Brigadier General Carter Clark, the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables for Truman and his advisors, put it this way:
"when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.
Cold? Heartless? You bet. Barbaric and revolting? No question. The inhumanity of it all couldn't be more telling. The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki was especially brutal and cruel. Knowing of the horrendous horrors that had already been unleashed in Hiroshima, three days later the U.S. did the same thing to the civilian population of Nagasaki. Why? Japan's surrender was already assured without the bombs. Surely surrender would soon be following on the heels of Hiroshima's decimation. So, again, why the second bomb?
The answer is as simple as it is grotesque. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki because Japan's surrender was never the issue. Getting Japan to surrender was the pretext. The bombs were dropped to make a point. There were political reasons for nuking those two high-density civilian populations, and the United States was not going to let Japan interfere with its political agenda by way of an untimely surrender. The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki was part of a political maneuver that had already been decided upon -- a one-two punch stratagem designed to strike fear into post-war Russia (our ally in the war against Germany) and convince them to accept their subordinate position on the postwar world stage.
Atomic Bombs Were Dropped On High-Density Civilian Populations In Japan To Make A Political Statement
It had been agreed at a conference in Yalta in February 1945 that the Soviet Union would join the U.S. in its war against Japan three months after the Germans were defeated in Europe. At the Potsdam conference between Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union in July this was reaffirmed. Germany had surrendered on May 8, and so the Russian army would be marching into Manchuria on August 9, 1945, and soon thereafter on into the Japanese mainland. Truman welcomed Russia as an ally in the war against Japan, but felt that the agreements hammered out at the Potsdam conference had given far too much ground to the Soviets, with several Soviet-occupied countries annexed as Soviet Socialist Republics, and a number of East European countries becoming Soviet Satellite states. Truman was firm in his conviction that there would be no repeat performance of this with the defeat of Japan, and with the success of the first atomic bomb test in mid-July Truman felt that he was now in a position to make this very clear to Stalin: there would be no Soviet influence in postwar Japan as the Potsdam conference had agreed there would be for postwar Europe. As Truman noted in his diary in July 1945:
Anxious as we were to have Russia in the war against Japan, the experience at Potsdam now made me determined that I would not allow the Russians any part in the control of Japan... force is the only thing that the Russians understand.
The important question for Truman was how to impress upon the Russians that Japan was not to go the way of a divided Germany as per the Potsdam agreement. The decision to bomb the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into oblivion was Truman's answer to this question.
As the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey made very clear, it was of the utmost importance to Truman that "Japan"capitulate to US occupying forces rather than Soviet," and that they do so prior to Russia getting its foot in the door. As per the Yalta agreement in February, Russian boots were due on the ground in Manchuria on August 9, and would be in Japan soon thereafter. Unless a Japanese surrender to U.S. forces could be effected prior to Russia"s invasion of the Japanese mainland, Russia would be justified in laying claim to a share in the spoils of a U.S/Soviet victory over Japan. The bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, Nagasaki on August 9, and the U.S. acceptance of Japan's terms of surrender on August 10, was to insure that this would not be the case; that, unlike postwar Germany, in postwar Japan the U.S. alone would be calling the shots. The complete annihilation of two entire Japanese cities would be a show of just the kind of "force" Truman felt the Russians were sure to understand.
Wouldn't A Simple Demonstration of America's New Weapon Be Sufficient To Contain the Russians?
Was there no other way for Truman to get his point across to the Russians short of incinerating nearly a quarter of a million people? Why not simply provide the Japanese leadership with a demonstration of the enormous destructive power of America's new weapon? Wouldn't this be sufficient to effect a Japanese surrender? And if the demonstration was conducted prior to the Russian army"s advance into Japan, wouldn't this be sufficient to dash any hopes the Russians had of sharing in the control of postwar Japan?
This is precisely what Strauss had in mind when he suggested to his boss, Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, that an atom bomb be dropped "over some area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be dramatic," but would involve no loss of life:
...a satisfactory place for such a demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood... I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest... would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will... Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation...
Why wasn't a demonstration of this sort ever performed? Why did Truman choose instead to drop the bombs on two Japanese high-density population centers? According to Thomas K. Finletter, Chairman of US Air Policy Committee, there simply "was not enough time" to organize a demonstration prior to Russia's August 9 entry into the war against Japan:
There was not enough time between 16 July when we knew at New Mexico that the bomb would work, and 8 August, the Russian deadline date, for us to have set up the very complicated machinery of a test atomic bombing involving time-consuming problems of area preparations, etc... No, any test would have been impossible if the purpose was to knock Japan out before Russia came in - or at least before Russia could make anything other than a token of participation prior to a Japanese collapse.
Even if we assume the best and grant that there was no time to prepare a demonstration before Russia's entrance into the war against Japan, this hardly justifies dropping nuclear bombs on defenseless civilian populations. Yet Finletter's statement reads as though dropping atomic bombs on the civilian populations of two Japanese cities was a perfectly acceptable alternative to setting up a demonstration given that the U.S. was having time-sensitive logistic problems in doing so. It's as though he said, "Well, we really did want to provide a demonstration for the Japanese leadership, but we just couldn't get it all together in a time frame that suited our political ambitions, so we decided instead to drop the bombs on two heavily populated Japanese cities and kill a couple of hundred thousand innocent civilians. What other choice did we have? It was the only rational thing left to do."
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