“There is a big chasm between defeat and surrender. Surrender is inherently a political decision.” — James M. Scott
Exactly eighty-one years ago, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped its second nuclear device on Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man. Our nuclear Rubicon had been crossed.
Three days in August that changed the world. These historic 72 hours are the subject of Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, by James M. Scott, America’s foremost chronicler of the Pacific War. This new book, Scott reveals, grew out of Black Snow, his history of the firebombing of Tokyo. But whereas Black Snow was a military study, he explains, Empire of Ashes focuses on Truman, Hirohito and the politics of nuclear warfare. By August 1945, Scott argues, Japan was already defeated. So surrender was a political decision — one that required a weak, figurehead emperor to summon the power to save his country from an even darker apocalypse.
Should America regret these August days? Harry Truman certainly didn’t, Scott notes. In fact, in 1958 Truman even held a press conference in Independence, Missouri, to fire back at Hiroshima’s city council when it suggested that he should. Nor does Scott render much of a moral verdict of his own. “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think,” he explains, suggesting that we can all make up our minds by reading Empire of Ashes.
So two bombs, somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 civilian deaths, and no crime? That, oddly enough, might be the biggest tragedy of those three days in August 1945 that changed the world forever.
