Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

In the late autumn and early winter of 1946–47, more than a year after the atomic bombings of Japan, as the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy was going down to defeat in the nascent United Nations, two influential articles appeared in respected national magazines justifying the 1945 attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the December 1946 Atlantic Monthly, physicist Karl T. Compton, MIT's president and a wartime atomic-energy adviser, published “If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used.” Two months later, in February 1947, a more extended treatment of the issues appeared in Harper's Magazine as “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” under the authorship of Henry L.

Stimson, the wartime secretary of war who had helped to guide America's use of the two bombs.1 Despite differences in emphasis and length, these two articles seemed deeply informed, honest and open, and generally persuasive. They were ventures by respected Americans to examine the wartime use of the bombs, to describe the care and considerations leading to those decisions, to explain why alternatives would not have worked and were rejected, and to show that the bombings had been necessary to end the Pacific war and save lives. Appearing at a time when most Americans continued to endorse the atomic bombings,2 and when few mistrusted their government or questioned the major wartime decisions, these essays confirmed popular beliefs.

Compton's article seemed to be mostly a revealing history with some calm advocacy. Stimson's was an even richer history, disclosing new documents, and seemed largely to eschew advocacy for candor. Taken together, these two articles affirmed, and emphasized, the rectitude of American leaders and of the A-bomb decisions.