Early on, some regarded the atomic bomb as just another weapon of war. Churchill himself spoke privately of using it, or threatening to use it, to roll back Soviet advances in Europe in 1946-47. This was not on the plenary level. By early 1948 he was pushing for a negotiated settlement with Russia.

At the 1953 Bermuda conference the British delegation was astonished to find that President Eisenhower, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, still regarded the bomb as conventional. It was, they said, just another improvement in military hardware. With the arrival of the hydrogen bomb, Churchill’s thoughts became apocalyptic. He tried in vain to arrange a “summit” with the Americans and Stalin’s successor, Georgy Malenkov.

1945

These were his words on war and peace at the end of the Second World War:

This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension.  —1945, 6 August, House of Commons

The bomb brought peace, but men alone can keep that peace, and henceforward they will keep it under penalties which threaten the survival not only of civilization but of humanity itself. —1945, 16 August, House of Commons

Peace and Cold War

As divisions with Russia deepened after the war, atomic research continued and Churchill offered ominous warnings:

The atomic bomb is still only in the hands of a State and nation which we know will never use it except in the cause of right and freedom. But it may well be that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself. —1946, 19 September, Zurich University

If we….firmly grasp the larger hopes of humanity, then it may be that we shall move into a happier sunlit age, when all the little children who are now growing up in this tormented world may find themselves not the victors nor the vanquished in the fleeting triumphs of one country over another in the bloody turmoil of destructive war, but the heirs of all the treasures of the past and the masters of all the science, the abundance and the glories of the future. —1948, 7 May, Congress of Europe, The Hague

“Century of the Common Man”?

….little did we guess that what has been called The Century of the Common Man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries put together in the history of the world. —1949, 31 March, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Appeasement…from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace. —1950, 14 December, House of Commons

The human race is going through tormenting convulsions, and there is a profound longing for some breathing space, for some pause in the frenzy. —1951, 8 October, Broadcast, London

Passing through infinity

By the time he met Eisenhower in Bermuda in 1953, the Soviets had an atomic bomb and were on the way to its next iteration. WSC spoke of what became “Mutual Assured Destruction.” Would it be enough to keep the peace? Churchill wondered.

I have since heard it said that certain mathematical quantities when they pass through infinity, change their signs from plus to minus—or the other way round. It may be that his rule may have a novel application, and that when the advance of destructive weapons enables everyone to kill everybody else, nobody will want to kill anyone at all.   —1953, 3 November, House of Commons

Summitry

When I meet Malenkov we can build for peace.…[Eisenhower] doesn’t think any good can come from talks with the Russians. But it will pay him to come along with us. I shall do what I can to persuade him. —1953, 3 December, Hamilton, Bermuda

[Dulles says] nothing but evil can come out of meeting with Malenkov. Dulles is a terrible handicap. Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay. —1953, 7 December, Hamilton, Bermuda

Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.…The [nuclear] deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics or dictators in the mood of Hitler when he found himself in his final dug-out. That is a blank…. —1955, 1 March, House of Commons.

A bomb in the hands of lunatics is, alas, the blank we still may be facing.

Concluded in Part 3…

Scott Johnson of Powerline (“Why We Dropped the Bomb,” 13 April) kindly links an old column of his quoting an old one of mine with reference to President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima and the atom bombing of Japan.

Johnson links a lecture by Professor Williamson Murray, which is worth considering, along with Paul Fussell’s classic essay in The New Republic, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” which makes you think, though some consider it a rant. Fussell wrote:

John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, “a difference, at most, of two or three weeks.” But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7000 per week. “Two or three weeks,” says Galbraith.

Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you’re one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the destroyer escort Underhill was lost.

That’s a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don’t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.

Bombing and Churchill

But back to Churchill. What did he think about the bombing? Need you ask. Churchill wrote in his war memoirs, Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (1953, chapter 19):

British consent in principle to the use of the weapon had been given on July 4, before the test had taken place. The final decision now lay in the main with President Truman, who had the weapon; but I never doubted what it would be, nor have I ever doubted since that he was right. The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.

Some historians have cited a minor official in the Foreign Office who argued that Japan would surrender without the bombing, if the Allies promised she could keep her emperor; it was never proven that this ever reached the plenary level. Others quibble that the first bomb (Hiroshima) was perhaps necessary, but surely not the second (Nagasaki) only three days later, after the effects of the first were not even assessed. But the Japanese cabinet was divided still on the question of surrender after Nagasaki. Churchill continued:

I had in my mind the spectacle of Okinawa island, where many thousands of Japanese, rather than surrender, had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by hand-grenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the rite of harakiri. To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that of British—or more if we could get them there: for we were resolved to share the agony.

Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision—fair and bright indeed it seemed—of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks. I thought immediately myself of how the Japanese people, whose courage I had always admired, might find in the apparition of this almost supernatural weapon an excuse which would save their honour and release them from being killed to the last fighting man.

Truman never shrank from decisions, and in this one he was right. Six years of war (ignorant Americans always forget and say four) was enough. In 1953, Acheson placed Churchill “on trial” for dropping those bombs, in a perhaps inappropriate banter, but with more serious implications.

*****

Wars are declared on nations, not those who lead them, which is one reason why declarations of war have gone out of fashion. In our more “enlightened” age we are repelled by the suffering war inflicts on ordinary people. Unfortunately, you can’t declare war on an individual.

In introducing Alistair Cooke at the 1988 Churchill Conference, I quoted the words of that caring and generous man on the 25th anniversary of the bombing, which I had long since committed to memory:

Without raising more dust over the bleached bones of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I should like to contribute a couple of reminders: The first is that the men who had to make the decision were just as humane and tortured at the time as you and I were later. And, secondly, that they had to make the choice of alternatives that I for one would not have wanted to make for all the offers of redemption from all the religions of the world.