Review: The Irreversible Decision 1939-1950

The Irreversible Decision 1939-1950 by Robert C. Batchelder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written only a decade and a half after the first use of atomic weapons in war, this work is remarkable sober in assessment. Over 10% of the book is given over to Christian, largely Catholic, assessment and determinations of the morality of this new weaponry. This is befitting is this is largely a discussion of ethics, not technology.

There is some tech, and the striking thing to me is to recall how far back it went. Think of Hitchcock's MacGuffin in "Notorious": a cache of uranium being held in a wine cellar by the Nazis. At the time, it was not common/popular knowledge that uranium was being used in the development of the atomic bomb. Indeed, Hitchcock later claimed he was followed by the FBI for several months after he and Hecht discussed uranium with Robert Millikan at Caltech in mid-1945. In any event, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the release of details of the Manhattan Project, removed any doubts about its use. However, the Nobel Prize in Physics 1938 was awarded to Enrico Fermi "for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". This expertise led him to the controlled reactions in Chicago as he fled Europe with others that new the explosive potential and that colleagues still operating in Nazi German knew this too. It was in August 1939, before even the invasion of Poland, that Einstein was compelled to reach out to FDR with the message to exploit the military potential before Hitler did.

In the end, the irreversible decision often brings up a few standard questions: Did it win the war? Did it save lives? Could it have been used effectively differently, as in a demonstration? Was it necessary to use them with the tactics employed?

As for winning the war, the book contention is that Japan was already defeated (a military state), but the shock-and-awe of the nuclear blasts made made surrender possible - a political act. Perhaps the most damning made here is that the U.S. had decrypted cables proving Japan sought surrender, the only sticking point being Japan wanted terms, but the Truman administration was sticking by the FDR legacy of no terms, that is unconditional surrender. Combined with the fact that US Bomb Survey from the fall of Germany gave the Allies confident steps to subjugate and starve an island nation, it is quite possible an invasion and great loss of life on the Allies side was not in the cards buy mid-1945. This makes it obvious the bombs shortened the war, but with the ratio of Japanese military deaths and ramping up from 20K/month civilian deaths from air bombing, no Japanese lives may have been saved either.

As for other uses, it could have been done and possibly worked as well. It appears the inertia to carry out nuclear war was at least in part to help set post-WWII global order, particularly vis-a-vis the US and the USSR.

The work includes pre-attack survey of involved scientists and a post-attack popular survey done by Fortune magazine. The scientists wanted demonstration, the populace was in support of the attack.

Considering that WWII started in Europe in Franco's Spain with American et al horror of aerial bombardment to see the Allies use it and win with it with Dresden and Tokyo alone having more firebomb deaths than there nuclear deaths and the Germans started concentration camps, later employed on Japanese Americans... It may have been inevitable that everything possible would eventually have been done on both sides.

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
- Beyond Good and Evil

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