The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

“To avert a vast, indefinite butchery,” Winston Churchill summarizes in his history of the Second World War, “to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.”2544 The few explosions did not seem a miracle of deliverance to the civilians of the enemy cities upon whom the bombs would be dropped. In their behalf—surely they have claim—something more might be said about reasons. The bombs were authorized not because the Japanese refused to surrender but because they refused to surrender unconditionally. The debacle of conditional peace following the First World War led to the demand for unconditional surrender in the Second, the earlier conflict casting its dark shadow down the years. “It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil,” writes the Oxford moralist G. E. M. Anscombe in a 1957 pamphlet opposing the awarding of an honorary degree to Harry Truman.2545 “The connection between such a demand and the need to use the most ferocious methods of warfare will be obvious. And in itself the proposal of an unlimited objective in war is stupid and barbarous.”