For those who have spent their lives being fed all the pro-American propaganda that the "bombs were necessary to end the war", there are some important facts that our government didn't want you to know.
1. Truman made the decision to use the bombs almost immediately upon learning that we had them. FDR had never approved using the bombs against the Japanese and some of his confidants don't believe he would have. Yet Truman agreed to immediately, months before they were ready, without even knowing what the war situation would be when they were ready and without consulting most of the pertinent military leaders or intelligence experts in the region.
2. When they decided to use the bombs, their highest priority was making sure the dropping of bombs was a useful experiment. They wanted to hit as untouched an area as possible and kill as many civilians as possible, so they could both measure and demonstrate the bombs' full impact. That was why when they picked the targets in May 1945, they purposely picked cities that were relatively untouched and ordered all bombing of those cities stopped until the bombs were reading (proving that bombing the cities was not considered militarily significant).
3. Oppenheimer and many others were aghast at the bombing of Nagasaki less than 3 days after the bombing of Hiroshima, before any Japanese leaders had even visited the site or gotten the chance to fully discuss the response in council. In fact, the Japanese leadership was meeting together and discussing the possibility of surrender WHEN the second bomb was dropped. Why did the USA destroy another city and kill 60,000 more civilians without even waiting to see what the response to the first bomb would be? Because they had already manufactured both a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb, using two very different firing mechanisms, and planned from the beginning to test out both of them.
By August 1945, the dropping of the bombs wasn't a military necessity, and American leadership knew that. It was a test of a new technology and a message to Russia and the rest of the world that the USA would be on top in the post-war reality.
If you don't believe me, then why not talk to people who know a LOT more about it than you or I do:
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war....The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan."
- Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief U.S. Pacific Fleet
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before."
- Admiral William F. Halsey Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet
"I didn't like the atom bomb or any part of it."
- Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
- Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air....it always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse."
- General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, Commanding General of U.S. Army Air Forces
"Russia's entry into the Japanese war was the decisive factor in speeding its end and would have been so even if no atomic bombs had been dropped."
- General Claire Chennault, Army Air Forces Commander in China
"On the other hand if they knew or were told that no invasion would take place [and] that bombing would continue until the surrender, why I think the surrender would have taken place just about the same time."
General Carl Spaatz, Commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific
"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
- General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (Pacific)
"I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (Europe)
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- former President Dwight Eisenhower, reflecting after his presidency
