Jun 2, 2023 By Richard Robbins 4 min read

Richard Rhodes, the author of the magisterial “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” relates a telling World War II anecdote involving one of the great movie actors of the 20th century, Paul Newman.

Just out of high school in 1943, Newman, the future star of such blockbusters as “Cool Hand Luke” and “Hud,” joined the Navy. He later told Rhodes he was thankful that the war ended when and how it did, with President Truman’s decision to unleash the power of the atom on the Japanese in August 1945. A turret gunner aboard an Avenger aircraft, Newman figured he would have been in on the U.S. invasion of the Japanese homeland, tentatively slated for November 1945.

Estimates vary, but the invasion would have cost tens of thousands of American casualties. One casualty – one death – might have been his own, he told Rhodes.

Debate about the use of the atomic bomb over the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has a long pedigree.

In July 1945, a group of scientists privately cautioned Truman that “a nation which sets the precedent for using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear responsibility for opening the door to an era of destruction on a scale unimaginable.”

The debate continues.

The widening use of artificial intelligence – a development that, according to some critics, poses an existential challenge as severe as the bomb to human autonomy and existence – as well as Russian nuclear threats against Ukraine, brings us back to consideration of the two atomic bombs that the United States deployed to end World War II.

Memorial Day seems as fitting a time as any to ponder the dawn of the nuclear age and its long twilight.

Some say, of course, it was all a mistake. In this telling, the use of the bomb was unnecessary for the simple fact that the Japanese by late summer 1945 were on the verge of surrender. Thrown into the cauldron of war by the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States had come from behind to wage a successful war of attrition and island-hopping against the Japanese.

With the defeat of Germany in the spring of 1945, the U.S. at last was able to turn its sole attention to the fighting in the Pacific. The Americans waged a relentless air war against the Japanese homeland, commencing with the fire bombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, that left a million civilians homeless and took over 90,000 lives.

In the ensuing weeks, attacks on other Japanese cities “dehoused more than 8 million people, killed as many as 900,000, and injured up to 1.3 million more,” according to historian David M. Kennedy.

In addition, the Russians entered the war against Japan, exposing the enemy to a two-front conflict.

With its navy and air force depleted and its army exhausted by years of brutal warfare, surrender was Japan’s only option.

Kennedy, Rhodes and other like-minded historians are not so sure. The military, in charge of the Japanese government throughout the Second World War, appeared ready for further sacrifices.

There was some sentiment both in and out of the Truman administration for a public demonstration of the destructive power of atomic weaponry.

For various reasons, including fear that the Japanese might use American POWs as shields against attack, the demonstration idea was abandoned.

In a larger context, Kennedy explains, “History has its own momentum.”

“The advent of the nuclear age,” he writes, “was heralded by little fanfare and even less formal deliberation.”

Truman had one paramount goal in the late summer of 1945: to end the war with the least number of American combat deaths.

Was he right? Or, by sparing the Japanese in 1945 might he have spared succeeding generations the hazards of the nuclear age?

At the war’s end, American GIs “wept for joy,” Kennedy records. ‘”The killing was over,” one of them reflected. “We were going to grow to adulthood after all.'”

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.