[44]. Here senior State Department officials, Under Secretary Joseph Grew on one side, and Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson and Archibald MacLeish on the other, engaged in hot debate. When Truman received a detailed account of the test, Stimson reported that the President was tremendously pepped up by it and that it gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence (see entry for July 21). The Supreme War Council comprised the prime minister, foreign minister, army and navy ministers, and army and navy chiefs of staff; see Hasegawa, 72. Despite the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war, and growing worry about domestic instability, the Japanese cabinet (whose decisions required unanimity) could not form a consensus to accept the Potsdam Declaration. How much did top officials know about the radiation effects of the weapons? On August 10, one day after the bombing of Nagasaki, the . This update presents previously unpublished material and translations of difficult-to-find records. Pressure from Secretary of War Stimson had already taken Kyoto off the list of targets for incendiary bombings and he would successfully object to the atomic bombing of that city. The United States decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a diplomatic measure calculated to intimidate the Soviet Union in the post- Second-War era rather than a strictly military measure designed to force Japan's unconditional surrender. Furthermore, the United States demanded that the Japanese withdraw from conquered areas of China and Indochina. Not altogether certain that surrender was imminent, Army intelligence did not rule out the possibility that Tokyo would try to drag out the negotiations or reject the Byrnes proposal and continue fighting. 8). For more on the Uranium Committee, the decision to establish the S-1 Committee, and the overall context, see James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age(Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), 140-154. The point was to keep the bombing mission crew safe; concern about radiation effects had no impact on targeting decisions. The George Washington University An intercepted message from Togo to Sato showed that Tokyo remained interested in securing Moscows good office but that it is difficult to decide on concrete peace conditions here at home all at once. [W]e are exerting ourselves to collect the views of all quarters on the matter of concrete terms. Barton Bernstein, Richard Frank, and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, among others, have argued that the Magic intercepts from the end of July and early August show that the Japanese were far from ready to surrender. The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945 By the end of November over ten weapons would be available, presumably in the event the war had continued. Open Document. The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki features a letter written by Luis Alvarez, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, on August 6, 1945, after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
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