The Growth of American Power Through Cold and Hot Wars 295of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb
was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our coun-
try should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose
employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save
American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seek-
ing some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary
was deeply perturbed by my attitude....In 1947, however, public opinion on the bomb began to change. Truman’s
aide, Henry Stimson, published an article in Harper’s Magazine in which he
claimed the president dropped the bomb to prevent an invasion of Japan that
would have cost one million American lives. With the horror of that scenario
in their minds, Americans began to change their views on the use of the bomb
and have consistently supported it since then. To this day, no one has discov-
ered a document claiming that “one million lives” would be lost if the bomb
was not used, but, as Stimson and Truman understood, it was a number that
would shock Americans into supporting the use of the atomic weapon.
FIGuRE 6-2 Patterns of a kimono burned into a woman’s skin due to the
intensity of the atomic bomb explosion