What’s in the News Wednesdays: Road to Surrender Revisits the End of WWII

This story showed up in my feeds today and I thought that it was connected to the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie, Oppenheimer, but it was more of a coincidence than connection. The book’s author, historian Evan Thomas, said in the Politics and Prose presentation that he knew about the book that the Oppenheimer movie was based on and hopes that his book will get a boost due to the interest that the movie will generate. Acknowledging that the Oppenheimer book focused on the scientists and their efforts, Thomas, using their personal diaries and other documents, focused on the thoughts of Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Thomas, who was a teenager in the 1960s had grown up hearing academics saying that the U.S. didn’t need to drop the bombs, definitely the second bomb wasn’t necessary because Japan was already a defeated nation. He explores that question and has expressed a concern that current decision makers seem to be forgetting the profound fear decision makers such as Stimson and Spaatz had about further use of nuclear weapons. Even the notion of “tactical” use of nuclear weapons was taboo because these men knew that war rarely stays within neatly defined restrictions and that when a nation’s existence is threatened everything at it’s disposal will be used to prevent that or avenge that possibility.

Please give a listen to the discussion found in the Fresh Air podcast episode or Politics and Prose video presentation.