Agenda for 2/29 and 3/1

1. Supervising Women Workers during WWII

2. Group Presentations

3. Questions about test?

4. The Decision to drop the atomic bomb...and questions about the DBQ

Secondary Source 1

David Kennedy.  Freedom from Fear.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.  pp. 840-841.

Excerpt

The “decision” to use the bomb might better be described as a series of decisions not to disturb the momentum of a process that was more than three years old by the spring of 1945 and was rapidly moving toward its all but inevitable climax.  In a profound sense, the determination to use the bomb at the earliest possible date had been  implicit in the original decision to build it at the fastest possible speed.  “Let there be no mistake about it,” Truman later wrote.  “I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.” Winston Churchill put it this way:  “the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue.  There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”

Secondary Source 2 

Gar Alperovitz, Review of David McCullough's Truman, The Nation, May 10, 1993

Excerpt

Historians continue to debate why Truman dropped the bomb.  But archival documents  leave no doubt that Truman knew that the war would end “a year sooner now” and without an invasion.  One of the main reasons was his awareness that the shock of an early Soviet declaration of war was expected to jolt Japan into surrender long before an invasion could begin.  [Other historians] have effectively refuted Truman's oft repeated argument about the number of American lives saved by the bomb.  [Stanford University's Barton] Bernstein could not find a worst case prediction of lives lost higher than 46,000—even if an invasion had been mounted.  “The myth of the 500,000 American lives saved” Bernstein concludes, “thus seems to have no basis in fact.”   ...At least one of the factors in the minds of those making the decision to use the atomic bomb involved geo-political and diplomatic concerns about the Soviet Union.

Discussion questions

1.     According to each historian, why did the US use the atomic bomb?

2.     What evidence does each historian use to support his claim?

5. Dropping the atomic bomb

6. Reasons for dropping the bomb

7. NY Times article on the atomic bomb debate

8. And another NYT article on the issue

9. And another article on the debate

10. And a short radio piece about the decision to drop the bomb.