YOUR correspondents, Derrick Holt (August 20) and David Diment (August 24) variously subscribe to the view that President Truman’s decision to use atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) was the only way to bring the war with Japan to a swift end and in so doing spare further deaths and suffering on both sides.

This view was challenged at the time by, among others, the physicist Leo Szilard, by Generals Eisenhower and Macarthur, and by Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahey, whose words expressed informed judgements widely held by those in the know: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in the war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…”.

Further, Truman made it clear he wanted to lay down a marker (“hammer” was his word) to the Soviet Union.

A domestic politician and president for only a few months, Truman was ill-equipped to make coherent decisions on the prosecution of the war and certainly saw post-war strategic advantage in being the only world leader with “tried-and-tested” weapons of mass destruction, a consideration dominant in his mind in August 1945 and for the rest of his cold-warring presidency.

In 1947 a group from the University of Chicago who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project created the Doomsday Clock. Every year a decision is made to move or leave the minute hand of the clock.

In 2014 the clock was set at five minutes to midnight, this year at three minutes to midnight.

Those who decide on the timings, including 17 Nobel laureates, recently wrote as follows: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.”

Very soon might not be soon enough!

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH
Bowness Avenue, Headington, Oxford