The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz

Author:Gar Alperovitz
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307773128
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-28T21:00:00+00:00

Within a week, McGeorge Bundy wired Conant that he was “personally delighted” with his suggestions38—and (as Hershberg writes) “a fortnight later, like a student handing in a revised term paper, he [Bundy] returned to Cambridge bearing a new draft that incorporated most of Conant’s ideas.”39 Conant in turn was greatly pleased with this nearly polished draft; on December 14 he wrote Stimson:

Mr. Bundy has just showed me the revised manuscript which you have prepared. I have read it with great interest and enthusiasm. I do hope that you will publish it in Harper’s as you plan as soon as possible. I feel certain that it will accomplish a great deal of good.

… I have found the line of argumentation which you have set forth so ably in your document to be convincing. I know there has been a great deal of misinformation widely circulated in the United States on this point and, therefore, I feel it is of great importance that this misinformation be corrected. You are the only one who can do it properly and I am delighted that you propose to publish the article I have just seen.40

Stimson and Bundy also shared the near-final draft with Groves, Frankfurter, Patterson, and Bernard Baruch.41 Groves, for one, replied with pages of “corrections,” some of which Bundy and Stimson were also to adopt in the final version, others of which they ignored.42 It is also known that Bundy received unrecorded suggestions by telephone.43 In early December, Stimson was able to write Patterson: “Our statements in it have passed the scrutiny of so many actors in this drama that I think you will not find any matter which should be excised for lack of security or other official reason.”44

The article appeared in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s. It was, to say the least, an extraordinary success. Recognizing its unusual significance, The New York Times treated the essay as front-page news,45 reprinted a substantial excerpt, and praised it in a lead editorial: “There can be no doubt that the President and Mr. Stimson are right when they maintain that the bomb caused the Japanese to surrender.”46*

The article was also reprinted in the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Omaha World Herald, the Infantry Journal, Reader’s Digest, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and many other media outlets. Excerpts appeared in Time, U.S. News, and an indeterminate number of newspapers throughout the United States and in several other countries. Editorial comment was decidedly uncritical and, indeed, often effusive in praise.

NBC radio commentator Lowell Thomas informed Stimson that “I was enormously impressed by the article … I myself am planning to say something about it within a few days in the hope that my remarks will cause a million or two Americans to read it.…”47 Major portions of the essay were also broadcast by ABC, and it was given extensive coverage by other radio outlets. (Rudolph Winnacker wrote Stimson: “When the story broke a week ago Monday night, the radio newsmen gave it

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