This is the second in a three-episode series about “Oppenheimer” and the historical issues raised by the blockbuster film. Part one featured an interview with arms control expert Joe Cirincione.
When Robert Oppenheimer accepted the job to lead the top-secret Manhattan Project, he and his fellow physicists expected any bomb would be used against Nazi Germany. By the time the A-bomb was ready in late July 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered. Some scientists questioned whether it was necessary to use “the gadget” against Japan, whose weakened military and industrial capacities could no longer project power across the Pacific. Some believed Japan would seek peace rather than risk internal collapse before the scheduled U.S. invasion of Kyushu later that fall.
Christopher Nolan’s new movie has revived interest in this contentious debate: Could World War II have been won without destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If so, how?
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian David M. Kennedy discusses the difficult circumstances facing U.S. leaders during those fraught days 78 Augusts ago. For Americans today who look back on World War II as “the good war,” the targeting of non-combatants in Japan – first in the fire-bombing of dozens of cities, then in the atomic bombings of early August – may raise uncomfortable moral and ethical questions. But such moral considerations did not weigh on the key decision-makers at the highest levels of the Truman administration.
“There were people who had moral qualms about working on the bomb in the first place, and about using it against civilians which was its clear purpose from the outset, but their opinions never really reached the highest level of decision-making. The moral dimension comes into prominence after the fact, when a lot of guilty consciences are awakened,” said Mr. Kennedy, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.”
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
