Forty years after the war, renewed scholarship on the topic flourished in the mid-1980s. In the Summer-Fall, 1985 issue of the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Review, John L. Harper, then-visiting professor of U. S. foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, reexamined the 1947 article by Stimson defending the use of the atomic bomb. Although he acknowledged Stimson was qualified to treat on the subject of America’s decision to deploy atomic weapons, he faulted Stimson’s failure to address why the bombings were preferred to alternative measures to bring the war to an end. Harper cited, as many revisionists do, the conclusions of the SBS that Japan would have surrendered in late 1945, regardless of other factors such as the atomic bomb and the entry of the Soviets into the war in Manchuria. Harper did note that the SBS assumed continued U. S. conventional bombing in the intervening months prior to a hypothetical Japanese surrender, potentially costing more Japanese lives than the atomic bombings themselves23 (Frank documented casualties from raids on Japan’s seven largest cities at over 126,000 dead and more than 1.4 million dwellings destroyed). Harper noted that the bombs were dropped without explicit prior warning, maximizing the expected shock of such a devastating new weapon.
Harper attributes the bombings to Truman’s concern for public opinion, which overwhelmingly supported the notion of unconditional surrender.26 He argued that the only logical reason for the Potsdam Declaration to omit the expressed intent of the U. S. government that “unconditional surrender” would not preclude retention of the Emperor, a known nonnegotiable in Japanese estimations, was that “doing so would have jeopardized the chance to employ the atomic bombs in a wartime situation.” It was this “immense psychological and diplomatic value” that led President Truman to deliberately leave the Potsdam Declaration vague regarding the fate of the Emperor. Truman’s own insecurity in the enormous shadow of recently deceased President Roosevelt, and his desire to cultivate an image of decisiveness, were significant, if not deciding, factors in Truman’s determination not to waste an opportunity to play America’s “master card.”28 He admitted that the ultimate value of the bombings may have been “that they gave the world an unforgettable preview of the future of general war,” which horrors may explain why nuclear weapons have never again been used in war.
In the fall of 1985, Rufus E. Miles, Jr., a former senior fellow of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, attacked what he termed the myth that dropping the atomic bombs saved “half a million American lives” from the planned November 1945 invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Former President Truman had asserted this prediction in his 1955 memoir. Miles cites Winston Churchill’s post-war defense of such catastrophic casualty estimates, supported by the example of the U. S. assault on Okinawa.31 Presenting a bloody invasion as the sole alternative to the atomic bombings was a flawed assumption. Irrespective of his estimation that the bombings saved fewer than 20,000 American casualties, “perhaps even zero,”32 Miles asserts four alternatives: a negotiated peace, based on terms similar to those that eventually prevailed; intensified bombing and naval blockade succeeding no later than November; a land invasion of Southern Kyushu in November 1945; and a spring 1946 invasion of Honshu. Any of these alternatives, Miles argued, would have accomplished U. S. objectives and resulted in Japanese surrender by early 1946. Miles relied on the SBS to demonstrate that such enormous casualty estimates were unwarranted. He did not address whether the bombings were “a sound decision on other grounds,” but merely that casualty estimates were not warranted.
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