ones, it becomes all-too-easy for something that
    experts don’t talk about to become talked about as a fact. []



Tags: 1920s, 1940s, 2000s, 2020s, Christopher Nolan, Henry L. Stimson, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, Japan, Kyoto
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | Comments Off on Henry Stimson
didn’t go to Kyoto on his honeymoon


Meditations


DECONSTRUCTING “THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE” – PART 1: THE QUESTION OF MEMORY

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 16th, 2023

When I learned several months ago that Daniel Ellsberg had pancreatic cancer,
and was opting not to treat it, I was not quite sure what I ought to do. I
consider it a great honor that I got to spend several days with Ellsberg, a few
years back, and was periodically in touch with him since then. I’d like to think
he was something of a friend, though I never knew him deeply or for that long of
a time.

After thinking on it for several days, and feeling conflicted, and talking about
it with a friend whose life experience exceeds mine by almost five decades, I
opted not to reach out to him when I heard the news — I figured he had a lot
more on his plate as it was, that he would be wanting to spend his final days
with his family, close friends, and his final attempts at advocacy, and I
couldn’t think of anything I would tell him that wouldn’t feel either maudlin or
better said by others. Whatever one thinks of him, he is a world-historical
figure, and I’m honored just to have met him.

Daniel Ellsberg holding forth at a dinner that was part of a 2018 workshop at
the Stevens Institute of Technology on “The President and the Bomb” that was
sponsored by the Ploughshares Fund. Dan was supposed to speak for 20 minutes or
so but instead spoke for about 2 hours… but it all pretty interesting, if a bit
taxing!

But I also felt like I ought to do something, just to commemorate him. I had
hoped to maybe do that something while he was still alive, but I knew he was on
a tight clock, and my own life didn’t really give me a lot of free time last
spring.1 So what I resolved to do was to go over his final book, The Doomsday
Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Bloomsbury, 2017), in some very
close detail, and write something about it.

I had gone over his book when it first came out, in part in preparation for
talking to him about it (which I did at some length in 2018), but I had always
wanted to really, truly dig into it, and to write something about it.
Discussions I had with other scholars, and observations about what was and
wasn’t said about the book on Twitter, in conferences, etc., made me feel that
the book and its arguments had not really been taken all that seriously by
serious students of nuclear history, international relations, or nuclear policy.
I had long wanted to write an essay about the book, with the hope of both
potentially stimulating more serious academic interest in it — because I do
believe it deserves to be taken seriously, even if it (like all books, and
especially memoirs, of which it mainly is) need not be taken uncritically — and
also applying the lens of someone who has had the time and luxury to try and
seriously study many of the events and issues that the book engages with and, in
some places, makes rather radical arguments about. 

My hope was that perhaps I would be able to write this essay while Dan was still
alive, and get his feedback on it, or perhaps have him answer any lingering
questions I had. That obviously did not happen: I finished my deep read of his
book today, June 16, 2023, a few hours before I saw his obituary in The
Washington Post. (Deep sigh.)

One might think that I might feel regret at being too slow (and I knew, of
course, that this was a possibility), but for whatever reason, this feels right
and appropriate. It would have been nice to ask him questions, and get his
responses to my thoughts, but I also would have felt guilty about burdening him
with potentially something else to do in his final days, and possibly be faced
with the awkwardness of disagreement, perceived critique, and, of course, the
painful (to me) difficulty of talking about death and legacy. 

For me, I think this is fine. I don’t think Dan would have minded this turn of
events, though I am sure he might have enjoyed it if I had written the essay
some time back, too. I think he’d be happy that I was spurred into action, one
way or the other. So I am using Dan’s very recent death as the stimulus to write
finally write all of this up, about an hour or so after I learned of his death.
What I am going to do, over the next week or so, is write a series of posts on
Dan Ellsberg and The Doomsday Machine. This is the first of an unknown number —
I’m winging it, and this is going to be written with a hot pen. Rest in Peace,
Dan. Thank you.


THE QUESTION OF MEMORY

The introduction to The Doomsday Machine lays out a description of the overall
context of the book: that Ellsberg had really identified nuclear war planning as
the truly dangerous “secret” that the US and global public needed to know about,
and that it was the issue that radicalized the one-time RAND Corporation analyst
into becoming a whistle-blower. The Pentagon Papers were just going to be the
“first taste” of his activities, something important and topical and immediate,
and would be followed up with more leaks. Due to a combination of circumstances,
this didn’t happen. The documents he had cached about nuclear war plans were
irrevocably lost in the wake of the Pentagon Papers (his brother hid them a
little too well, and they now are likely buried under a housing development),
and life took him in other directions. 

I did get a chance to ask Ellsberg in person why he had waited almost 50 years
to write this book, if it was really the true message. To be sure, it’s not like
Ellsberg didn’t get involved with nuclear weapons activism in the intervening
time, and he did talk about some of the things in the book prior to it (some of
its novelty was, I suspect, part of the publicity pitch for the book), but
still, it is a long time to sit on something. I didn’t really find his answer
all that compelling: he said he had found that publishers weren’t that
interested in books about nuclear weapons. That’s a little hard to believe,
given how many books have been published on the topic since the 1970s, and one
would think the nuclear war fears of the 1980s would have been more than
adequate to convince some publishers that the guy behind the Pentagon Papers
could sell a few books. And yes, he did lose the documents he intended to leak —
but so what? He had kept (he told me) extensive notes from the 1970s on these
topics (these notes are what he based a lot of the book on), his memory for
these things (even in his 80s, when I met him) seems almost eidetic, and even
just as a “memoir” it seems like it would have an audience.

I admit that Dan’s book cover was one of the examples I gave to my press for
guidance on the aesthetics for the cover of my own book: dark, cool, no mushroom
clouds or over-the-top SECRET stamps.

I suspect the real reason is a little more complicated, aside from the fact that
clearly he had decided to live his life a bit after the attempts by the Nixon
administration to put him in prison for the rest of his life. He clearly
believed that his nuclear secrets were far more dangerous to his own freedom
than the Pentagon Papers had been — and he was probably right about that.
Despite his longstanding advocacy for the importance of whistleblowers, I got
the sense when meeting him that he had decided to prioritize his family a bit
more once he was truly free (one thing he said in person that stuck with me was
that he pointed out that the divorce rate for whistleblowers was extremely high,
and he was incredibly happy and grateful than he was still with his wife), and
while the kind of activism he did after Pentagon Papers case did lead to him
getting arrested a few times as a protester, it was not the sort of thing that
would lead to him living out his days in a Supermax. I suspect he felt that
publishing a book that mostly described events over 50 years after the fact
(most of the book is about the 1950s and 1960s) was a lot safer than publishing
it when many of the people in it were still alive and somewhat influential, and
that prosecuting an octogenarian for espionage would be less likely. And the
context of the Trump administration spurred him to dive back into this topic,
just as it spurred the publishers and audiences of people who suddenly
rediscovered nuclear threats. 

I would also note that the book as published could not have been published a
whole lot earlier than it did, because it is not just a memoir. It is really an
odd hybrid of memoir, historical narrative (which occasionally dips into the
memoir, but is often quite independent from Ellsberg’s lived experiences), and
moral appeal. The historical narrative parts clearly required a lot of research
on Ellsberg’s part over the years, and even the memoir sections derive a lot of
their utility from the fact that he was able to compare his perception of things
with what we now know about them — for example, he readily admits that the Cuban
Missile Crisis as he experienced and perceived it was entirely different from
what was later revealed (in the 1990s and later) to have happened. So it would
have been a much more limited book if he had published it in the 1970s or 1980s,
although its proximity to the events of the memoir would have been closer.

How much should we trust Ellsberg’s memory? This is a question I’ve seen pitched
by scholars informally. A historian will instinctively reply: not much. Memory
is fickle, and constantly revised for both self and others. It doesn’t mean you
can’t listen to memory, but you want to corroborate as much as possible. The
fact that nearly everyone else mentioned in Ellsberg’s book is dead makes it
very hard to get any easy corroboration, and the fact that many of the events
and documents are still highly classified doesn’t help, either.

That being said, I did find it very useful to learn that he had made extensive
notes on these matters in the 1970s, so the bulk of a lot of this narrative is
not actually +50 years old distant from the events in question, but more like
10-20 years distant. That is still some time, of course. He also did have some
documents from this topic squirreled away — when I visited his home in 2018 with
Avner Cohen, we were both impressed by the cavernous library, document hoard
(including the aforementioned notes), and workspace he had underneath his home.
He did release some of those documents on his website promoting the book, some
of which are technically “leaks” in that he released un-redacted versions from
his personal files (but they are not nearly as “spicy” as the ones he wanted to
release). 

Ellberg’s under-the-house library and document collection in his home, circa
2018.

As noted already, I did get to spend some time talking with Ellsberg in person,
both socially (several lunches and dinners), in a workshop setting, and at his
home for a very long interview I conducted with Avner Cohen in 2018. I was, to
say the least, very impressed by him. To contextualize that, let me say that I
am not inherently impressed by people seeming to “know their subject well”: as
someone who writes and teaches and gives a lot of talks, I know how easy it is,
after awhile, to seem like you always have “all the facts at hand.” People are
frequently impressed with how good they think my memory must be, but I know that
a) I forget things (or details, or get things wrong) all the time when I don’t
re-check them, b) I don’t think I have a much better memory than anyone else
(and for some things, like numbers, my memory is probably worse than average,
because my brain just can’t seem to “hold” numbers very well), and c) anything
you spend a lot of time explaining to other people, and in effect engaging with
on a sustained and detailed basis, will get really tightly “encoded” in your
brain without you really trying. As I like to put it, almost everyone has a
great memory regarding the things they do every day, and in my line of work,
that means historical details. 

So with that as a preamble, I will say: I was impressed in particular by Dan’s
ability for recall. He appeared to have a level of recall much better than
average. I don’t think he was faking it, or hallucinating details, or just knew
things because he engaged with them on a daily basis. He seemed to be able to
accurately recall exact dates, exact subject lines on memos, exact wording. He
seemed to do so effortlessly and earnestly — he didn’t seem like it was trying
to impress me or others, this was just how he got his point across. I have
talked with people who have known him longer than I have who reported that this
was always the impression of Dan, this superhuman quickness of memory and
thoroughness, and that his ability in his 80s was not nearly as good as it used
to be, but was still superhuman.2

So I actually rate Ellsberg’s ability to recall his memories of experiences,
documents, etc., pretty high. That does not mean his memories are accurate —  an
important distinction. But I believe that the book earnestly and probably with
high-fidelity reports things as Ellsberg experienced them. Its recollections
need to be subjected to scrutiny and, I would like to hope, become the basis of
efforts at corroboration, especially for the most controversial and perhaps most
important sections. But they should not be dismissed outright, however
fantastical or (at times) self-centered they might appear. I think, frankly,
this is what Dan would want: there is nothing about him, or his book, that makes
me think that he wants us to accept his narrative on his authority alone.
Indeed, as I’ll get to, his entire stated goal of the book — which I believe him
on — is that it ought to generate extensive efforts to look into the truth of
these matters. 

Next time: Looking at Ellsberg’s claims about the delegated authority under
Eisenhower and Kennedy

 1. If I’ve seemed “off the radar,” it isn’t just a perception. The last year
    was intensely busy in term of teaching and service. Busier, and more
    generally taxing, than usual, for a lot of reasons. I am now, however, on
    both my summer “break” as well as beginning a year-long sabbatical, and I
    find that my reaction to that has been to throw myself into research in an
    almost frenzied way, working essentially non-stop, seven days a week, and
    being utterly happy with that change of pace. Many of these efforts will
    only bear fruit in a year or so, but some of them will be wrapping up
    projects this summer that have been in a holding pattern for a while. []
 2. “Superhuman” is, of course, hyperbolic — Dan was quite human. But I have,
    over the years, met several Nobel Prize winners, top-tier academics, a few
    policymakers who were renown for their abilities, etc., and found that most
    people of this sort do not give me the impression of being “superhuman” in
    their cognitive abilities. I don’t mean this as any kind of self-flattery
    (or self-deprecation), just that when I spend time with these people I come
    away with the impression that they are smart but specialized, or smart but
    very-well trained, or smart but have a mental “trick” that is very
    productive (e.g., a question they ask or method they use that isn’t at all
    obvious, but usually yields interesting results, and once you realize what
    they are doing, you could imagine replicating this approach yourself and
    getting similar sorts of answers — a lot of “academic intellects” fit into
    this category, I find), and not with the idea that their brain works
    fundamentally different form other “smart” people I’ve met. I’ve only met
    two or three people who gave me the impression that their brain just worked
    fundamentally faster and more generally impressive than the generally
    “smart,” and gave me some insight into the awe that all of the other
    scientists of his day had for someone like John von Neumann, who made them
    all feel like second-raters. Dan is one of this small group of people I’ve
    met face to face who impressed me as having a brain on a much more
    “accelerated” template than normal “smartness.” It could be exhausting, too
    — once he got going, he didn’t want to stop telling you what he thought was
    important! But more than a few of us are guilty of that… []



Tags: 2020s, Books, Daniel Ellsberg, Historiography, RAND Corporation
Posted in Meditations | This post has footnotes | 6 Comments »


Meditations


OPPENHEIMER: VACATED BUT NOT VINDICATED

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 21st, 2022

One of the sleeper news items of last week was that the Department of Energy
officially vacated the Atomic Energy Commission decision that stripped J. Robert
Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954. It did come as a surprise to me.
I knew that there was a campaign to overturn Oppenheimer’s clearance loss — I
had been asked to give representatives from the American Institute of Physics a
background talk about it, in order to help them determine whether to take a
stance on it — and also knew that there had been previous, unsuccessful efforts
in this respect.

“Beyond loyalty, the harsh requirements of security.” TIME magazine’s June 1954
cover after Oppenheimer’s clearance was stripped.

I didn’t really expect the DOE to do anything about it, though, because there
would be no real practical consequence or obvious “gain” for them to do so, and
I could imagine several plausible reasons why they wouldn’t want to do it,
regardless of their opinion about Oppenheimer and the case. To the first point,
the pro-Oppenheimer lobby is pretty small these days; this is not a pressing
issue for the American public, or even American scientists. The case is nearly
70 years old, and Oppenheimer himself has been dead for over 50 years; anyone
who was aware of it while it happened is quite old (this includes my good friend
and colleague Ed Friedman, who tried to organize a protest in favor of
Oppenheimer while an undergraduate at MIT in 1954, and was told by his
professors that he ought to keep his head down if he didn’t want to run into
political trouble), and while Oppenheimer is a subject of many biographies (some
quite excellent) and some films, popular interest in him doesn’t seem to
generally translate into the argument for his (symbolic) restitution. The people
who seemed most invested in this appear to me to be Oppenheimer biographers, who
are more tied to Oppenheimer’s legacy emotionally and perhaps financially than
your average voter. So why do this? “Righting wrongs” is a nice thing to say,
though when it has no practical consequence, it tends not to be a governmental
priority. Perhaps it is just meant to be some good PR for the DOE, an agency
whose mission is surprisingly unknown to the public (and as such makes it the
target of small-government conservatives). Perhaps it is meant to coincide in
some way with the upcoming Oppenheimer movie by Christopher Nolan. Perhaps it is
some internal bureaucratic move — someone angling for something down the line.
Perhaps it just came across the right desk at the right time with the right
person. I have no inside story here. (If someone does have an inside story, and
wants to share, get in touch.)

Why might they not have done this? For one thing, government agencies tend not
to second-guess their previous decisions, even if it was a different agency (the
DOE is not the AEC, but it is its successor agency; it has been over a decade
since I was inside the DOE’s Germantown headquarters, but when I was there, they
still had a massive rendering of the AEC seal over the entrance desk). For
another, second-guessing security clearance decisions seems even more fraught
with problems. Do they really want to create a precedent for reviewing past
security decisions? And how would they split the difference on exonerating
Oppenheimer, while not necessarily tying their hands in the future when it came
to disqualifying people for clearances? And while the Oppenheimer affair is not
a hot political topic anymore, attacks that the DOE is “lax” on the subject of
nuclear secrecy and security are a perennial political feature of Washington,
and garner big (if ignorant) headlines. So why stick your neck out?

This is why I didn’t really think the DOE would bother — on the balance, it
seemed more risky than not, and my experience is that in such situations, the
bureaucrats go with the “safe” choice, which is to kick it down the road to a
successor. But they did it anyway! So I was, again, surprised. The way they
tried to avoid the potential problems I brought up is interesting, though it
somewhat constrains the impact of the order. Essentially, the conclusion by the
DOE is that the AEC’s decision against Oppenheimer could be vacated because the
AEC did not, at several points, follow its own guidelines and procedures. In
this, they are 100% correct that the AEC did not follow its own rules; if
anything, the DOE statement understates the level of perfidy involved by people
like Lewis Strauss, who broke not only AEC rules but probably the law in his
attempt to punish Oppenheimer. The entire hearing was deliberately and
decisively unfair, and prejudged from the start by many involved. 

This is a very “safe” way to overturn the judgment: basically overturning it on
a technicality. What they have not really done is vindicate Oppenheimer. The
statement is very positive towards Oppenheimer, and points out the lack of
evidence that he ever did anything disloyal to the United States. But the AEC
decision against Oppenheimer was based on the idea that he had “fundamental
defects” to his character — notably his lying to security officers — and because
his “associations” with Communist and Communist-adjacent people (i.e., most of
his friends, students, and family) “extended far beyond the tolerable limits of
prudence and self-restraint.” The DOE doesn’t really go against these things,
except to point out that his issue with “associations” was already well-known
and looked-over in the past. What they aren’t saying is, “the entire case
against Oppenheimer was flawed, the charges against him were bunk, he was done
totally wrong.” What they are saying is, “the AEC didn’t follow its own rules.” 

J. Robert Oppenheimer, from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Which sort of implies, to me, that the DOE is tacitly saying that if the AEC had
followed its own procedures (which probably still would have led them, in my
view, to revoke his clearance), then the Oppenheimer affair would be fine. I’m
not saying they are really saying this, of course. As indicated above, I get it:
focusing on procedure gives them an easy “out” of this past decision. If they
actually said that the concerns about his “character” were totally
inappropriate, they’d be implying that it is OK to lie to security officers. If
they said his “associations” were fine, they’d be implying that having half of
your entire social network be made up of people who were members of prohibited
organizations is fine. These are not precedents they want to, or can, set. 

This gets at a very tricky aspect of the Oppenheimer affair. The motivation for
the whole thing was entirely a sham. There were no real concerns that
Oppenheimer was a danger to the country or a spy. It was pure political
character assassination. This is easy to document. And the proceedings were
completely stacked against Oppenheimer — and would have been even if the AEC had
followed its own rules, because there isn’t the same presumption of innocence in
a security clearance hearing as there is a court of law, and because of the very
nature of the thing, Oppenheimer didn’t have access to all of the evidence
(because his clearance was suspended, he didn’t have access to classified
evidence against him). So the whole thing was both unnecessary and unfair, in my
view. 

But. Once you ask the question, Did J. Robert Oppenheimer comport himself
according to the standards for a nuclear security clearance in 1954?, it is, in
my opinion, very hard to answer “yes.” This is not a referendum on his
contributions as a scientist or advisor, or even a referendum on his
personality. It is, perhaps, a referendum on the security standards of the time
— one can argue they were overly strict and driven more by a hysterical fear of
losing “the secret” than practical security. But Oppenheimer’s actions in the
1930s and 1940s definitely did not set him up for a favorable evaluation in the
1950s.

He did have a lot of Communist and near-Communist “associations.” This is just
the truth of the matter. His brother, his wife, his sister-in-law, his
ex-girlfriend, his students, his colleagues… there’s a lot of Red and Pink in
that list! There are really good historical and contextual explanations for
that, and the timing matters (Great Depression, etc.). It doesn’t actually mean
Oppenheimer was a Communist — though he did probably have closer connections to
the Communist Party of the United States than he ever admitted, even if he
doesn’t appear to have ever been a card-carrying member — and definitely doesn’t
mean he was a spy. But it’s hard to imagine someone in the middle of McCarthyism
looking at all that and saying, “this is fine.” This is more of an indictment of
McCarthyism than Oppenheimer, to be sure. But even today it would be hard to
imagine a director of Los Alamos having that many “associations” with people in
radical groups of any political stripe. If it came out tomorrow that the
director of a weapons laboratory had family and friends connected to the Proud
Boys, for example, there would be some legitimate cause for concern!

And he did exhibit really questionable judgment from the perspective of
security. And not just by the standards of the 1950s! He admitted lying to
security officers repeatedly about the Chevalier affair. When asked why he did
this, Oppenheimer offered up nothing more than, “because I was an idiot.” That
is not a strong defense! (The real answer likely was: “Because I was trying to
protect my brother.” Which is still a bad answer, but at least a relatable and
plausible one.) He admitted to having had an affair with Jean Tatlock, his
ill-fated, Communist-adjacent ex-girlfriend, while running Los Alamos. When
asked whether this was “consistent with good security,” Oppenheimer tried to
argue that it was, because he didn’t really believe Tatlock was a Communist.
This is not a good answer! This is not “consistent with good security”! (Again,
one might probe a better answer: Tatlock was troubled, and Oppenheimer was
trying to help an old friend, and that’s still not great judgment — one can’t
imagine Oppenheimer’s wife found it adequate — but it doesn’t look as bad as his
actual testimony makes it look.) Again, it is hard to imagine thinking “this is
fine.”

Two frames from a 1961 photo session with Oppenheimer by Ulli Steltzer. “He was
shy of the camera and I never got more than 12 shots. It is hard to say which
expression is most typical.” More on this image, here.

The best one can do with both of these issues (which is what Henry DeWolf Smyth
did in his dissenting opinion on the security clearance case) is say that
Oppenheimer was flawed-but-human, and that ultimately he doesn’t represent a
security risk. Which was clearly a thinkable opinion at the time (Smyth, for
one, thought it), but one can readily see why it was the minority view.
Ultimately all of this comes down to how serious you think the standards of
security ought to be. If you believe that nuclear secrecy and security is
paramount, then you want a high bar. If you believe the “system itself is
nothing to worship,” as Smyth puts it, and regard it as a “means to an end,”
then you might have been willing to let it slide, especially since Oppenheimer’s
clearance was about to expire anyway. But even then, one can see the
precedent-setting aspects as problematic. Does one really want to say that it is
acceptable to lie to security personnel, for example, or that to object to
Oppenheimer on those grounds is just anti-Communist hysteria?

This is what I mean by saying this is “tricky.” I don’t worship the security
system, obviously. I don’t think the Oppenheimer affair was anything less than a
sham. But I also am not sure that Oppenheimer “deserved” a clearance, just
because he put in good service for the country.1 I think once you start to
evaluate Oppenheimer’s worst behavior by the standards of the 1950s — and
frankly, even by the standards of today — it is pretty hard to find it
acceptable. I’m well aware that this is not the perspective of most Oppenheimer
biographers and certainly not his popular fans; I make this as a historian who
isn’t completely willing to dismiss the fears of the 1950s as “hysteria” and who
is not generally a fan of seeing historical figures as either perfect heroes of
treacherous villains.

So the Department of Energy vacated the Oppenheimer decision, but didn’t quite
vindicate it. This is what I meant when I told William Broad that I didn’t think
this went quite as far as the real pro-Oppenheimer people might want — it
doesn’t say, for example, that Oppenheimer deserved a clearance on his merits,
or because the charges against him were all bunk. It gives it to him on the
basis of procedure. Which is important, and totally defensible. But a bit shy of
total vindication — for reasons, again, that I can totally understand. Would
Oppenheimer have been satisfied with this? I doubt it. He would have wanted more
of a positive statement about his loyalty than this offers up.

I’m ultimately fine with the DOE’s action. It doesn’t have any practical impact
that I can see. But it does go a bit of a way to right a historical wronging,
and the Oppenheimer affair was ultimately a wronging. Oppenheimer didn’t deserve
it, even if he was imperfect. And even if righting historical wrongs doesn’t do
much directly, it does imply that we are capable, as a people and a society and
a government, of reevaluating ourselves and our past and coming to terms with
errors and injustices. The vacating of the AEC decision in the Oppenheimer
affair is, ultimately, less important for what it does for the DOE or
Oppenheimer than what it does, and perhaps says, about us. 

 1. So did Klaus Fuchs, as an aside. As Norris Bradbury liked to put it, Fuchs
    worked very hard for the USA. The problem was, he also worked hard for the
    Soviet Union. Obviously the cases of Fuchs and Oppenheimer are separated by
    the key fact that Fuchs was a spy, and Oppenheimer was not! But I just bring
    this up as an example of the limits of the “good service” argument. There
    have been plenty of people who put in good service to the country at one
    point in their lives, and then did things that worked against it. []



Tags: 1950s, 2020s, Atomic Energy Commission, Clearances, Department of Energy,
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Posted in Meditations | This post has footnotes | 11 Comments »


Redactions


DID THE JAPANESE OFFER TO SURRENDER BEFORE HIROSHIMA? (PART 2)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 6th, 2022

This is second post of a two part series on this topic.
Click here for part one.

Did the Japanese offer to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped in
August 1945? In my first post earlier this week, I gave what we might call the
standard diplomatic history answer: no, they didn’t. There were “peace feelers”
to the Soviet Union from an important minority of the Japanese government, which
is quite interesting and complicates the overly-simple picture of Japanese
fanaticism that is often told about their refusal to surrender, but they don’t
constitute, in any meaningful sense, a real offer to surrender. And they were
certainly not an offer of unconditional surrender.

But what if that wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer up a
full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were
exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war? 

General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a
picture deliberately mean to contrast the diminutive Emperor with the American
general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.

I bring this up because my attention was not long ago directed to an article
that came out recently in the (respectable) Asia-Pacific Journal that makes the
argument that Japan was indeed ready to surrender. Most of it is very much the
“standard revisionist” take on the end of the war, with a strong reliance on the
postwar critiques of the atomic bomb by high-ranking military figures and a
discussion of internal debates about whether unconditional surrender was a good
idea or not.1 Overall I didn’t find it to contain much new, and the argument is
still not compelling.2 

But one part stuck out to me as something I wasn’t familiar with from the normal
diplomatic historical literature, in a footnote:

> Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, reported that two days
> before President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Winston
> Churchill and Joseph Stalin in early February 1945, he was shown a forty-page
> memorandum drafted by General MacArthur outlining a Japanese offer for
> surrender almost identical with the terms later concluded by President Truman.
> Trohan related that he was given a copy of this communication by Admiral
> William Leahy who swore him to secrecy with the pledge not to release the
> story until the war was over. Trohan honored his pledge and reported his story
> in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald on August 19, 1945.

Now that is very interesting! But is it true? Because if so, this would be a
very different situation than the MAGIC intercepts — a real, detailed offer (40
pages!) for surrender, well before the atomic bomb was ready to use (and before
the Soviets had committed to entering into the war!), that Roosevelt had
rejected (more grist for the “what did Roosevelt think about nuclear weapons”
mill)! One would assume that if this was the case, one would read about it in
the many, many, many serious books that have been written on the end of World
War II, including by people who have spent a lot of time in both the US and
Japanese archives, like Hasegawa, or the hardcore revisionists, who would surely
have leapt at such a thing… and yet, from what I can tell, that isn’t the case.
The Trohan memorandum (as I’ll call it for brevity) isn’t in Hasegawa, or
Alperovitz, or… really anybody serious. So I thought, “what’s up with that?”  

Portrait of Walter Trohan, reporter for the Chicago Tribune, in 1964. From the
Harry S. Truman Library and Museum.

So I looked at the linked-to source, an article for the History News Network,
where it went into a little more detail:

> Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune with impeccable credentials
> for integrity and accuracy, reported that two days before President Roosevelt
> left for the Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in early February
> 1945, he was shown a forty-page memorandum drafted by General MacArthur
> outlining a Japanese offer for surrender almost identical with the terms
> subsequently concluded by his successor, President Truman. The single
> difference was the Japanese insistence on retention of the emperor, which was
> not acceptable to the American strategists at the time, though it was
> ultimately allowed in the final peace terms. Trohan relates that he was given
> a copy of this communication by Admiral Leahy who swore him to secrecy with
> the pledge not to release the story until the war was over. Trohan honored his
> pledge and reported his story in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington
> Times-Herald on August 19, 1945. According to historian Anthony Kubek,
> Roosevelt, in the presence of witnesses, read the memorandum and dismissed it
> with a curt “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.”
> 
> Specifically, the terms of the Japanese peace offers of late January 1945 were
> as follows:
> 
>  * Full surrender of the Japanese forces, air, land and sea, at home and in
>    all occupied countries.
>  * Surrender of all arms and ammunition.
>  * Agreement of the Japanese to occupation of their homeland and island
>    possessions.
>  * Relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa.
>  * Regulation of Japanese industry.
>  * Surrender of designated war criminals for trial.
>  * Release of all prisoners.
> 
> Other than retention of the emperor these terms were identical to the final
> surrender terms. Harry Elmer Barnes, in his essay “Hiroshima: Assault on a
> Beaten Foe,” published in the May 10, 1958 issue of the National Review, tells
> the same story. Barnes said that the Trohan article was never challenged by
> the White House or the State Department, and says that after MacArthur
> returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former
> President Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter
> confirmed its accuracy in every detail. The Trohan story was ignored by other
> news media and almost immediately dropped off the public radar.

So that’s kind of interesting, but also raises some serious concerns. First, the
Eisenhower-era National Review is not where I would anchor a modern historical
claim. Maybe there is something of truth in their pages, but I would be very
careful to support any claims like this with a less-partisan, better-cited
source, and one that perhaps enjoyed access to the wealth of research resources
now available to us about this topic.

Harry Elmer Barnes, left, and Anthony Kubek, right.

Second, the historians cited to back this up are, to say the least, problematic.
Harry Elmer Barnes, for example, according to his Wikipedia entry, came out as a
Holocaust denier in his later career (which is to say, only a few years after
the National Review article). Even if one wants to make the argument that this
particular article is not Holocaust denial, and is before he did that… it’s
still a big oof, as the kids say. 

As for “historian Anthony Kubek,” he was virulently anti-Communist,
anti-Roosevelt, and anti-Truman, who, late in his career, gave at least one talk
at an Institute for Historical Review conference and published an article in
their journal that railed against the Morgenthau Plan as a Communist plot. The
IHR is infamous for being primarily a forum for Holocaust denial. He doesn’t
seem to have been an explicit Holocaust denier himself, from what I could tell,
but his anti-Communism seems to have been of the sort that seems to have found
easy company with anti-Semitic bigots.

So the confluence of “respected historians” who are supposedly backing this
story up is… not so good. If anything, their endorsement makes this claim even
more suspicious, and says much about the “kinds of circles” this claim is
deployed within: far-right critiques of Roosevelt and Truman. Which is a kind of
atomic bombing critique that is not very common today, as the politics of the
bombings have shifted quite a bit over the years. The irony is not lost on me
that the people who are deploying the Trohan allegation today are from the other
end of the political spectrum!

(I would just like to note that it is not my goal here to heap scorn on the
authors of the quoted pieces, so I have not engaged them by name or anything
like that. From what I can tell they seem to be well-intentioned, but they are
not well-known names in the fields of diplomatic history or atomic history. I
suspect they fell into these claims somewhat unaware of their trickiness or the
types of people who originated and supported them.)

Trying to corroborate any aspect of this story sent me down a rabbit hole. What
I found was that where this story shows up, in almost identical language to the
above, are various “revisionist” accounts. As one might expect from the above,
these start as being right-wing revisionist accounts, but switch into left-wing
revisionist accounts at some point. None of the places I have seen the Trohan
story deployed in this fashion try to actually corroborate it with more
evidence, which is a sign of something.

One doesn’t find the Trohan story or the alleged “offer” in it in more careful,
academic histories of the end of the war. Even “revisionist” ones. It isn’t even
refuted; it’s just not mentioned. There is no sign of the purported 40-page
memorandum in the archives, in oral histories, in telegrams, nothing. At least,
none that I could find through footnotes, finding aids, and other means at my
easy disposal. I sent a draft of this post to a few scholars I respected in this
field, and they hadn’t heard of any of this before. It seems relegated only to
“fringe” sources. There is only one discussion of this issue in serious
historical writing that I could find, which I will discuss in a moment, and it
is essentially devoted to contextualizing how the story of the “Trohan
memorandum,” as I will call it for brevity, became a talking point of the
fringe-right in the 1940s and 1950s.

This does not mean that the “Trohan memorandum” might not be buried in some
archival basement somewhere — it’s totally possible, there are lots of “lost
files” out there. But one would think that something like this would have been
discovered by an archivist or historian at some point, and made some deal of,
given that it would play a big role in how we thought about the end of World War
II, the atomic bombings, Roosevelt, and Yalta. None of these are exactly
“unexamined” subjects. If anything, they have been pored over to a fault by
scholars, and the importance of such a document would be obvious to anyone who
stumbled across it. Which is for me pretty strong evidence that it isn’t in the
archives.

The headline of the Trohan article in the Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1945.

Of course, I could easily look up the only cited source for this information:
the front-page article by Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan. It is
basically similar to what is reported above, but has some additional details
which are interesting. I am putting the entire thing (retyped by myself from the
original) into a footnote here, because it would pretty long to just insert into
the post directly. (Anyone who receives these posts as e-mails will,
unfortunately, be seeing the entire thing right now! Sorry, my footnote plugin
does not work with the e-mail plug-in.)3
There are a few things gained from the original article that are missing from
its use in “revisionist” accounts. The most important in my mind is that in
Trohan’s article, there is an explanation as to why Roosevelt would have
rejected the alleged offer at the time: it wasn’t meant to be an official offer
from the Japanese Supreme War Council; rather, it was from some kind of “peace
party” minority of it. And as such there were fears that if the US pursued this,
it would lead to a coup against said “peace party” (and the Emperor) by the
dominant militarists. Which is pretty interesting, because it is not so far from
what actually happened, of course, when Japan did offer a conditional surrender
on August 10th, 1945, and suffered an attempted coup by junior officers. (The US
refused the offer then, and the Japanese offered unconditional surrender on
August 14th.)

Anyway, all sources of this claim go back to Trohan and Trohan alone. There are
some other claims in other, later sources (also unsubstantiated) that the source
of this information to Trohan was Admiral Leahy, and that, many years later,
Herbert Hoover confronted MacArthur on this article, and that MacArthur said it
was essentially accurate (and this claim, again, is hard to substantiate).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The only source I have seen that contextualizes all of the above is Marc
Gallichio’s Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II (Oxford
University Press, 2020). He spends part of chapter 6 discussing how the Trohan
article was received (not it origins, which seem mysterious), and how it became
pulled into the anti-Truman, anti-Communist, right-wing maw of the late 1940s
and early 1950s that essentially saw Communist infiltration of the US as being
behind the “loss” of China, the Korean War, and so on. He does a great job of
showing how the Trohan memo became a sort of talking point of the anti-Communist
Right, including Senate Republicans who were instead lionizing MacArthur (at the
expense of Truman). The Trohan memo was just one of many “threads” in a growing
conservative conspiracist argument that included, but was not limited to, the
argument that the atomic bombs were not needed, and that Roosevelt had
deliberately prolonged the war in order to allow the Soviet Union to enter into
it. 

Gallichio dismisses any reality of the Trohan memo pretty quickly:

> The idea that, in January 1945, the emperor authorized his representatives to
> tell MacArthur that he was willing to have the Americans occupy Japan,
> liberate Taiwan and Korea, surrender war criminals for trial, regulate
> Japanese industry, and abandon all prerogatives of the throne was patently
> ridiculous. Not surprisingly, Trohan’s fantastic story received little
> attention when it was published amid the celebration of the war’s end.
> Republication in the Senate hearings gave it second life. In the crisis
> atmosphere of the Korean War, it quickly became an article of faith among
> conspiratorially minded critics of Roosevelt. According to this story, by
> failing to act on MacArthur’s recommendation and adhering stubbornly to
> unconditional surrender, Roosevelt had prolonged the war and opened northeast
> Asia to Soviet penetration. No evidence of MacArthur’s supposed report was
> ever found. That only confirmed critics’ worst fears about the lengths
> Roosevelt’s men would go to serve the Kremlin’s ends. The story survived for
> decades as part of the indictment against FDR.4

I find this pretty compelling, on the whole. It doesn’t tell us where the story
of the Trohan memo originated, of course. I think it suspiciously similar to the
MAGIC intercept story (discussed in part 1 of this blog post), albeit transposed
in time and with many details changed. So it could be a garbled version of the
situation at Potsdam, with different people involved. That seems not entirely
impossible to me, though it would be a big error on the part of Trohan, and
involve him either deliberately fabricating some aspects (e.g., when he learned
about it, the 40-page memoranda, etc.), or being duped by someone deliberately
spreading misinformation to him. It could also be confused in other ways. For
example, the 40-page memoranda might have been an offer prepared by some
planners in the US to present to the Japanese (there were Americans working on
“conditional” surrender possibilities before and at the Potsdam Conference,
which Truman rejected), but the authorship got scrambled.

Another possibility is that it is entirely fabricated. This strikes me as not
impossible — journalists do, sometimes, fabricate entire stories out of nothing,
and there is something slightly too neat about this account. It might not have
been fabricated by Trohan, of course; it could have been fabricated by someone
feeding information to Trohan in some way. Remember how the Trohan story was
used and understood in the 1940s and 1950s: as an attack on the necessity of the
use of the atomic bombs. So it is possible that one of the people who had
knowledge of MAGIC, and wanted to argue that the bombs weren’t necessary (Leahy?
MacArthur? Eisenhower? Grew?) was behind a disinformation campaign. Stranger
things have happened! Given the importance of MacArthur in this story, and his
own well-established narcissism and conflicts with Truman, it is not entirely
out of hand to wonder if he was himself the fabricator here.

The other option, of course, is that it is real or partially real — maybe there
was some kind of “early peace-feeler,” in late January/early February 1945. This
doesn’t strike me as at all impossible, either; again, we know the Japanese were
interested in such “feelers” a few months later, so why not a bit earlier? The
main argument against this is again, that there seems to be zero corroborating
evidence of this being the case from either the US or Japanese sides. Which is
pretty striking. Separately, from what we know, the “peace party” was not at all
organized-enough to do this kind of thing in early 1945. The timeline is wrong,
from what we know of what was going on in Japan at the time. I am inclined to go
along with Gallichio in calling the sum of this “ridiculous” given the context
of what was going on in Japan at the time.

One of the things that Gallichio does well in his chapter about this is show how
this idea steadily regulated itself to the fringes of even conservative thought,
so that we end up with the “chief spokesmen” of this argument being people who
can only find audiences with places like the IHR. The politics of Hiroshima in
the 1940s and early 1950s are not quite the politics they would become: it would
instead become an article of faith of conservatism that the bombings were
justified and necessary. That’s a story for another time, but it is what makes
the very odd movement of this story from the far-right fringe to an
anti-Hiroshima argument from the left very interesting. It’s kind of easy to see
how this happened — an anti-Hiroshima argument is an anti-Hiroshima argument —
but I think people on the left would be far more suspicious about using some of
this evidence if they realized who had first developed it, why they had done so,
and how it got deployed later.

“Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender
on behalf of the Japanese Government, on board USS Missouri (BB-63), 2 September
1945. Lieutentant General Richard K. Sutherland, U.S. Army, watches from the
opposite side of the table. Foreign Ministry representative Toshikazu Kase is
assisting Mr. Shigemitsu. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in
the U.S. National Archives.” Via Wikimedia Commons.

Anyway, I thought this made for an interesting little historical quandary. I try
to keep an open mind on these things, though I (obviously) lean much more
towards the “it didn’t exist” options than the idea that it did exist. It just
doesn’t add up, and the burden of proof is going to be on those who assert it is
real, because so much evidence points against it.

Circling back to our original question of whether the Japanese made an offer of
surrender prior to the atomic bombings, it is very interesting to note that even
if the Trohan article was 100% true, the memorandum it describes still wouldn’t
constitute a real “offer to surrender” as most people understand it, because it
wasn’t an official offer, and it did not represent the view of the Supreme War
Council. All it would be was a more direct and concrete “peace feeler” than what
would come later. It would be important to understanding the historical events,
to be sure, but it wouldn’t actually change the overall conclusion.

In the end, the answer to the question motivating this series of posts — did the
Japanese offer to surrender prior to Hiroshima? — remains a qualified no. There
were elements of the Japanese high command that were looking for a diplomatic
way out of the war, to be sure, and that does challenge the all-too-common
narrative of the “fanatical Japanese” who left Truman et al. “with no choice”
other than to use the atomic bombs. But it is not as easy as saying that the US
deliberately foreswore credible surrender offers.

 1. These after-the-fact critiques existed, but need to be contextualized
    themselves, as well; the generals in question were offended that their
    conventional efforts were being overshadowed by the atomic bomb, and were
    concerned with attempts to use the atomic bomb as an excuse to cut
    conventional military funding. After the onset of the Korean War, they made
    their peace with the fact that the US was going to fund a nuclear and a
    conventional military. []
 2. As an aside, I hate using the term “revisionist” to refer to heterodox
    historical arguments: it presumes that historical truth has been “settled”
    and that anything that suggests a new approach or conclusion should be
    viewed as part of a coordinated political agenda, essentially. This is an
    infantile way to think about history — and if it were true, there wouldn’t
    be any need for historians! (Imagine applying this standard to science: “I
    will never accept the revisionist theory of Isaac Newton, which goes against
    my beloved Aristotle!”) But I use it here, in scare-quotes, just because in
    this debate it is a common way to refer to the collection of historical
    interpretations, which have existed since the 1940s, that argued that the
    atomic bombs were not necessary to end the war, and were understood as not
    necessary at the time, but used just to scare the Soviet Union. For more on
    this, and my thoughts on it, see this older post. There are aspects of the
    “revisionist” view I find compelling, just as there are aspects of the
    “orthodox” view I find compelling. It is the work of historians to sort
    through different evidence, arguments, and interpretations and try to find
    something like “truth”; this is why I don’t find the blanket categories that
    helpful. []
 3. The full article follows:
    
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    BARE PEACE BID U.S. REBUFFED 7 MONTHS AGO
    
    BY WALTER TROHAN
    Chicago Tribune Press Service
    [Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 August 1945, page 1]
    
    Washington, D.C., Aug. 18—Release of censorship restrictions in the United
    States makes it possible to announce that Japan’s first peace bid was
    relayed to the White House seven months ago.
    
    Two days before the late President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference
    with Prime Minister Churchill and Dictator Stalin, he received a Japanese
    offer identical with the terms subsequently concluded by his successor,
    President Truman.
    
    The Jap offer, based on five separate peace overtures, was relayed to the
    White House by General MacArthur in a 40 page communication. The American
    commander, who had just returned triumphantly to Bataan, urged negotiations
    on the basis of the Jap overtures.
    
    All Acting for Emperor
    
    Two of the five Jap overtures were made thru American channels and three
    thru British channels. All came from responsible Japanese, acting for
    Emperor Hirohito.
    
    President Roosevelt dismissed the general’s communication, which was studded
    with solemn references to the Deity, after a casual reading with the remark,
    “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.”
    
    The MacArthur report was not taken to Yalta. It was preserved in the files
    of the high command, however, and subsequently became the basis of the
    Truman-Attlee Potsdam declaration calling for surrender of Japan.
    
    News Kept Secret
    
    This Jap peace bid was known to The Tribune soon after the MacArthur
    communication reached here. It was not published, however, because of The
    Tribune’s established policy of complete cooperation with the voluntary
    censorship code.
    
    Now that peace has been concluded on the basis of the terms MacArthur
    reported, high administration officials prepared to meet expected
    congressional demands for explanation of the delay. It was considered
    certain that charges would be hurled from various quarters of congress that
    the delay cost thousands of American lives and casualties, particularly in
    such costly offensives as Iwo and Okinawa.
    
    It was explained in high official circles that the bid relayed by MacArthur
    did not constitute an official offer in the same sense as the final offer,
    which was presented through Japanese diplomatic channels in Bern and
    Stockholm for relay to the four major allied powers.
    
    War Lords Feared
    
    No negotiations were begun on the basis of the bid, it was said, because it
    was feared that if any were undertaken the Jap war lords, who were presumed
    to be ignorant of the feelers, would visit swift punishment on those making
    the offer.
    
    It was held possible that the war lords might assassinate the emperor.
    Officials said Mr. Roosevelt felt that the Japs were not ripe for peace,
    except for a small group, who were powerless to cope with the war lords, and
    that peace could not come until the Japs had suffered more.
    
    The offer, as relayed by MacArthur, contemplated surrender of everything but
    the person of the emperor. Japanese quarters making the offer suggested that
    the emperor become a puppet in the hands of American forces.
    
    Full Surrender Offered
    
    Jap proposals in the MacArthur communication contemplated:
    
     1. Full surrender of Jap forces on sea, in the air, at home, on island
        possessions, and in occupied countries.
     2. Surrender of all arms and munitions
     3. Occupation of the Jap homeland and island possessions by allied troops
        under American direction.
     4. Jap relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa, as well as all
        territory seized during the war.
     5. Regulation of Jap industry to halt present and future production of
        implements of war.
     6. Turning over of Japanese the United States might designate war
        criminals.
     7. Release of all prisoners of war and internees in Japan proper and in
        areas under Japanese control.
    
    
    
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    []
 4. Gallicchio, Unconditional, 194-195. []



Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Japan, Soviet Union,
World War II
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 11 Comments »


Redactions


DID THE JAPANESE OFFER TO SURRENDER BEFORE HIROSHIMA? (PART 1)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 2nd, 2022

This is part one of a series of two posts on this topic.
Click here for part two.

One of the most common invocations made in the service of “the atomic bombs
weren’t necessary” argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well
before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States because they
wanted to drop the bombs anyway (for various other asserted reasons). It’s one
of those things that has a grain of truth to it, but without a heaping of
context and interpretation is misleading by itself. 

The Suzuki Cabinet, who held the fate of Japan in their hands in the summer of
1945. Photograph is from June 9, 1945. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki is front
and center. Of note, second to Suzuki’s left, looking downward and glum, is Navy
Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, one of the only members of the “peace party” actually
on the cabinet. Contrast his expression with that of War Minister Korechika
Anami (back row, two behind Yonai), who was, until very close to the end, one of
the most die-hard supporters of a continued war. Photograph from Wikimedia
Commons, somewhat touched up. A captioned overlay is here.

That there were “peace feelers” put out by some highly-placed Japanese in
mid-1945 is well-known and well-documented. Specifically, there were several
attempts to see whether the (then still-neutral) Soviet Union would be willing
to serve as a mediator for a negotiated peace between the US and Japan. This
story is the heart of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s justly influential Racing the Enemy:
Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005), and he goes over, in great
detail, how these approaches worked (one in Japan, with the Soviet ambassador
there, another in Moscow, with the Japanese ambassador there). Hasegawa’s
argument isn’t about Japan being ready to surrender, though; he uses this
account to show how dependent Japan’s ideas about the war’s possible ends were
on a neutral Soviet Union.1

The distance between these “peace feelers” and an “offer” or even “readiness” to
surrender is quite large. Japan was being governed at this point by a Supreme
War Council, which was dominated by militarists who had no interest in peace.
The “peace party” behind these feelers was a small minority of officials who
were keeping their efforts secret from the rest of the Council, because they
clearly feared they would be squashed otherwise. The “peace party” did appear to
have the interest — and sometimes even the favor — of the Emperor, which is
important and interesting, though the Emperor, as Hasegawa outlines in detail,
was not as powerful as is sometimes assumed. The overall feeling that one takes
away from Hasegawa’s book is that all of these “feelers” were very much “off the
books,” as in they were exploratory gestures made by a group that was waiting
for an opportunity that might tilt the balance of power their way, and certainly
not some kind of formal, official, or binding plan made by the Japanese
government.

Furthermore, the surrender that the “peace party” was contemplating was still
miles away from the “unconditional surrender” demanded by the United States.
There were conditions involved: mainly the preservation of the status and safety
of the Emperor and the Imperial House, which they regarded as identical to the
preservation of the Japanese nation. But as Hasegawa points out, they were so
unclear on what they were looking for, that there was contemplation of other
things they might ask for as well, liking getting to keep some of their
conquered territories. Again, this was not a real plan so much as the feelers
necessary for forming a possible future plan, and so we should not be surprised
that it was pretty vague.

General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a
picture deliberately mean to contrast the 5’5″ Emperor with the six-foot
American general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.

One can argue, and people who argue against the necessity of the bombings do,
that since the United States ultimately agreed to preserve the Emperor and
Imperial House, that the US could have accepted such a condition earlier on if
it had wanted to shorten the war. But this is not very compelling: it is a
different thing to decide, after a war, that you are willing to cut your former
enemy a break, versus cutting them that break while they are still your sworn
enemy. The counter-argument, which even as someone who is not a die-hard
“unconditional surrender was necessary” person I find somewhat compelling, is
that if the US had modified its already-stated demands at that point, that it
might have ultimately led to the Japanese making more demands, as part of the
classic “give them an inch and they’ll ask for a foot” scenario. In any event, I
doubt the Japanese would have been willing to accept the specific condition that
the US ultimately ended up imposing during the occupation: that the Emperor had
to publicly renounce his divinity. That’s a big “ask” to contemplate prior to
surrender.

Anyway, whatever one thinks about the requirement of unconditional surrender and
whether it prolonged the war — and it has been argued over since the 1940s — we
can all agree, I think, that what the Japanese were unofficially “offering” was
not what the US was demanding. And it is important to note that this was never
actually offered to the US anyway: the Japanese were probing Soviet willingness
to support them as a neutral party for a negotiated peace. So it was all a
prelude to a negotiation of an offer. As it was, the Soviets weren’t interested
(they were eager to declare war against Japan and seize promised territory as a
consequence), and just strung them along. So the entire thing never got off the
ground.

Cover sheet for a “MAGIC” intercept summary of cracked Japanese communications,
classified ULTRA TOP SECRET, which was looked at during the Potsdam Conference
in July 1945. From the National Security Archive.

The US was aware of these efforts by the Japanese, because it had cracked the
Japanese diplomatic codes (the MAGIC intercepts), but it was never a formal
“offer” for them to accept or reject. The general interpretation of the
intercepts at the time was that Japan might be on the road to surrender, and
they perceived there was a sympathetic “peace party” in their high command, but
that Japan was ultimately not yet ready to accept unconditional surrender. Which
I don’t think is really wrong, though of course one could debate about what one
could do with that information.

At this point, I feel I should emphasize, that I don’t think the use of the
atomic bombs the way they were used (two bombs on two cities in three days) was
the only possible way to achieve the aims of the United States in World War II,
or even that the goal of “unconditional surrender” was unambiguously the best
thing to pursue. (See my article on the possible alternatives, for example, as
to other possibilities that were on the table at the time.) I am saying, rather,
that I think the argument offered up by those who would use the MAGIC intercept
situation as an argument that the Japanese were “ready to surrender” prior to
Hiroshima is not very compelling. It wasn’t an offer, it wasn’t unconditional
surrender, and it wasn’t something the majority ruling the Japanese government
had even approved or would support. It’s an important historical event that is
crucial to understanding the end of the war (as Hasegawa makes quite clear), and
one that complicates the “they all fanatics willing to fight to the death”
argument that is used to justify using the atomic bombs, but it wasn’t anything
like a surrender offer. I don’t have any problem with people making sound
arguments either for or against the use of the atomic bombs — there are strong
arguments on both sides — but they shouldn’t be based on myths. Unfortunately,
many arguments in the popular sphere are.2

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OK, but what if the above wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer
up a full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were
exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war? I’m not sure
that would change all of my analysis above (you would still have the issue of
whether the US ought to have accepted the postwar terms before it was the
postwar), but it would certainly complicate the situation! There has been an
account of Japan doing just that, which has circulated for over 70 years. In
part 2 of this series, I’ll be exploring that — the case of the enigmatic
“Trohan memoranda.” The ultimate conclusion  spoilers! — is that it is likely
bunk, but there’s a story in the telling…

Click here for part two of this series.

 1. At some point in the future, I would still like to write a longer post about
    Hasegawa’s book and arguments in general, because it is one of most frequent
    questions I get online. One of these days I will get around to it — the
    summary version is that I find much of his argumentation persuasive, though
    I think the ultimate question of “how much weight should we give the atomic
    bombs, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, internal Japanese pressures, or
    other factors in accounting for their unconditional surrender agreement?” is
    ultimately unanswerable in any satisfying way. []
 2. The most pernicious myth in the “for” category remains, in my mind, the idea
    that the Japanese people were warned about the atomic bombings before their
    use — which to my mind is clearly not true, but gets a lot of traction on
    Internet forums and the like. []



Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hiroshima, Japan, Soviet Union, World
War II
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 7 Comments »


« Older Entries

 * Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science and nuclear weapons and a
   professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also the creator of
   the NUKEMAP. This blog began in 2011. For more, follow @wellerstein.
   
   Want more nuclear secrecy content? Check out my book:
   Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States
   (University of Chicago Press, 2021).


 * SEARCH
   
   Search for:


 * PAGES
   
   * About me
   * About the blog
   * Post archives
   * Articles and appearances
   * Visualizations
   * Document list
   * Resources for Teachers, Students, and Researchers


 * PROJECTS
   
   * NUKEMAP
   * Reinventing Civil Defense
   * Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States


 * RECENT POSTS
   
   * Henry Stimson didn’t go to Kyoto on his honeymoon
   * Deconstructing “The Doomsday Machine” – Part 1: The Question of Memory
   * Oppenheimer: Vacated but not Vindicated
   * Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 2)
   * Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 1)
   * NUKEMAP and the Ukraine–Russia war (so far)
   * 10 years of NUKEMAP
   * Surely You’re Joking, Comrade Beria!
   * How many people have Q Clearance?
   * A decade of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog


 * POST CATEGORIES ►
   
    * Redactions (115)
    * Visions (89)
    * Meditations (85)
    * News and Notes (32)
    * Articles (2)


 * POST TAGS ►
   
    * 1940s (152)
    * 1950s (83)
    * 1960s (32)
    * 1970s (6)
    * 1980s (10)
    * 1990s (7)
    * 2010s (56)
    * 2020s (11)
    * Accidents (11)
    * Archives (16)
    * Atomic Energy Commission (33)
    * Bad ideas (30)
    * Bomb design (34)
    * Books (27)
    * Business and industry (9)
    * Civil Defense (14)
    * Counterfactuals (6)
    * David E. Lilienthal (9)
    * Declassification (13)
    * Department of Energy (6)
    * Edward Teller (13)
    * Espionage (23)
    * Fat Man (19)
    * FBI (11)
    * Firebombing (7)
    * Franklin D. Roosevelt (6)
    * Germany (8)
    * Graphic design (33)
    * H-bomb (37)
    * Hanford (9)
    * Harry S. Truman (14)
    * Hiroshima (45)
    * Historiography (24)
    * J. Robert Oppenheimer (54)
    * Japan (11)
    * John Coster-Mullen (5)
    * Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (13)
    * Klaus Fuchs (17)
    * Leaks (12)
    * Leo Szilard (7)
    * Leslie Groves (49)
    * Little Boy (7)
    * Livermore (5)
    * Los Alamos (42)
    * Manhattan (show) (9)
    * Manhattan Project (110)
    * Musings (27)
    * Nagasaki (27)
    * North Korea (5)
    * Nuclear fallout (6)
    * Nuclear power (10)
    * Nuclear testing (34)
    * NUKEMAP (22)
    * Oak Ridge (12)
    * plutonium (6)
    * Proliferation (8)
    * Resources (12)
    * Smyth Report (16)
    * Soviet Union (33)
    * Speculation (32)
    * Tinian (10)
    * Trinity (24)
    * Vannevar Bush (12)
    * William L. Laurence (7)


 * E-MAIL SUBSCRIPTION
   
   Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications
   of new posts by email. You can unsubscribe anytime.
   
   Email Address
   
   Subscribe


 * TWITTER
   
   

All text copyright (©) 2011-2023 by Alex Wellerstein, unless otherwise
specified.