Going Nuclear

FIVE DAYS IN AUGUST

How World War II Became a Nuclear War

By Michael D. Gordin

Princeton Univ. 209 pp. $24.95

When the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr -- the father of quantum physics -- arrived in Los Alamos on Dec. 30, 1943, the first question he asked J. Robert Oppenheimer was "Is it really big enough?" Bohr had no doubt that Oppenheimer's "gadget" would work; he only wanted to know if the atomic bomb was destructive enough, truly special enough, to prevent all future wars.

This is the question at the heart of Michael D. Gordin's study of how World War II became a nuclear war: Did those who unleashed the bomb think of it as a weapon like any other -- just another fireball -- or did they understand prior to Hiroshima that the atomic bomb was something quite extraordinary? Gordin, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, argues that at the time most "military men" saw the bomb as an "ordinary" weapon. Yes, it was more efficient, packed more explosive power, and required only one B-29 bomber to deliver it, but it was not qualitatively different from the fire-bombing campaign conducted against numerous Japanese cities in the spring of 1945 -- or so they thought.

To make his point, such as it is, Gordin quotes from numerous pre-Hiroshima archival documents to show that Leslie R. Groves, the general in charge of the Manhattan Project, was planning to use not one or two atomic bombs on Japan but more like one every 10 days. Gordin reminds us that the third bomb was to be ready for use on Tokyo by August 19.

All of this is true: Groves had in mind an extended atomic bombing of Japan. It didn't happen because President Truman forbade any further atomic bombings on August 10, the day after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. According to his commerce secretary, Henry Wallace, "he didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, 'all those kids.' " But as Gordin observes, it also didn't happen because Tokyo offered to surrender on August 14. And then he insists that the atomic bomb became "special" only after the surrender, when it seemed to end the war. Gordin belabors his thesis of the atomic bomb as an "ordinary" tactical weapon, claiming that he can "tell the story of how the atomic bomb was thought about and treated before anyone could claim that the bomb had ended the war." He reminds us of the "frantic and confused time that no one yet realized was the final summer of the Second World War." No one could know exactly when the Japanese would finally surrender, and so military planners had to make contingency plans assuming the worst.

But all this is beside the point; both the scientists who built the bomb and the politicians who decided how to use it knew very well that it was "special." As early as April 25, 1945, War Secretary Henry Stimson told Truman, "Within four months, we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb which could destroy a whole city." He even warned Truman that in the future such a weapon might be built by a small nation or "group" and used effectively against a "powerful unsuspecting nation." Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy described the bomb as "revolutionary" in his diary of July 20, 1945. Stimson told McCloy on May 14 that "we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique." The next day he described it as his "master card." On May 31, Stimson told Oppenheimer that he did not regard the bomb "as a new weapon merely, but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe." It was, he said, a potential "Frankenstein which would eat us up." Indeed, the bomb was seen as something so extraordinary that Gen. Carl A. "Tooey" Spaatz refused to use it without written orders.

Gordin ignores all this evidence, apparently because it doesn't fit what the publisher calls his "provocative" thesis. Clearly, the bomb was always special -- and was regarded as such in the War Department and in the White House long before Hiroshima.

There's nothing wrong with fleshing out the military narrative of how Oppenheimer's "gadget" was turned into a combat-ready atomic bomb. Thus, Gordin shows in meticulous detail how the island of Tinian was turned into a giant aircraft carrier for the 509th Composite Group, the B-29 unit that carried out the bombings. But this interlude sheds little light on how decisions were being made in Truman's White House.

Nor does Gordin grapple with the larger questions surrounding the use of the bomb. He suggests almost in passing that it was not, in fact, the bomb that ended World War II but a combination of the Soviet entry into the war and the simple fact that the firebombing and naval blockade had brought the Japanese to the precipice of military defeat. This will not please those who still defend Truman's use of the bomb.

Nor will Truman's revisionist critics appreciate Gordin's handling of whether the president could have made the terms of unconditional surrender more palatable to the Japanese by including an assurance that the monarchy could survive. Gordin claims this "would have required extraordinary political effort." Perhaps he is unaware that the Republican minority leader, Sen. William White, boldly declared on July 3, 1945, that the Pacific war might end "quickly" if only Truman would clarify the surrender terms in that way. This view was echoed by former president Herbert Hoover, who wrote Truman in May and early June that he, too, favored a clarification. This very newspaper published a series of editorials in the spring of 1945 urging such a course on Truman. Obviously, if Truman had decided to do so, he could have issued a clarification with the political support of his Republican opposition.

This small book is not nearly nuanced enough, nor nearly lengthy enough, to do justice to a highly complicated and myth-laden historical controversy. In an attempt to be bold and even audacious, the author has produced a non sequitur. ·

Kai Bird is the co-editor of the anthology "Hiroshima's Shadow" and the author of three biographies. He co-authored, with Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus," which won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize.