According to J. Samuel Walker in Prompt & Utter Destruction, the five fundamental considerations which led to the use of the atomic bomb grew out of circumstances that existed in the summer of 1945, when an especially brutal island-by-island military offensive was still being waged in the Pacific. The battle of Okinawa had sacrificed tens of thousands of American lives and had proven to US military leaders that the Japanese defenders were willing to fight to the death to repel the allied invaders.

These fundamental considerations “moved Truman to use the bombs immediately, without a great deal of thought and without consulting with his advisers about the advantages and potential disadvantages of the new weapons.” I would argue instead that a great deal of thought went into Truman’s decision.

1) Ending the war at the earliest possible moment. The primary military objective of any war is to win as quickly and as easily as possible, with the fewest possible casualties. Unleashing the atomic bomb on the Japanese people was clearly the best way to accomplish this goal – at least according to Truman and his closest advisors. It is true that Truman and others inflated the numbers of lives potentially saved by the bomb after the fact – figures of a million or more were bandied about – but as the author points out: inflated or not, the numbers cited by Truman and others after the war “should not obscure the fact that the president would have elected to use the bomb even if the numbers of U.S. casualties prevented had been relatively low.” This argument makes perfect sense: why prolong the war unnecessarily? This is the best case for using the atomic bomb, in the opinion of many historians. I would tend to agree with this assessment as well if I weren’t fundamentally opposed to the use of atomic weapons under any circumstances.

2) Justifying the costs of the Manhattan Project. Why would the government spend all that money -more than 2 billion! – developing such a device and not use it? While this argument has less moral standing than the other considerations, once the atomic bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo there was simply no compelling reason not to deploy it against the enemy. Truman’s concerns were much broader than simply having to justify the enormous costs of the project, however. It would have been pretty difficult to explain to the American people why he didn’t use the bomb as soon as it became available if the deed hadn’t been done – or if it had been needlessly delayed. As Walker correctly observes, “If Truman had backed off from using a weapon that had cost the U.S. dearly to build, with the result that more American troops died, public confidence in his capacity to govern would have been, at best, severely undermined.” In other words, it would have been political suicide.

3) Impressing the Soviets. While it is clear that Truman didn’t drop the bomb solely to intimidate and impress the Russians (àla Gar Alperowitz), Hiroshima definitely sent the Soviet Union a shocking message and gave America a huge advantage in the nascent Cold War. It also emboldened the Truman administration to take a more aggressive global stance with the Soviets. Walker pays little heed to this concept and brushes it off as simply a “bonus” in dealing with the Soviets. This aspect is somewhat downplayed by the author in my view, however, because it seems pretty obvious that diminishing the threat of Soviet expansionism had to be a major consideration in the decision to use the new weapon. Walker concludes, “Growing differences with the Soviet Union were a factor in the thinking of American officials about the bomb but were not the main reason that they rushed to drop it on Japan”

4) Lack of incentives not to use the bomb. This is what would be referred to today as a political ‘slam dunk.’ Truman used the bomb because there was “no compelling reason to avoid using it.” Ending the war quickly, without risking any more American lives naturally proved to be a popular decision. If Truman had delayed victory by not using the bomb, there could have been disastrous consequences for our nation’s morale, to say the least. Walker’s words are especially poignant here: “Moral scruples about using the bomb were not a major deterrent in its use. American policymakers took the same view that General LeMay advanced later in his memoirs: ‘From a practical standpoint of the soldiers out in the field it doesn’t make any difference how you slay an enemy. Everybody worries about their own losses.’” According to the military’s own estimates, the number of American lives lost in a Japanese invasion might have been as “low” as thirty to forty thousand. Obviously, even that is far too many casualties, especially if it’s your son who doesn’t get to come home. Walker states, “The success of the Manhattan Project in building the bombs and ending the war was a source of satisfaction and relief.” Indeed.

5) Dealing with ‘a beast.’ Americans did not hate the Nazis in the same way they hated the Japanese. Up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazis had several prominent American financiers and supporters, including Senator Charles Lindbergh and famous industrialist Henry Ford – who had met Adolf Hitler and received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from him, the highest honor available to non-Germans. German-Americans were certainly not rounded up and held in internment camps like Americans of Japanese descent.

It can be argued that racist attitudes played a part in the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The question of whether atomic weapons would have ever been used in Europe is highly debatable in my opinion, although Walker argues that,

“Truman did not authorize the bombs solely or primarily for those reasons, and there is no reason to think that he would have refrained from using atomic weapons against Germany if they had been available before the European war ended. But the prevalent loathing of Japan, both among policymakers and the American people, helped override any hesitation or ambivalence that Truman and his advisers might have felt about the use of atomic bombs.”

I think this is a fairly concise summation of the facts.

In Prompt & Utter Destruction, author J. Samuel Walker demonstrates that whatever alternatives existed, the bomb proved to be the best available means to win a decisive victory at the lowest cost to American lives. Although there were many important considerations, the author’s most compelling argument is that the atomic bomb simply provided the president and his advisers with the most convenient method of ending the war as quickly as possible.