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The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. By Gar Alperovitz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 847 pages. $32.50.
The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. By Dennis D. Wainstock. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1996. 192 pages. $55.00.
Harry S. Truman and the Bomb: A Documentary History. Edited with commentary by Robert H. Ferrell. Worland, Wyo.: High Plains, 1996. 125 pages. $24.50.
Reviewed by D. M. Giangreco, an editor of Military Review at the US Army's Command and General Staff College and author of six books including the recently published Dear Harry: The Truman Administration through Correspondence with "Everyday Americans" (coauthored with Kathryn Moore).
Gar Alperovitz's landmark Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of the Atomic Bomb, and American Confrontation with Soviet Power first appeared in 1965 and has remained in print ever since. In it, Alperovitz advanced the proposition that the Japanese in World War II were on the verge of surrender when the atom bombs were dropped, that President Harry S. Truman and his senior advisors were fully aware of this, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed in 1945 in order to intimidate Joseph Stalin.
Timing is everything. Appearing in the mid-1960s, Atomic Diplomacy's seductive tales of conspiracy in high places found an eager readership among an intelligentsia skeptical of the growing US involvement in Vietnam. Truman historian Robert H. Ferrell later noted that "[Alperovitz's] argument had a certain attraction, for it explained the Cold War, [but] it fell to earth because of sheer lack of proof that any American statesman confronted a Russian with such a scheme." There were, however, enough historians impressed with the book's academic paraphernalia-as many as 200 footnotes in some chapters-that it became required reading in many classrooms.
In The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, Alperovitz "recapitulates" Atomic Diplomacy and adds little new to the mix except redundancies, extraneous material, and a generous amount of smoke. The author's willingness to misrepresent or ignore documents that do not support his thesis is particularly troublesome. For example, one set of documents declassified after the publication of Atomic Diplomacy and referenced in the current work is a set of memorandums between President Truman and...