A-Bomb Agonistes

>> Michael Auslin: Welcome back to the Pacific Century, a Hoover Institution podcast on China, America, and the fate of the world in the 21st century. I'm your host, Michael Auslin, and it is a real pleasure today to be joined by not just an historian and a scholar, but someone whom I have admired and whose work I've admired for years.

Ever since I was, in fact, back in college and read his first book, co-authored, which was the Wise Men. And that, of course, for those of you who don't know, which I can't imagine is anyone, is Evan Thomas. Evan is a graduate of Harvard University and University of Virginia law School.

He started off as a reporter at time and then in 1991 joined Newsweek, where he reported for 24 years. But he is best known, probably, for not only his historical work, but in particular, his group biographies, again, starting with The Wise Men, which was co-authored with Walter Isaacson.

But books that many of you know, including The Very Best Men, The Early Years of the CIA, Sea of Thunder, Four Naval Commanders and The Last Sea War, The War Lovers, Roosevelt Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898. And then a host of single focused biographies, including on Eisenhower, Nixon, John Paul Jones, and Robert Kennedy, among others.

So in addition to being one of the most prolific authors and historians we have today. Evan is just a wonderful person and someone who is so interesting to talk to, which is why I wanted to have him on today, to talk in particular about his brand new book, Road to Surrender, three men and the Countdown to the end of World War II.

So, Evan Thomas, welcome to the Pacific century.

>> Evan Thomas: Hi, and thanks for having me.

>> Michael Auslin: Well, it's great to do this publicly. Of course, we've met privately and been able to talk, but I thought that given the book and the timeliness of the book Road to Surrender. It'd be a wonderful opportunity to have you reflect a little bit on why you wrote this book.

Now, it focuses on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And of course, for historians and those who deal with Asia, this is not uncharted territory. People have written about the atomic bomb, they've written about the decision to drop the bomb. But you once again took on a slightly different approach, which was the group biography, focusing on three critical individuals during that period, the very last months of World War II.

Which is, of course, secretary of war Henry Stimson, Carl Tooey Spataz, who was the head of our strategic bombing arm in the Pacific. And I think perhaps most interesting, the Japanese foreign minister, Togo Shigenori, Togo being his family name. So before we get into your analysis of the decision and some of the controversies that still arise from the decision.

Evan, why did you write this book?

>> Evan Thomas: Well, I had a personal connection. My father had been a junior officer on a LST, a Landing Ship Tank, that was on its way from Europe, where he'd been at D-Day and other European theater things. And on his way to the Pacific for the scheduled invasion of Japan in the fall of 1945.

And the legend in my family always was that my sisters and I existed because of the atom bombs, because if there hadn't been those atom bombs. He would have died, that's not totally far fetched. There are war gaming that showed that in the first day, a couple hundred LSTs would be sunk.

The Japanese had 7000 Kamikaze planes hidden in caves and around the landing beach at Kyushu. Then it was gonna be, I think pretty well accepted, a bloodbath. There's an argument over how big a bloodbath, but a big bloodbath, and that could have included my father. So that was always the family legend.

But also, growing up, as many of your listeners had, I had a pretty heavy dose in school and college questioning, why did we really do this? There's a whole school of scholarship that Gar Alperovitz is the most famous member. But there are others who say, really, did we really have to drop those bombs?

And did we have to drop two of them? And couldn't we have warned the Japanese somehow or negotiated a settlement? And that question kinda gnawed at me for a long time, and so that drew me into it. But really why I did this book was I'm interested in moral ambiguity.

And I suspected from my earlier books that this was not an easy black and white yes, no question. That even though the decision was to drop them, that didn't mean that the people who made those decisions had an easy time of it. I'm also super interested in the Japanese side because you mentioned an earlier book I wrote called Sea of Thunder.

And that was about the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and that I decided to do the Japanese side as well as the American side. It turns out that the Japanese side is in some ways more interesting than the American side, because when you talk about moral ambivalence, it's so hard for us westerners to get this.

And I'm not an expert, I had a lot of help from Japanese people helping me with this. I'm a westerner. I don't claim super knowledge on this, but I reached out to the Japanese side of the story and went to Japan and talked to people there. And I'm fascinated by moral ambiguity, and it was intense on both sides.

With dropping the atom bomb, there really was not much of a decision there, but there was a lot of angst over it, a lot of private hand wringing. And so on the American side, I picked these characters who were very phlegmatic. And in that generation especially, never complain, never explain.

You don't whine about what you're doing, there's no Internet. This is all before the me generation. These people are all, don't be selfish, don't even talk about yourself. But that doesn't mean they didn't worry and so what I wanted to do is get at that. And in the case of Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, who really was really the chairman of the board of the atom bomb.

The war secretary is running the Manhattan project from afar, but he's running it. In his diary, he called it by its code name, S1. But he also called it the awful, the terrible, the diabolical, a Frankenstein monster. He was just very upset about this. And this really got my attention on the morning that he showed Harry Truman the photographs of what Hiroshima looked like after the bomb.

So these are aerial photographs of the damage. What does Hiroshima look like? The inside of an ashtray, I mean, there is nothing left there. And Stimson that morning has a heart attack. Now, he's 77 years old, he's got a heart condition. Maybe it's a coincidence, but I don't think so.

I think he was just traumatized by this, and I know he was guilty about it. In later years, one of the reasons why the revisionists really dug in was that they saw Stimson's guilt about it, and they thought, whoa, if Henry Stimson's guilty about it, Maybe we shouldn't have done it.

Now I think I show that we were gonna do it anyways, and matter how much guilt he felt. And this is important and it was the only real choice. Not a good choice, but the only real choice. So in looking at moral ambiguity, I wanted to do a military operator.

Somebody was involved in the delivery of the bomb, and I decided to do 2e Spaatz. General Carl Spaatz, who was the head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, but before that had done strategic bombing in Europe. And that interested me, because in Europe, we killed a lot of civilians, and we didn't want to.

We called a precision bombing. We said we were aiming at military targets, and we tried to hit, but we missed. The technology was imperfect, the Norton bomb site didn't work. The Germans were shooting at us, the weather was bad. We killed a lot of civilians. And on the night that we killed a lot of civilians, which was when we bombed Dresden in February 1945, a lot of your listeners will remember this, the firebombing of Dresden.

It was both a British operation, but also US. Two nights after we bombed Dresden, 2E Spaatz blew $1,700 on a poker game. That's the way he relieved the tension, he didn't complain about it. He didn't write whiny letters. He did complain to his wife a little bit, but he just didn't know what else to do.

So he blew two months salary on a poker game, I think that's revealing.

>> Michael Auslin: So one of the things that you do uniquely, I think, in this book, compared to some of the other books that have dealt with the question of the bomb, building it and using it, is, as you've been intimating, though haven't explicitly said here, is that you're trying to get into the minds of these characters.

But you're getting into their thoughts and words by using their diaries, by using letters, by peeling back from the official, as you say, sort of the office work to the work at home. So whether it's Stimson and his wife, very close relationship, and as you said, one where he's in ill health, spats trying to figure out how to blow off steam.

What about Togo Shigenori? Very rarely do we get, I mean, obviously, there have been books on the end of the war from the Japanese perspective, but very rarely have we focused, I think, as carefully as you do on one of the key Japanese antagonists. So maybe tell us, if you would, a little bit about him.

Why'd you choose him? Why not Hirohito? Why not Togo? Someone else.

>> Evan Thomas: Well, writing about Japan is especially challenging. For one thing, the Japanese don't believe in speaking ill of the dead. We say that, but they actually mean it. So in their post war recollections, they write around a lot of their problems.

Indirection is for people who have studied Japan, been to Japan. They know that indirection is part of the culture. Certainly was in the 1940s, and so that's a problem. But I focused on Togo Shigenori, just say it the Japanese way, because he's the only member of the Supreme War Council.

People who actually run Japan. There are six people who basically run Japan, and they are military, all of them, except for Togo. He's the foreign minister, war minister, chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy. But the one civilian is Togo, and he's a very interesting character to me because he's anti-Nazi.

That was interesting for a foreign minister, he thinks Hitler's a thug. He's not even Japanese, well, he's Korean by blood. He changed his name, his family bought a Samurai name. Their name had been Park, so he's a bit of an outsider. That's important, because if you're an outsider, you're not totally drinking the Kool-Aid, and you feel like an outsider.

He's an admirer of German intellectual history. He's a little different also, and this makes him really different. He's blunt, he's straightforward. He says what's on his mind, that makes him very different from his peers. Now, he has a very difficult task, and he's really the only guy doing it.

Trying to bring the Japanese government to surrender in the summer of 1945. There are others in the government, but he's the top guy who's trying to do it. And he puts himself at risk of assassination, because if you're for surrender in Japan in 1945, the word surrender has been forbidden.

You can't even use the word, and these young hothead colonels will kill you. It's not an idle threat. In Japan in the 1930s, I think two or three prime ministers were assassinated. There were famous assassination attempts, and there's graffiti in the walls of Tokyo. They wanna kill, what do they call them?

They use this Italian word, I'm suddenly forgetting it, but it means traitor. They're looking for traitors, anybody who wants to surrender is a traitor. So the point is, he's a personal risk. So how do I get at this story? Well, I had the good fortune of finding his grandsons, and this is important in this kind of history, to find family members.

And in this case, one of the grandsons had his diary, which has never been published before, and it's in Japanese. I had help from Kazu Togo, who was a pretty westernized guy. He's Japanese diplomat, had been ambassador to Netherlands. And so he's quite westernized but even so, there are problems of loss in translation.

And I had a lot of help from an American, a guy named Brian Walsh, who is a Princeton PhD. He teaches in Japan, he teaches history in Japan. His wife is Japanese and he acted as my translator, but also my interpreter. There can be a lot of lost in translation here and so we would have these Zoom calls between Kazu.

We also got his twin, Shige, on the phone, on the Zoom, and Brian. And we would talk through, really trying to understand Togo Shigenori's diary, what he meant, what he's thinking, and that's that. You said, getting into the head, that is what I'm trying to do. It's tricky, but with the diary, those are imperfect devices.

I'm sure your readers will understand this. People write diaries for lots of reasons, they're not always honest. They can be written for the record or for history, so you have to be careful with it. But I did the best I can with his grandsons interpreting his diary. And it is a record, it's an important record.

And it showed his own angst over all this, how exhausted and worn he was by this nearly futile attempt to bring around the Japanese government. He succeeds finally, because the emperor of Japan, Hirohito, who's been a tool of the military through most of the war, finally gets fed up with his own generals.

The key moment is a few months before the bomb in June, when the military wants to move the emperor up into the mountains to their redoubt, to a palace. And I don't think really, it's a palace to a bunker, really. And they've got an armored train to take him there.

And the Emperor says, no, this is new. The Emperor defying the military. This is an unusual move, and it shows he's finally getting sick of these generals who are taking this country down the road to perdition. And it's tricky for him because he's afraid of a coup. And not that he would be killed, but he would be essentially become the captive of the military or be replaced by one of his brothers.

That could also happen, in any case, the Emperor is starting to have some distance from the military. The other big factor is the atom bomb, the atom bomb falls on Hiroshima. And this, the Emperor thinks, are they coming for me next? His entourage tells him that they're hearing the radio signals of the 509th Composite group, the Air Force group that dropped the atom bomb.

They hear their signals, they're in the air again. And the Emperor is worried, the Air Force has already burned his palace by mistake. In May, when we were firebombing Tokyo, not intentionally aiming at the palace, but the firestorm jumped the moat and burned down a number of buildings in the palace grounds.

So the point of this is that the Emperor is afraid for his own safety, and he's worried that the atom bomb is coming for him. And that finally helps bring him around to surrender, the records on this are spotty. The Japanese have never fully revealed the record of the Emperor.

They sort of dole it out bit by bit but there's some recent stuff. There's a Chamberlain who has talked about what I've just finished talking about, that he was worried about the atom bomb. There's a story named Rich Frank, who's probably known to some of your listeners, who's onto this and writing a very long three volume work on the Pacific war.

And he told me about this chamberlain who has this recent stuff about the. So the point is, I'm piecing together bits and pieces from diaries and recollections to tell this story that has been told in various ways, but not quite as directly as I do, and also not for a popular audience.

One thing I'm doing here is I'm not writing academic history. I'm writing for a popular audience. I have to be accurate, and I have it vetted by academics. And I'm careful, I got a lot of footnotes, but I'm writing, and I'm writing. I actually ended up writing a thriller I didn't set out to.

It's about half the length of one of my usual books. And what happened was I decided to write in the present tense to make it more immediate, and that made it move along fast. And the story itself was more thrilling than I realized, cuz again, it's the Japanese side.

I didn't realize how close it was, how close they came to not surrendering. That really has not been brought out well in other books, rich Frank gets at it, some others get at it. But that's the heart of my book is this kind of thrilling last couple of weeks when it's not, you know we won the war, we dropped the bomb.

But l in a way, you don't know, it's thrilling. You sort of can't believe what a close run thing it is.

>> Michael Auslin: Well, I think that's exactly one of the things I want to bring up, two things. One is exactly that, which is, yeah, of course, if you're an academic and you've studied it, you know that even after the bombs were dropped, there was questions within the high councils and the Supreme War Council.

Would they surrender? Would they not, could they keep fighting? But you really bring that to life in a way that I think shows that there really was no other option. Meaning that for all the questions about the peace feelers through the Russians or the peace feelers through the Swiss, that they were hopelessly deadlocked.

And even after Hirohito had pretty well made clear his own desires that the war end, they still dragged it on. So this was not by any means a sure thing. Leading back to that question of, did we actually have to do it?

>> Evan Thomas: Yeah, this is an important point, because in the revisionist school, the United States has broken the Japanese diplomatic code, and we intercept these messages that make it pretty clear the Emperor is saying, I want peace.

But if you look closely at the decoded messages at the dialogue between Togo, my guy, the foreign minister, and the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, who's supposed to go to the Russians and get the Russians to mediate a peace effort. It's pretty clear from the decoded messages that it's somewhat of a half hearted attempt.

And the Japanese ambassador says, look, you're not gonna get this unless you agree to unconditional surrender. And Togo says, no, we're not doing that and why? Because the war council doesn't wanna do unconditional surrender, what do they want? They know they've lost the war, it's not like the Japanese think they're gonna win.

They know that they've lost, their fleet has been sunk. But what they want is to force an invasion that will be so bloody that the Americans finally say, enough, no mas, and give them what they really want. What do they really want? No American occupation and no war crimes trials.

Because remember, who's gonna be hung in the war crimes trials but the Japanese military leaders? So the guys making the decision, no, the noose is around their neck. So they want no war crimes trials and they wanna keep the Emperor and they want all those three things. And they think that it's not crazy, it's not really irrational.

They think if they can make us bleed enough, they'll get that. So that's why they wanna force an invasion. The atom bombs change the equation because they can beat and they can have a bloody invasion. But if we just keep dropping atom bombs on them, that's not an invasion.

That's just the fairly quick death of all of Japan. So there's a squabble, how many bombs do we have? Do we have more than one? Well, actually, it turns out we do, cuz we drop a second bomb. But even after the second bomb, there's a scene. The war council's meeting, and word comes to them, Hiroshima.

Not just Hiroshima, but now, second bomb, a Hiroshima style bomb, has just taken out Nagasaki. And what is the war minister? The most powerful man in the room, Anami, General Anami. He's the war minister, what does he say? He says, wouldn't it be beautiful if the whole nation was to die like a flower?

This is the way they talked. Now he's blustering for his subordinates, who he doesn't wanna get killed by them either. So some of this is bluster but the point, they're tied. The war council is not voting to surrender even after the second bomb, it's divided. It's a three to three deadlock.

In order to get anything done in Japan, you have to have a consensus. So the war council is deadlocked, so it's gonna just drag on. Fortunately, Emperor, that night, finally comes around and says, no, I agree with Togo. I agree with a foreign minister, we're gonna surrender, are we done?

No, because the message that goes to Washington says, okay, we surrender, but the Emperor has to be sovereign. Well, the message gets to Truman and Stimson and Byrnes, the secretary of state, and they go, whoa, wait a second. You can't have a sovereign, you can't preserve the Japanese imperial system, that's gotta go.

So we sent a message back saying, okay, well, great, you accept your surrender, but the Emperor is not gonna be sovereign. It's gonna be subject to the supreme allied commander. They don't want the Emperor reporting to God, he's a deity. They want him reporting to Douglas MacArthur. Well, they're back at square one because the Japanese can't accept that.

They can't accept the Emperor losing their sovereignty. So this rattles on for four or five more days. Meanwhile, a coup attempt is launched, and the war minister half goes along with it. It's unclear what his motivations are, and I think he's deeply ambivalent. I spoke earlier about moral ambivalence, which is a big theme of my book.

Anami, I think, is ambivalent. He doesn't wanna cross the Emperor, but on the other hand, he doesn't want to surrender. So he kind of half encourages this nutty coup attempt. But it's not that nutty, because while Anami commits suicide, Harakiri, he takes his sword and plunges it in his stomach, right, because what else is he gonna do?

These crazy colonels kill the head of the imperial guard and they forge orders, giving them control of the palace. And the night before the Emperor's scheduled surrender speech, there are soldiers running through the imperial palace trying to find the recording of his speech, of the emperor's speech. So they can break it, so that there won't be a speech.

We`re back, if that happens, we're back in, who knows? Civil war, military, government, who knows? It's just complete chaos. Fortunately, the soldiers cannot find the recording. It's hidden in a room reserved for the ladies in waiting to the empress. You can't make this stuff up, it's a movie.

And the chief plotter at that point is a young colonel, he goes out and he shoots himself. And finally they surrender. And the Emperor gives his famous address, saying, war is not going as well as anticipated. They've been nuked in two days, I mean, twice in ten days, so it's a very close run thing.

And my book, I think, captures the drama of this.

>> Michael Auslin: One thing that you talk about that, honestly, I'd like to think I had forgotten it, meaning I did know it at some point, but I honestly am not sure I did. We've always been told we only had two bombs, we used the two bombs.

If the Japanese hadn't surrendered, we were out of Schlitz. We had nothing more to use to force them into a surrender. And yet you talk about a third bomb, so when I first read that, I thought, I got him, the mistake. There's no way, I know this period.

And you go through and you talk about the preparations that were going on. General Groves, who was the operational head of the Manhattan project, preparing a third bomb that they thought would be ready within the fall. And the target for that most likely would have been Tokyo. And you go through some of those debates.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Cuz I think, to me, that was actually new.

>> Evan Thomas: Yeah, again, remember, I'm a journalist here. I'm not making new academic discoveries, and I don't wanna claim to. So other scholars have unearthed the record that shows there was a third bomb that would have been ready by August 20th, actually, pretty soon, not just the fall, but August 20th.

And initially Truman gets Truman is so shocked, he gives control to the military over dropping the bomb. The order goes out, initially saying bombs is made ready for targets. But then when Truman sees the photographs of what Hiroshima looks like, he takes civilian control back, no, no, no, no more bombs.

He doesn't even know about the Nagasaki bomb that goes off, he doesn't know the timing of it that goes off. Now he's got civilian control again, the president's control. He says, no more bombs. So they stop the transmission of, the sending of the third bomb is actually halted for a couple of days, and then they're getting ready to resume it again, because the Japanese are not surrendering.

So they would have had a third bomb ready for delivery on about August 20, where? Well, my character, General Spots and his buddies at Atinian wanna pick the next target, Tokyo. Now that sounds a little grimmer than it is because they don't mean to drop it on the palace.

After all, somebody's gotta surrender here. They're not trying to kill the Emperor, they wanna drop it on a burned out area. There's a lot of burned out Tokyo, maybe 20 square miles, maybe even more. So the thinking is do it as a kinda a demonstration. So what they call the scare radius, the flash and the boom is big enough, loud enough so the Emperor and his government can see how terrible a third bomb.

So now we got three, and that that would force him into surrender. And Truman, we know this from a document from the british archives. On the day before the Japanese surrender, the official surrender, Truman is meeting with British diplomats and interestingly, the Duke of Windsor, who's in Washington.

And he says, according to the British document, he says, sadly, he says, we're gonna have to drop a third atom bomb on Tokyo. And that is five hours before they get word the Japanese has finally surrendered, this time for real, so that bomb never gets dropped. But it's even worse than that because there's also a record that General Marshall, the sainted General Marshall, the army chief of staff, is thinking, the Japanese are not surrendering here.

We're gonna have to invade after all. Marshall's thinking about tactical nuclear bombs, using nine nuclear bombs on the beaches of Kyushu. It's sort of hard to believe, I think we would have had about seven ready by the day of the invasion, November 1st, but maybe would have had a couple more.

In any case, he's asking for nine atom bombs. He asked, how is this gonna work? And they say, well, the invading forces should lay back for 48 hours before we go over. They didn't understand radiation as well as they should have. I think there was some willful denial on this, there's some very good scholarship on this.

Sean Malloy, who's very good on this, is sowing kind of a willful denial, not just by the military, but by Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is not as curious about radiation and the effects of radiation as he might be, why? Cuz I think he wants to drop this bomb, he wants to do this demonstration and show the world this is not in the movie.

They don't really get into this, but there's a lot of evidence, and again, there's a scholar named Sean Malloy who's gotten into this, that they should have known more about radiation than they did. And Groves, the head of the Manhattan project, he covers it all up. But Oppenheimer's in cahoots, not just Oppenheimer, but President Conant of Harvard is not as curious about the effects of radiation as he might have been.

I'm pretty sure that's because they didn't want to have a big discussion about poison. Poison gas had been proved awful in World War I, it had not been used in World War II. The people making the bomb did not wanna get into a big discussion about radiation cuz it's like poison gas, and so they kind of skipped past the risk.

They knew the risks, but they minimized them. And then when they were confronted with radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were kind of in denial for a while.

>> Michael Auslin: It's actually fascinating, and again, something that I myself, I'm not that familiar with. To play devil's advocate for a second on another issue, though, you saying that.

Interestingly, almost could be used to give credence to the argument that we were thinking about these bombs for an incipient Cold War, meaning there was an international agreement after World War I never to use poison gas again. And the argument is Hitler adhered to it in World War II because he was a victim of poison gas.

 

>> Evan Thomas: Right.

>> Michael Auslin: A poison gas attack in World War I. So even he bizarrely, even for Hitler, poison gas was too much, at least on the battlefield, obviously not against civilians and Jews in the concentration camps. So if the same dynamic had taken place of radiation poisoning, it's a horrible thing.

We're gonna ban the use of the bomb but why wouldn't you wanna ban the use of the bomb? Only if you see its utility in post war, a post war environment.

>> Evan Thomas: There's a division, I think, on this. The person who's thinking the most about the atom bomb and Russia is Secretary Jimmy Byrnes.

He wants to use it as a diplomatic weapon, like a pistol in your pocket, to intimidate the Russians. And I think he does think that way, and I think Truman does a little bit as well. Stimson is more ambivalent, in his diary, he says, this is our master card.

But he changes his mind. He initially thinks, we can use this to threaten the Russians, maybe to make the Russians liberalize. But then he decides, after we've dropped a couple of these bombs, he just says, no, we need to bring the Russians into the tent, share the secret with them and have some arms control.

He gives the first ever arms control speech to the Aussie bowl club in, I think it's early September, 1945, right around the time of the Japanese surrender. He makes a plan to share the bomb with Truman. He shows it to him in September and Truman rejects it, and the arms race is on.

Why does Truman reject it? It's not all that unreasonable in the sense that the idea that Stalin is gonna allow inspectors into Russia is far fetched. The Russians are building their own bomb, I don't think they're gonna share with us. I'm torn by this. I'd like to think if only the United States had proposed to the Russians arms control right away, nuclear freeze, basically international control, the whole world would have been better.

I'd like to think that. But at the same time, not that I'm a Russian expert, I have a hard time seeing Stalin agreeing to this sort of freeze and agreeing to allow western inspectors in. It's just so un-Russian to do that, especially since they had stolen the secret of the bomb and were building their own, which they had within four years by 1940.

 

>> Michael Auslin: And we hadn't told them at all about the bomb preparations officially during. So they already felt, well, we can't trust them. They're not gonna share with us.

>> Evan Thomas: How do they trusted us anyways, neither side trusted the other. I think realistically, I don't think arms control could have happened.

I say that with regret, and I find this a difficult subject to know for sure. This is all historical counterfactuals, and those are always hard, but I don't think we could have trusted the Russians and they wouldn't have trusted us.

>> Michael Auslin: One thing I wanted to go back to just very briefly, because we overlook it, and yet it's an indication of just how revolutionary and transformative the atomic bomb was.

You mentioned, of course, that Truman initially said to the Army, as soon as you get them use them. And the Army Air Forces and then he saw the devastation of Hiroshima and took control. Now, we take that for granted today, but I think it's worth remembering that never in American history had an American president taken personal meaning in his position.

Civilian control of a weapon. Of course, he was commander in chief, sends the army and the Navy, but he actually took control of this weapon and without much of a fight. I mean, whether that's because of the strength of the constitution or because everyone understood how unique this was.

I just think it's worth remembering that if it had gone differently, we could have had the military in charge of the weapon.

>> Evan Thomas: Yeah, no, Truman himself is somewhat ambivalent about it. He later talked about how it was my decision and I never lost a minute's sleep about it.

But I think the evidence is that he did lose some sleep about it. And one bit of evidence is that, just, as you say, he took control of it, having given the military control, he took it back and he kept control. The Atomic Energy commission kept control of those bombs.

They didn't give him back to the military, I believe until Korea, is that right? I think the AEC had control of those bombs until the Korean War. They didn't transfer the actual physical control of the weapons back to the military until the Korean War. And even then, the chief executive kept control over the decision.

 

>> Michael Auslin: Over the usage, that's right. Right, and you have the famous anecdotes of Douglas MacArthur stating, this changes war forever. Bernard Brody, the naval theorist who becomes really our first atomic theorist, who says, up until now, the whole point of building weapons has been to prepare to fight wars.

Now we have to prepare not to fight wars. That's the whole point of the military, because we have the nuclear weapon, that this really was transformative. And since we're getting towards the end of the interview, I'd actually like to begin transitioning, if we could, towards the present. Your book brings to life a period of history that many, there are still people who remember.

They remember the first reports of the bomb. They certainly remember the early days of the atomic age, and those people are getting fewer and fewer. But we also, since the end of the Cold War, have largely, at least in this country, sort of put the nuclear question back in the bottle.

The genie back in the bottle. Doctor Strangelove has folded up the tent, but that's not how the world has acted in many ways.

>> Evan Thomas: Unfortunately, I mean, I'm certainly of that generation.

>> Michael Auslin: We're back in a nuclear world.

>> Evan Thomas: I hate it. I mean, I grew up with duck and cover drills and all that, and I was so grieved in 1989, 1990, 1991, when the genie went back in the bottle.

Well, it's out again, and it's kind of unstable. Scary way, because the Russians have talked about tactical use of tactical nuclear. Putin is using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, let's hope he doesn't do it. It's terrible military weapon. But I'm actually more worried about the Pacific theater because the war game scenario there that I think is all too plausible is some kind of naval engagement happens over Taiwan or just over freedom of the seas.

But anyways, we get into a sea fight with China, and the problem, and you probably know more about this than I do, but I believe that China has land based missiles that they would use to sink our ships.

>> Michael Auslin: Yes.

>> Evan Thomas: And so they are shooting at us from their land base, so what do we do?

We take out their land based missile sites. Now the United States of America is attacking Chinese mainland, so what's the next step? Well, it wouldn't be crazy to use a tactical nuclear weapon against the American fleet. For the Chinese to use a tactical nuclear weapon against the American fleet.

Now we are into what they euphemistically call limited nuclear war. I have my doubts about whether you can fight a limited nuclear war. I have these doubts just cuz it seems crazy to me, but also because Dwight Eisenhower, I wrote a book about Dwight Eisenhower, who never really, in the 50s, people started talking about limited nuclear war.

And the think tanks at Rand and Herman Kahn and all that and game theory. And I remember Eisenhower never really bought that. He thought if you start these wars, you're all in, and he would bluff. I wrote a book called Ike's Bluff about Eisenhower's bluff with nuclear weapons cuz he was an all in guy.

Either you fight with these all away or don't. I mean, or don't even tempt fate, do not get into an engagement that can escalate into a nuclear war. I have this fear now about the Pacific that we could get into a military engagement that would tempt fate by tempting the Chinese to use a tactical weapon against our fleet.

And then who knows, for one thing, you've got cyber. So while all this is going on, they're knocking out satellites. What's to stop the Chinese from turning the lights out in the United States? People have not come to grips with these scenarios that are scary as all hell.

It's not some nice little 19th century naval battle of ships shooting at each other that we're getting into. We're shooting at main lands and cyber attacks on the United States, for one thing, the economy goes to hell right away cuz stock market collapses. I mean a war with China is gonna be a really ugly, scary thing.

I'm not saying doomsday, although you can get to doomsday, but these scenarios are very-.

>> Michael Auslin: These scenarios are very frightening, for sure. And you raise and questions that back then they really had no idea about. So for example, you don't have to set off a tactical nuclear weapon against our forces, but you could set off an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse, with a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere.

Now how do we respond to that? And if we don't respond, does that embolden them? There's other scenarios, by the way. You brought up the question of us attacking their land-based missiles to protect not just our ships, but our bases in the region, in Japan, on Guam, perhaps South Korea.

There are scenarios where the most assured way of doing that is by launching our own missiles, not just from planes, but ballistic missiles. Where if you're the Chinese and you see a ballistic missile coming in, do you wait to make sure it's conventional and not nuclear before you decide to launch yours?

So you're exactly right I think to raise this question of the uncertainties in the Pacific, perhaps proximately it's more worrisome in Ukraine right now, but over the long run. And these are, as you point out, scenarios that we simply haven't had fully thought through, I mean hopefully there are some people doing it.

But what's so interesting then, to go back to the book as we begin to finish up, is of course that was a nuclear monopoly, an atomic monopoly that the United States had for four years. And so when you talk about Stimson, and Truman, and Oppenheimer, and Groves, and Byrnes, and all of them.

That was the royal flush of all royal flushes, you don't get anything better, and yet it was ephemeral.

>> Evan Thomas: Yeah, yeah, people forget. I mean there was no risk of escalation in 1945 cuz we were the only people who had the bomb. Now, nine countries have bombs, and our immediate foes, Russia and China, they got bombs.

Iran could have a bomb soon. I mean you're in an escalatory world which didn't exist in 1945, it does now and it behooves us to think about that. In fact, I'm a little surprised that we're not thinking about it more, that this is not more a public question that is debated in either the think tank world, which you're familiar with.

Or maybe it is, maybe I'm not well enough educated. And I do know there is some talk about this in the scholarly journals, but I'm surprised there's not more talk about it.

>> Michael Auslin: Well, I think that's exactly right. There are people that talk about it, but it's the same thing that happened to Russian studies after the Cold War.

We sort of closed up shop on the nuclear question, assuming we didn't have to worry about it, and we didn't train a new generation of nuclear thinkers for 30 years. There were some, of course there were some, but not like how we did during the Cold War. Nor did we do it in a way that the nuclear question was intimately related to every strategic question we discussed because we understood that ultimately it could come into play.

And after 1989, 1991, we just figured well we didn't have to think about that, and you're right. So I think it's a loss of muscle memory, it's a loss of institutional intellectual capacity, which we have to build up. And while there are some attempts at that, and we talk about war games and the like, I think that a lot of it is done with a sort of post 1992 mindset.

Not a post 45 mindset where you very quickly had a pure competitor, the Soviet Union, that could deliver missiles or could deliver bombs and then had missiles. But I think we sort of take it with the, well, we've got such overwhelming power that we don't have to really worry about this.

So I think in a lot of ways it is worth going back to the book and the angst questions, the moral ambiguity that you raise as starting points to talk about, how do we ensure that this never happens? They were dealing with it, as you point out, because in essence it had to happen, they needed to use it.

But we need to think about how you never need to use it, but with the same sets of questions. So to leave us then, is there anything from the book, Evan, that you would say is the most important lesson? If there's one that you can draw out for us today, is there one, or is it just it's so overwhelming that you sort of have to take it in its own totality?

 

>> Evan Thomas: There's no great moral bottom line here. There's a wish that our leaders will be serious about this and think about it in a more serious way. Politics is a joke right now, it's pathetic and it's almost amusing, but it's kinda darkly amusing. And we need, this kinda sounds ridiculous, but we need more serious leaders.

That's sort of pathetic to say that, but we need more serious leaders who are thinking this way. Now having said that, I think at the presidential leader level they may not be so serious. That's not fair, actually, Trump is a joke. But Biden has been around the track a few times, I shouldn't be so critical of him.

But our general political discourse today, our public discourse, is laughably naive and focuses on things that are not the things that are gonna kill us. We need to be more focused on the questions that we're talking about.

>> Michael Auslin: Well if anything, that brings into even starker relief the character of someone like Henry Stimson, the core, the central figure in your book.

 

>> Evan Thomas: Yeah, I hope we have some good, I mean I hope our presidents, this is obvious, but have some serious people. I think Jake Sullivan's a serious person, I don't mean to say they're not. And I think Trump, even in Trump's presidency he had some decent people advising him.

I'm not sure in a second Trump presidency if he would, I'm not sure who those people are. In the first Trump presidency he did have some serious and good people, but let's hope if Trump wins he does it again. It's hard to even imagine, to tell you the truth.

 

>> Michael Auslin: Well that's why I think the value of going back and looking at that's what history does for us, right, as you have done through 11 books, shown people, mostly men given the periods that you're dealing with. But people who dealt very carefully, and soberly, and seriously with questions, and honestly none perhaps as grave as that of the atomic bomb.

So I think that's a good point to wrap it up. And again, the book is Road to Surrender, the author Evan Thomas. Most of you have read at least one, if not more, of his books, I urge you to get this one as well. And Evan, it has been a great pleasure having you on The Pacific Century.

 

>> Evan Thomas: Thanks, Michael, I really enjoyed it.

>> Michael Auslin: So for The Pacific Century, I'm Michael Auslin. It's been, as always, great to have you with us, and we will see you next time.

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