Revisiting The Decision To Drop The Bomb

Diane Rehm: On My Mind

WAMU 88.5

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🗓️ 18 May 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

President Biden travels to Hiroshima this week for a meeting of the G-7.

While there, he plans to acknowledge the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city by U.S. forces, but the White House says he does not plan to make any apologies for America's actions during World War II.

Though 78 years have passed since the United States unleashed the power of the atomic bomb on Japan, the weapon continues to cast a shadow over geopolitics. And questions linger as to whether the call to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right one.

Could the war have ended without the use of these nuclear weapons? Could the U.S. have merely tested the bomb on a desert island as a show of force? And was it necessary to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki?

Historian and author Evan Thomas explores these questions in a new book titled, “The Road to Surrender.” In it, Thomas goes back in time to tell the story of the leaders grappling with the “morally fraught decisions” about whether to use their new weapon of mass destruction, and how to put an end to a brutal war.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I used to die in.
0:07.3	On my mind revisiting America's decision to drop the atomic bomb.
0:13.9	In his diary he calls the atom bomb the terrible, the awful, the diabolical.
0:22.1	He's seventy-eight years had passed since the US unleashed the power of the atomic bomb
0:29.7	on Japan.
0:31.7	And to this day, he was remains the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon on the battlefield.
0:41.2	In a new book author and historian Evan Thomas goes back to the month leading to the end
0:48.8	of the war and what he calls the morally fronk decisions about how to do it.
0:56.3	He explores what lessons those choices can teach us for today's conflicts.
1:03.3	The book is titled The Road to Surrender, Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World
1:11.4	War II.
1:13.4	Evan Thomas, we've all been wondering at least I have ever since I was a little girl.
1:26.3	Why?
1:27.3	We dropped this bomb first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki.
1:35.1	And your book answers not only that question, but what was going on in the minds of those
1:44.1	involved.
1:45.4	So take us back to the making of this decision.
1:54.4	This was a decision that was at once forerundained.
1:57.4	It was almost inevitable that we were going to use this weapon.
2:01.2	You can take a cynical view, a bureaucratic view that of course we spent two billion dollars.
2:05.0	Of course we were going to drop it.
2:07.0	But as I hope to show in this book by talking about the human beings involved, it was
	...

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