When did Truman decide to use atomic bomb?

Answer 1

Harry Truman thought that by dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, he would save American lives and end World War II faster. He also wanted to collapse Japan's means to make war again. He believed that the loss of a few hundred thousand citizens and the complete obliteration of the enemy country's morale was a far better option than the loss of a few million people from both sides combined and a huge consumption of resources in the midst of a protracted invasion. Also, it was used to intimidate Soviet Russia since the end of the war was nearing and tension was starting to accumulate.

Towards the end of WWII, Japan began to fight what they knew was a losing war in the Pacific. But since the Japanese lived by a motto in which they would die before they were captured by an American, every last battle would be fought until there were no survivors. Seeing this as a useless waste of lives on both the American and Japanese side, Truman made a hard decision and decided to drop the Fat Man and Little Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His reasoning was that if he took many lives at once, Hirohito would finally see that an end was needed to the senseless killing. Thus, on August 6 and 9 of 1945, the bombs were dropped. Civilian casualties were huge; however, as Truman had predicted, Hirohito ended Japan's involvement in the war afterwords, making it so that no more American lives had to be spent.

He had already moved toward demanding Japan's unconditional surrender; how best to force that surrender was left to be decided. If the war dragged on, there would many more military and civilian casualties. If the Soviet Union perceived a weakness by the US, it would be emboldened in its postwar stance in Eastern Europe. Other democracies would be affected by the policies of the US regarding military actions. Truman chose to act, and nuclear bombs were soon seen as too fearsome a weapon to use in "ordinary" wars. As it turned out, the use of nuclear weapons likely influenced the Emperor of Japan to order the war's end. His concern for his people eventually outweighed the loss of national prestige.

President Truman had two choices: 1) He could drop the bomb and end the war quickly or 2) He could send waves of infantry towards Japan. If he decided to send in infantry to attack Japan, many soldiers would have died for he knew Japan would not give up so easily. He knew the Japanese would fight to the death. Also, he partially wanted to follow through with President Roosevelt's promise after the attack on Pearl Harbor that America would get nothing more than absolute victory. So to save lives and follow a promise, he dropped the bombs.

President Harry S. Truman, speech (6th August, 1945)

The harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been used against those who brought war to the Far East. We have spent $2,000,000,000 (about $500,000,000) on the greatest gamble in history, and we have won.

With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

Before 1939 it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy, but none knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942 however, we knew the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world, but they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got VI's and V2's and in limited quantities, and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.

The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land and sea and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won other battles. Before Pearl Harbour, scientific knowledge useful in war was pooled between the United States and Britain and many priceless.helps to our victories have come from the arrangement. Under that general policy, research on the atomic bomb was begun. With American and British scientists working together, we entered the race of discovery against the Germans.

We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories and their communications. Let there be no mistake, we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.

It was in spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued from Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of run from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with a fighting skill of which they have already become well aware.

Although workers at the sites have been making the materials to be used in producing the greatest destructive force in history, they have not themselves been in danger beyond that of many other occupations for the utmost care has been take for their safety. The fact that we can release atomic energy ushers in a new era on man's understanding of nature's forces. I shall recommend the Congress of the United States to consider promptly establishment of an appropriate Commission to control the production and use of atomic power within the United States. I shall give further consideration and make a further recommendation to Congress as to how atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence towards the maintenance of world peace.

At the end of World War II, few questioned Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Americans accepted the obvious reasoning: the atomic bombings brought the war to a more timely end. They did not have a problem with over one hundred thousand of the enemy being killed. After all, the Japanese attacked America, and not the other way around. In later years, however, many have begun to question the conventional wisdom of "Truman was saving lives," putting forth theories of their own. However, when one examines the issue with great attention to the results of the atomic bombings and compares these results with possible alternatives to using said bombs, the line between truth and fiction begins to clear. Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan was for the purpose of saving lives and ending the war quickly in order to prevent a disastrous land invasion.

The people who are now questioning Truman's motives are often known as Revisionists, because they attempt to revise common perceptions of history, proposing alternate theories and motives. As early as 1946 they begin to postulate new ideas, but their words only began to receive credence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Revisionists contend that Truman either had ulterior motives in the dropping of the atomic bombs or that he used these bombs on Japan for an entirely different reason, one that had nothing to do with saving lives.

Most people who were alive at the time of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, especially veterans, subscribe to the "traditional" belief that Truman decided to drop the atomic bombs on Japan for solely military reasons. A timely end to the war would mean that no land invasion of Japan is necessary. Such an invasion would have been extraordinarily costly in terms of not only American lives, but also in terms of Japanese dead. Ending the war quickly would return soldiers to their homes and allow Americans to begin a life of normality again.

The Revisionists, however, believe that Truman had either partially or entirely different reasons for bombing Japan. They believe that the destruction of two Japanese cities would accomplish several things. Most obviously, it would punish the Japanese for the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the atrocious treatment of American prisoners of war. Also, an atomic bombing of Japan is also the only thing that would justify the expense of the Manhattan Project. If this expense was not justified, Truman would have faced a Congressional inquiry into the misappropriation of $2 billion. Not only did he want to avoid Congressional hearings, but he also wanted another term of office. His chances of reelection would have been nil if it were learned by the general public that he wasted money and American lives by shelving a weapon that could have ended the war more quickly. The final Revisionist claim is that Truman wanted to give the U.S. and edge in the coming Cold War by showing that he was not afraid to use these weapons of mass destruction. They also say that Truman should have chosen one of the several available ways to compel a Japanese surrender without an atomic bombing of two cities. The most obvious alternative is an American invasion of Japan. Olympic was the code-name given to the planned American invasion of Kyushu, one of the four Japanese home islands, if an atomic bomb were not available by late October. Two separate estimates exist to rate the number of American casualties that would result from such an invasion. A joint war plans committee comprised of the army and navy came to the conclusion that 46,000 Americans would die in an invasion of Kyushu and later Honshu. The number of American wounded averaged three to one during the later years of the war, so according to this estimate, 175,000 American casualties were not out of the question. However, these figures were based on such tentative intelligence that George Marshall, the army's chief of staff, bluntly rejected them.

A second estimate proposed by Admiral Leahy was much higher. The invasion of Iwo Jima caused 6,200 American deaths, and the U. S. outnumbered the Japanese by four to one. Okinawa cost 13,000 U. S. servicemen, and they outnumbered the Japanese by two and one-half to one. These 13,000 men made up more than 35% of the U. S. landing force. Consequently, Admiral Leahy came to the conclusion that it was absurd to think that any less than 35% of the American force that invaded Japan would be killed. Based on the estimate of 560,000 Japanese soldiers on Kyushu as of early August, Leahy predicted that at very minimum over 250,000 American soldiers would lie dead as a result of an invasion of the Japanese islands.

It was later found that the troop strength on Kyushu was greatly under-estimated, and that by August 6 the Japanese had over 900,000 men stationed on Kyushu, nearly twice as many as thought. Leahy's estimates that the Americans would have a preponderance, when in fact the 767,000 American soldiers who would comprise the landing force were already greatly outnumbered three months before Operation Olympic was actually to begin. By November, Japanese troop strength could easily double or triple, making between 500,000 and 1,000,000 American deaths conceivable.

These numbers do not even begin to account for the Japanese dead. In Okinawa, twice as many Japanese were killed as Americans. It is therefore plausible that between 100,000 (according to the earliest estimate) and two million soldiers would die in an invasion. This number does not include Japanese civilians dead, which could conceivably have been even higher than the number of dead soldiers.

Also, if Truman had not used the atomic bomb then congress would have raked him over the coals after the war for having wasted the $2,000,000,000 expenditure developing them by not using them to shorten the war! He might even have been impeached!

Another very possible reason was that Truman wanted to avoid having to us the chemical weapons that had been stockpiled on the departure islands for use in the invasion of Japan. The effects of these chemical weapons are as horrifying as the effects of the bombs that were used, but could not be limited to their targets. Thus there would have been far more collateral damage if he had used the chemical weapons instead of or in addition to the nuclear weapons.

He wanted to quickly end the war in the Pacific without invading Japan.

It was concluded by military leaders that a second atomic bombing three days after the first would so terrify and disorient the Japanese leadership they would surrender. A secondary reason was the physicists who created the bombs wanted to determine which style of bomb would be the most effective -- the plutonium or uranium based weapon.

The only actual decision on the use of atomic bombs made by Truman was to stop using them after the first two unless he personally authorized more later. Had he not done this, there was another one ready that Los Alamos had already shipped and could have been dropped sometime around August 25. The reactors at Hanford could produce enough Plutonium for three bombs every month, and by switching to a composite Plutonium/Uranium core beginning in November seven bombs could be made every month (these plans were already in place by June).

Even if we hadn't of dropped the atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would still have been targets for attack. This is because Hiroshima was a large industrial city that contained the 2nd Japanese Army Headquarters, which was in charge of all the defense systems in Southern Japan; Hiroshima also had communication centers for armies, storage points, and troop assemblies. Small industrial plants were also in the outskirts of the city. As for Nagasaki, it was the largest fully operational sea port in Southern Japan, which produced ships, equipment, and relief supplies.
He stated that he needed to end the war and collapse Japan's means to make war never again.

Answer 2

he thought it would be a funny bruh moment

Answer 3

The US dropped the first atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in 1946, on Hiroshima on August 6 and on Nagasaki on August 9. No other atomic bombs have been dropped on inhabited cities, although several countries have exploded many other atomic bombs in tests.

Answer 4

Truman knew nothing of the Manhattan Project or the bomb until after he was sworn in as president. It was extremely secret.

He did know, however, that the US Military was already planning for the invasions of the first of the Home Islands of Japan, with one landing projected for November 1945, and another for March, 1946. Estimates were that there might be as many as one million American casualties in the first of these. And, it was assumed that all the Japanese would die. The military would either fight until exterminated, or commit suicide, and the civilians would try to fight or commit suicide as well. There had been mass suicides of Japanese civilians on Saipan and Okinawa, people throwing their children off cliffs and leaping after, rather than be overrun by the Americans.

So, when Truman was told of the bomb program and its potential, he had to think about it. Finally, he realized that when it became known that the US had developed and possessed a weapon which might have won the war, but that he had ordered it not to be used, instead sending hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths, to say nothing of the millions of Japanese, that the American people would have his head.

After weighing it out, he came to the conclusion that the bombs had to be tried, if it was possible this might shock the Japanese into surrendering their hopeless war, rather than have the war degenerate into a complete bloodbath. As he said to an aide upon making the decision, using the bomb " was right", under the conditions then existing. Everybody wishes it had not been necessary, and today there is a tendency to blame Truman or try to read evil into the decision. This perception flows from ignorance of the type of war Japan had carried on for four years, their stubborn refusal to give in, and their inevitable fight to the very last man for every flyspeck island. The next islands were the Japanese homeland, and the Japanese were expected to fight ten times harder for those. They had just demonstrated on Iwo Jima and Okinawa that the closer the US approached to their homeland, the more fanatical their defense.

Answer 5

Because he had it.

Okay, it's a LITTLE more complicated than that, but:

• you're in a war with a country that was very clearly the aggressor by any reasonable standard,
• you've spent thousands of man-years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing a new weapon (back when a million dollars was real money),
• and your best military projections are showing truly horrendous enemy civilian casualties if you attempt a traditional landing and invasion scenario.

Given those factors, what might make it look like a great idea to NOT use the atomic bomb? Pretty much nothing, that's what. And remember, Truman himself had not seen the bomb.

Some of the scientists who witnessed the Trinity test argued that a nonmilitary demonstration would be sufficient to cause the Japanese to surrender. This didn't seem likely to those who hadn't seen the test, though, and it must be remembered that the Japanese government did not in fact surrender until after the second bomb.

Answer 6

Because the US and Japan had been at war for several years, Japan having attacked the US and declared war. Japan had refused to surrender, and an invasion of Japan was forecast to cause the death of approximately 1 million Allied servicemen.

Answer 7

President used the Atomic bomb to end WW2 just to simply end it as soon as possible. He said the use of Atomic bomb would cause less fatalities than if they didn't and just end it b fighting them. This part can quite disputed between people as some would say less would have died if the US didn't drop the Atomic Boms.

Answer 8

Truman believed that far more people would die in the long run if only the conventional bombing of Japan continued.

About 83% of the scientists who worked on the development of the first atomic bomb signed a petition urging Truman to detonate the first weapon in an unpopulated area as a demonstration, but Truman refused.

Answer 9

Truman stated that his decision to drop the bomb was purely military.Truman believed that the bombs saved japanese lives as well.Prolonging the war was not an option for the president.Over 3,500 japanese kamikaze raids had already wrought great destruction and loss of American lives.

Answer 10

His choice was either bombs or sending millions of Allied soldiers into invasion and certain death for many of them.