Alternative Views on Hiroshima

During his (Secretary of War Stimson's) recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely un necessary, and secondly because I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for chang e, 1963
 

Mr. Byrnes (Secretary of State) did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war...Mr. Byrnes's view (was) that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.

Leo Szilard, atomic scientist, A personal history of the atomic bomb, 1949
 

The use of this barbarous weapon (the atomic bomb) at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan...(I)n being first to use it, we ...adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

Admiral William Leah y, President Truman's chief of staff, I was there, 1950
 

(Only 250 military personnel were killed in Nagasaki out of the approximate 100,000 deaths. My reading of history is that Truman's decision was based on at least three reasons other t han the need to control Russia. These reasons were: 1) revenge for Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march, 2) racism [the Japanese were dehumanized as bucked teeth little yellow b------s], and 3) research [a whole industry employing thousands of work ers was created by the development of the bomb. There was a need to see the effects of all that effort]. The only condition for surrender was that the emperor not be killed or deposed. The U.S. rejected this condition, and the rest is history
[sanitized] ).