It concluded that Japan would have surrendered anyway before November (the planned start date for the full-scale invasion). The other piece of evidence behind this claim is the US Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted after the war. Revisionists argue that this shows the bombings were unnecessary. Japan was attempting to use the Soviet Union to mediate a negotiated peace in 1945 (a doomed effort, since the Soviets were already planning on breaking off their non-aggression pact and invading). They say the decision to use the bombs anyway indicates ulterior motives on the part of the US government. The revisionists argue that Japan was already ready to surrender before the atomic bombs. The oldest and most prominent critics of the traditionalist school have been the “revisionist school,” starting with Gar Alperovitz in the 1960s. But there is also a sizable literature disagreeing with the central premise: that the bombs led to the surrender. Retrospective estimates vary wildly, and are often lower than the figures stated by Truman and Stimson. Historians have critiqued various parts of this rationale for the bombings, including casualty estimates from the planned invasion. Emperor Hirohito’s citation of the “new and most cruel bomb” in his speech announcing surrender bolsters this theory’s credibility. The traditionalist conception is that the atomic bombs were crucial to forcing Japan to accept surrender, and that the bombings prevented a planned invasion of Japan that might have cost more lives. Stimson, and others in the government in the aftermath of the war. The “traditionalist school” accepts the explanation given by President Truman, Secretary of War Henry L. The historians who have tackled this issue have generally used the same pool of primary source information, but they have come to divergent conclusions because they differed in which sources they considered trustworthy or significant.
The “traditional narrative” put forward in the war’s immediate aftermath was that using the atomic bombs caused the surrender, but this narrative has come under fire in subsequent years.Īs with other debates around the Manhattan Project, ambiguities arise due to the fact that many of the available primary sources are considered unreliable. This debate has also figured prominently in the discussion of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (for more on that discussion, see Debate over the Bomb).
The debate over what precipitated the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II is a source of contention among historians.