What were factors in deciding to use the atomic bomb?

Answer 1

Harry Truman was the president who had to make the decision. It was not an easy one to make. Truman had been a Senator from Missouri before basically being drafted to run with Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, as Roosevelt sought his fourth term in office. Roosevelt had decided to replace Henry Wallace as vice president, and Truman was picked, much to his surprise. Truman tried to resist, but they got him by appealing to his patriotism. Once elected, Truman had exactly two meetings with FDR, altogether less than two hours, before FDR died on April 12, less than three months into his fourth term, and Truman became president. The atomic bomb program was very, VERY highly secret, and Truman knew nothing of it until after he was sworn in as president.

The main factor that influenced Truman was that the US, poised to invade the Home Islands of Japan, was projecting one million American casualties, in the first two operations in the Home Islands. And, it was assumed that ALL the Japanese would have to be killed - civilians included. Up to that time, as the US "island hopped" across the Pacific, on each island battlefield the Japanese had to be killed to the last man, except for those who committed suicide. Very few prisoners had been taken. On both Saipan and Okinawa there had been large populations of Japanese civilians, and these had committed suicide rather than fall under American rule. Throwing their own children off of cliffs and leaping after, forming the children into a circle and pulling a pin on a hand grenade and giving it to them to toss around until it went off. Sailors on ships off Okinawa had to be issued rifles to shoot the bodies bobbing around their ships, in the hope of sinking them, before they could snag in the ships' propellers. In the Home Islands the Japanese were training women with bamboo spears, to take one American with them when the invasion came.

Truman was at Potsdam, Germany, in mid July, when he learned that the atomic bomb had been successfully tested, and that the US thus had a viable weapon. He issued the "Potsdam Declaration" calling on Japan to surrender immediately, or face a "rain of destruction" the likes of which the world had never seen. There was no response.

Truman was the only WWI combat veteran to become president, and the first war veteran as president since Theodore Roosevelt. He knew what war was, and understood the bloodbath that impended invading Japan. As he said to an adviser, if they didn't use the bomb, when it later was revealed that the US had spent billions developing a weapon which might have won the war, and Truman didn't use it, preferring instead to send millions of Americans into Japan to shed their blood or die, then Harry Truman could expect to be lynched by the families of those Americans.

It has become fashionable in recent decades for revisionist "historians" to suggest that the US was just showing off for the Russians, knowing the Cold War was about to start, but there was nothing said at the time that would support this. It's claimed that the Japanese were trying to surrender, but instead of getting on the radio and calling up the Americans, they were going through the Russians or the Swedes or the Swiss or somebody. If the Japanese were really wanting to surrender, nobody would have been more happy to hear that than the Americans, and they should have let somebody know about it. I have never met anyone who was in uniform in 1945 who was not absolutely delighted that Truman dropped the bombs (remember, just the one was not enough to convince the Japanese) and they could go home alive.