“Oppenheimer”, the Bomb, and Should It Have Been Used

With the new movie “Oppenheimer” out, we are once again debating whether it was right to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.  I have talked about this question many times before, so I will not go into it again,¹ except for one thought that I have had for a while but not written about before.  Actually, it’s more of a possibility or a question than a certainty.  In any case, I thought of it again because of a couple of things in a review of Road to Surrender, a new book by Evan Thomas focusing on three men involved in the decision to drop the bomb and end the war:

“After receiving a full description of the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including an account of the civilian death toll, President Truman ordered that further atomic bombs would be used only on his explicit order – first time in American history that a president had taken direct control of a military weapon. …

Truman and his advisers initially assumed that the A-bomb, while uniquely powerful, would be used like any other weapon. After Hiroshima, however, they understood its revolutionary nature ….”

Which raises my question: If the initial idea was that the bomb would be just like any other weapon, except bigger, what if we had not dropped the bomb on Japan in 1945 but had continued to develop it after the war – and the Soviet Union had continued to develop its bomb, to?  Without the actual experience of Hiroshima, would we have realized what we were dealing with?  How would the Cold War have played out if we or the USSR, or both of us, had not realized how terrible the atomic bomb was?  Would one, or both, of us have been more willing to use the atomic bomb in a confrontation?  Would we have been less focused on the need to avoid war between us, for fear any such conflict might escalate, if we did not realize what the bomb really was?

What if, instead of being first used at the end of a war, the atomic bomb had been first used in the middle of a war.  Would the parties have been able to appreciate how awful it was and to agree to stop using it, then and there, perhaps at a time when one of them was losing and the bomb seemed like the only way to turn things around?

I don’t know if it is an apt comparison, but consider the case of poison gas in World War I.  It was first used by the Germans at Ypres, on April 22, 1915, in an attempt to break through the French trenches.  Once it was used, both sides continued to use poison gas for the rest of the war.  It was only after the war, in 1925, that an agreement was signed prohibiting the use of poison gas.  When World War II came, both the sides complied with the prohibition on the use of poison gas.  But that prohibition could only be agreed upon after the war in which the poison gas was first used, not during it. 

Does this perhaps mean, in addition to all of the reasons why it was necessary to drop the bomb to end the war, that it might have been a good thing the atomic bomb was used at the end of World War II.²  Did that mean its terrible nature could be seen and appreciated at a time of relative peace, instead of in the middle of an active war?  And did that mean nations had an opportunity to come up with at least some understandings between each other on how these weapons should be used and, perhaps most importantly, how they should not be used, an opportunity they might not otherwise have had.
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¹ See this post for links to many on posts on this question.
² This is perhaps easier to say as the country that dropped the bomb, as opposed to being the country on which the bomb was dropped.