Presidential Predicaments: Truman IV--Nagasaki: Did He or Didn't He?
Did President Truman order the dropping of the bomb that fell on Nagasaki? Almost certainly not.
Let’s look again at the written directive to drop the atomic bomb sent by General Thomas Handy to General Carl Spaatz, the commander of the strategic air forces in the Pacific, on July 25, 1945.
That directive said that the Army Air Force should “deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.”
It also said “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the [Manhattan Project] staff.”
The order concludes, “The foregoing directive is issued to you by direction and with the approval of the Secretary of War [Henry Stimson] and of the Chief of Staff, USA [George Marshall].” President Truman’s name does not appear in the order.
The directive gives General Spaatz, then, the authority to deliver “special” bombs on any of the four specified cities “as soon as made ready,” with no further approvals required.
The Potsdam Conference had wrapped up on August 2. The first atomic bomb to be used in combat, Little Boy, was “delivered” to Hiroshima four days later, on August 6, 1945. Not until August 8 did President Truman get to see photographs of the effects of the bomb on Hiroshima. After he saw the photographs, President Truman would certainly have known that these weapons could not be used in the limited “strategic” way he had told Stimson in Potsdam that he wanted them to be used.
Most of the rest of us were not permitted to see photographs of what had happened Hiroshima until 1952, seven years later. Life magazine was allowed to publish some.
On the morning of August 9, 1945, the day after Truman saw the photographs from Hiroshima, Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki. Nagasaki’s clock is eighteen hours ahead of Washington, D.C.’s.
President Truman met with his cabinet on August 10. According to an entry in the journal of his Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, the President found that “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible.” He didn’t like the idea, he said, of killing “all those kids.”
After Nagasaki, Handy’s order as issued would have allowed “special” bombs to be dropped on the two cities on the target list they hadn’t been dropped on yet, Kokura and Niigata, without further approvals.
After Nagasaki, however, no other special bombs were available. We hadn’t yet produced enough fissile fuel—highly enriched uranium or plutonium—to make more. We were out of atomic bombs.
Also on August 10, the day President Truman made those remarks in the meeting with his Cabinet, a memo was written by General Handy (also likely drafted by General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project) that was directed to Chief of Staff General Marshall. The memo told General Marshall that while the next bomb had not been expected to be ready for delivery until August 24, it was now expected be ready a week earlier, on August 17 or 18.
At the bottom of the memo, a handwritten note appears, also dated August 10. The note is signed by Chief of Staff General Marshall, who no doubt had been present at the President’s cabinet meeting that day. The note says the bomb “is not to be released over Japan without express authority from the President.”
This added handwritten note from General Marshall is, as far as I know, the first documentary evidence we have of the president reserving to his office the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
Notice, however, that this note prohibits only the use of these weapons “over Japan” without his explicit order.
Would the President’s authorization now be required for any future use nuclear weapons?
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