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WITH the ceremonies and controversies surrounding its fiftieth anniversary, World War II has regained prominence in our national discussions. Those of us who fought that war have, in the main, a unitary point of view. Few of us regarded it as a crusade, but all of us believed it was necessary: necessary to eradicate an oppressive fascism, to restore independence to friendly peoples in Europe and preserve Britain's independence, and necessary to lift the boot heel of Togo's soldiers from the necks of the Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asians who, we now know, suffered twenty million dead from the Japanese onslaught.1
There are, however, no "good" wars. Many accounts of strategic bombing-beginning with the Axis in Spain and with Japan in Shanghai; culminating with the Allied destruction of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki-have revealed the extent to which total war dissolves inhibitions solemnly embodied in the Hague treaties. At the outset, both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt disdained bombing cities and endorsed the principle of noncombatant immunity; by the end, that principle was honored primarily in the breach, most dramatically when America unleashed its atomic power on Japan.2 Harry Truman, who assumed the presidency just as the Manhattan Project-the nation's Herculean effort to outpace Germany's expected development of atomic explosives-came to fruition, was blamed for this most spectacular destruction/
The chief defender of the bomb decision was Henry Stimson, secretary of war under Roosevelt and Truman and author of "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," which appeared in Harper's Magazine in February 1947. Purporting to be a personal account, drawn from his diaries, his memory, and his office files, Stimson's article addressed the concerns of those (mostly churchmen and conservatives) who in 1946 began to gain an audience for their dissenting view about how the war with Japan had been concluded. Dubbed the official narrative about the decision to drop the bomb, Stimson's article only temporarily silenced the critics; in time it drew their redoubled ire.4
During the Vietnam War, as large numbers of Americans began to question their government, particularly its bellicose policies, the decision to use the atomic bomb in World War II was revisited. Reinterpreted as an action principally intended to intimidate the Soviet Union, the drop on Nagasaki and Hiroshima...