Both civilian and military advisors told Truman that the bomb was unnecessary to bring the war to an end. [v]That Japan was close to surrendering because the Soviet Union entered the war[vi]. That all the United State’s leaders knew the end of the war was near. The many military leaders saw no need for the use of the bomb. General Arnold Command of the Army Air Force thought Japan could be bombed into submission with conventional weapons.[vii] Fleet Admiral Leahy was disgusted at the idea of attacking woman and children.[viii]  General Eisenhower hoped that we would never use such a thing against as enemy because he felt that the United States should not introduce into war something as horrible and destructive as this atomic bomb.[ix].Truman’s own cabinet urged Truman to seek a clarification of Japan’s position regarding the Emperor and surrendering[x]. Finally there is a view that Secretary of State Byrnes convinced Truman that the use of the bomb would be an important diplomatic instrument in dealing with the Soviets.[xi] These views by Secretary Byrnes and the other high level military leaders, removes it from the debate that this was a military necessity.

7.       Truman decisions to not use the A-bomb in the Korean War.

Truman was still President by the time of the Korean War, a mire half decade after the end of World War Two. The Chinese entry into the Korean conflict against the UN forces and almost pushed them out of the Korea peninsula. Truman was again faced with the decision as to whether he should use the atomic bomb in Korea as well. Truman now felt that this was “a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, woman and children who have nothing to do with this military aggression”. Later, Truman made these final comments on the use of nuclear weapons after the first test of the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb) in January of 1953. He said in a statement that “The war of the future would be one in which man, could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolishing the great cities of the world. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational man.”[xx] For the only world leader who dropped a nuclear bomb in anger, this statement shows that he now felt that the atomic bomb was not a normal weapon of war.

9.        The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the showdown during the Cuban missile crisis.

In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. The United States armed forces were at their highest state of readiness ever and Soviet field commanders in Cuba were prepared to use battlefield nuclear weapons to defend the island if it was invaded. Given that, the United States would have had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear devices on Soviet soil. Luckily, thanks to the cool head thinking of two men, President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, war was averted. The world came within a small miss-step of a nuclear war.

Khrushchev in a personal letter at the height of the crisis wrote to Kennedy and tried to frankly state the current situation and find a safe solution. In his letter he wrote, “You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly what dread forces our two countries possess. I propose you will declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its troops. Then presence of our military specialists in Cuba will disappear.”

 Nine months after the crisis ended, Kennedy and Khrushchev signed an agreement to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere.  It is clear that these two leaders believed that this crisis would have destroyed civilization.

10.    The conclusion as to why Truman’s decision was corrects for his time and as a matter of history these last sixty-four years.

I think that this review of this one historic decision by the United States show that the executive decision-making is a difficult process for a world leader. Many times these decisions are made under serious time constraints. A leader must often depend totally on their advisers and their intelligence sources. Failure of any of these governmental components can often have the most severe outcomes. The United States during World War Two made many mistakes in its conduct of this total war. While I don’t think this can ever be avoided, the United States should always strive, to capture the high moral ground as long as doing so is still in our country’s self interest. The saving of at least 20,000 to 46,000 of soldiers lives that would have been lost, invading Japan might be viewed by many, as in the country’s self interest.

Reviewing the legacy of Truman’s decision as it played out during the Cuban Missile crisis, shows that the knowledge of the horrors that had occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the dropping of the weaker A-bombs in 1945 might have prevented the use of the much more powerful H-bomb during the1962 Cuban Missile crisis. [xxii] Viewed from that single potentially devastating crisis, the decision by Truman was the correct decision, given a review of the facts leading up to that decision and in light of the more than half century of history since that single decision.