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WORK TITLE: Most of 14th Street Is Gone
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Walker, Sam
BIRTHDATE: 6/8/1946
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: MD
COUNTRY: United Arab Emirates
NATIONALITY: American
https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/j-samuel-walkers-interview
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 8, 1946.
EDUCATION:University of Maryland, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, author. Formerly worked at the National Archives; former Nuclear Regulatory Commission, historian, beginning 1979. Frequent commentator on nuclear policy on television.
AWARDS:Richard W. Leopold Prize, 2010, for The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to numerous journals.
SIDELIGHTS
J. Samuel Walker is a former historian for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the author of a number of books on the atomic bomb and nuclear regulatory policy, including Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971; Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective, and The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States. Walker is also the author of the 2018 work of more general American history, Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968.
Speaking with Cindy Kelly on Manhattan Project Voices website, Walker remarked on his career: “I’m trained as a historian. I have a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. My field in graduate school was American diplomatic history, and like many of my colleagues who got Ph.Ds. in the early 1970s, I couldn’t find an academic job. I got a job at the National Archives and worked there for three and a half years. I maintained my interest and did some publishing in diplomatic history, but not on the atomic bomb. It wasn’t a topic that greatly interested me at that juncture.” It was only after getting a job as a historian at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (later becoming the only historian at the Commission) that Walker’s interests shifted his interests to nuclear regulation and to the development and the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II.
Containing the Atom
In his 1992 work, Containing the Atom, Walker provides a historical overview of nuclear regulation from 1963 to 1971, an era that ended with the transfer of the administration of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) from Glenn Seaborg to James Schlesinger, and which also demonstrated a sea change in the optimism in the use of nuclear energy in the early 1960s to a growing skepticism in the use of such power by the beginning of the 1970s.
“This well-referenced book (seventy-five pages of notes) is a necessity for anyone writing on or teaching about nuclear regulation in the United States,” noted John F. Ahearne in an American Scientist review of Containing the Atom. “Walker’s book provides an excellent source that is well written by a professional historian.” Reviews in American History contributor Martin V. Melosi also had praise, commenting: “Containing the Atom is meticulously researched, rich in detail, and clearly written. This is traditional government history only in the sense that an in-house historian was granted broad access to the available documentation. But the study is not a rigid institutional history. To his credit, Walker has chosen to focus on the major environmental issues confronting the AEC in the 1960s–metropolitan and seismic siting, reactor safety, thermal pollution–and the commission’s responses.” Business History Review writer Brian Balogh similarly observed: “Every reader will benefit from this public historian’s willingness to criticize the agency that he chronicles, and Walker, of course, deserves a great deal of the credit for this. But it must also be noted that Walker’s employer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was born of the very criticism that Containing the Atom levels at the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission.” Likewise, Science critic James M. Jasper noted: “In Containing the Atom J. Samuel Walker offers a wealth of raw materials for understanding the roots in the 1960s of the controversy that blossomed fully in the 1970s. Intended as a history of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1963 to 1971 (the period of Glenn Seaborg’s reign as chairman), this beautifully written account provides more details concerning the civilian development of nuclear power in the United States during that period than any other work ever has–or perhaps ever will.”
Prompt and Utter Destruction
In his 1997 work, Prompt and Utter Destruction, “Walker has provided a concise and objective analysis of the myriad of issues surrounding Truman’s search for the best way to end World War II in the Pacific,” according to Historian reviewer Conrad C. Crane. This “balanced and thoughtful” work, as Crane further termed it, argues that Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was essential in order to end the war and save thousands of American lives. “This book would deserve to be purchased by every college undergraduate, or anyone else wanting a thorough background in the issues surrounding the use of the atomic bomb,” observed Crane.
Others also had praise for the work. Tony Capaccio, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, noted: “Walker’s book is the most useful layman’s synthesis of the debate in print.” History in Review Online writer Rochelle Caviness also had a high assessment, concluding: “Prompt and Utter Destruction is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of atomic weapons and warfare, the Truman administration, U.S.-Soviet relations, World War II, or who are simply curious about why Truman decided to use not one, but two atomic weapons on Japan.”
Three Mile Island
Walker provides an overview of the nuclear incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania in his 2004 work, Three Mile Island. Taking place in 1979, the incident involved leaking cooling water from a reactor core which led to a core meltdown and the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history. Walker’s study was published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accident.
Booklist reviewer Mary Carroll termed Three Mile Island a “thoroughly researched administrative history.” Similarly, New Scientist contributor Rob Edwards called it a “lucid account of the accident,” while American Scientist, Robert M. Bernero also observed: “This is a comprehensive historical account, with forty-two pages of notes, an essay on sources and a 13-page index. But despite these scholarly trappings and the complexity of the events described, the book is eminently readable.” Likewise, Historian writer Thomas R. Wellock concluded: “This book is highly recommended for all libraries and students of politics, government bureaucracy, and environmental history.”
The Road to Yucca Mountain and Most of 14th Street Is Gone
Walker examines one of the major challenges of the nuclear power industry: what to do with nuclear waste. As early as the 1950s it was determined that disposal in deep geological areas was the best choice and deep caves under Yucca Mountain in Nevada were designated in 1987. However, as construction proceeded, critic also voiced opposition, and in 2009 the Obama administration cancelled further funding for the project. Walker’s book details the history of this proposed site. Choice critic R.M. Ferguson found it a “valuable account of the history/ongoing issues related to this significant problem.”
Walker’s 2018 title, Most of 14th Street Is Gone, is the “anatomy of a vicious American riot,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, 1968, riots exploded in many American cities, including the nation’s capital. Walker takes an in-depth look at the causes and the results of the rioting in Washington, DC, that left portions of the city resembling a war zone. The African American community rose in violent protest, as Walker demonstrates, not just because of King’s assassination, but also because of years of poverty, segregation, and unfair policing. The critic concluded: “In a country that still has barely begun to reconcile with a long history of racism, white supremacy, and their consequences, Walker provides an important reminder about how any event related to these phenomena will have both deep roots and long-term consequences.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Scientist, September-October, 1994, John F. Ahearne, review of Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971, p. 495.; November-December, 2004, Robert M. Bernero, review of Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective, p. 561.
Booklist, March 15, 2004, Mary Carroll, review of Three Mile Island, p. 1248.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March-April, 1998, Tony Capaccio, review of Prompt and Utter Destruction: President Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, p. 66; September-October, 2004, John Abbotts, review of Three Mile Island, p. 66.
Business History Review, winter, 1993, Brian Balogh, review of Containing the Atom, p. 671.
Choice, R.M. Ferguson, review of The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States, p. 1379.
Historian, spring, 1999, Conrad C. Crane, review of Prompt and Utter Destruction, p. 692; fall, 2005, Thomas R. Wellock, review of Three Mile Island, p. 547.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968.
MBR Bookwatch, April, 2016, Able Greenspan, review of Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman.
Nation, May 10, 1993, Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, “Truman,” p. 640.
New Scientist, March 20, 2004, Rob Edwards, review of Three Mile Island, p. 52.
Reviews in American History, September, 1993, Martin V. Melosi, review of Containing the Atom, p. 494B.
Science, February 12, 1993, James M. Jasper, review of Containing the Atom, p. 996; July 9, 2004, Gene I. Rochlin, review of Three Mile Island, p. 181.
ONLINE
Atomic Heritage Foundation website, https://www.atomicheritage.org/ (August 1, 2018), “J. Samuel Walker.”
History in Review Online, http://www.historyinreview.org/ (October 20, 2009), Rochelle Caviness, review of Prompt and Utter Destruction.
Manhattan Project Voices, https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/ (March 14, 2016), “J. Samuel Walker’s Interview.”
Organization of American Historians website, http://www.oah.org/ (August 1, 2018), “J. Samuel Walker.”
J. Samuel Walker
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J. Samuel Walker in 2008
J. Samuel Walker is an American historian and author based in Maryland, most notable for his research and writing on the nuclear age, both weaponry and atomic energy. Several of his books have earned broad-based critical acclaim and advanced novel viewpoints.[1] Despite affiliation with government and the nuclear industry, he is cited by the peace movement[2] and parties who are highly critical of nuclear energy.[3]
Contents [hide]
1
Employment with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
2
Publications
2.1
Prompt and Utter Destruction
2.2
Three Mile Island
2.3
The Road to Yucca Mountain
3
External links
4
References
Employment with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission[edit]
Walker was a history instructor at the University of Maryland in the mid-seventies but was hired by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)[4] in June, 1979, working under the chief historian, George T. Mazuzan. Walker was able to write in a lucid manner applauded in popular science press.[5]
Publications[edit]
Prompt and Utter Destruction[edit]
Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ix + 142 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-2361-3.
Roger Chapman, writing in Bowling Green's university press, characterized the book on the atomic bombing of Japan as "a brave attempt to bridge two diametrically opposed positions"[6] about whether the bombings were necessary, justified or humane. David Hendrickson, writing in Foreign Affairs, stated that Walker's position was "that some officials saw diplomatic benefits 'vis-a-vis' the Soviets from the use of the bomb but insists that such motivations were of decidedly secondary importance."[7]
Three Mile Island[edit]
He also authored a comprehensive review of the Three Mile Island accident, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (2004). According to his own account, Walker's work debunked the "grievous misconstructions [which] were portrayals of the bubble issue that were central features of at least two books that came out shortly after the accident (in 1982) and in three television programs..." Walker disputed the alleged imminence of an explosion; a central point of his argument was that if the situation was as dangerous as previous writers contended, that Jimmy Carter would not have been permitted to visit the TMI power plant.
The Road to Yucca Mountain[edit]
The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States, University of California Press, 2009, Hardcover, 240 pages, ISBN 978-0-520-26045-0
In The Road to Yucca Mountain, Walker covers the U.S. government's controversial attempts to address the engineering and social issues associated with high-level radioactive waste repository (HLRWR) management and spent reactor fuel (SRF). He starts with the Manhattan Project and works through the policy debate. In 1987, Yucca Mountain, Nevada emerged as the most likely candidate for a repository. He explicates the United States Atomic Energy Commission's flop with its first attempt to build a HLRWR in a Kansas salt mine. He addresses deep geological disposal and surface storage of HLRW and SRF as well as fuel reprocessing.
The Organization of American Historians awarded the book the 2010 Richard W. Leopold Prize for historical work being done by historians outside academia.[8]
QUOTE:
I’m trained as a historian. I have a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. My field in graduate school was American diplomatic history, and like many of my colleagues who got Ph.Ds. in the early 1970s, I couldn’t find an academic job. I got a job at the National Archives and worked there for three and a half years. I maintained my interest and did some publishing in diplomatic history, but not on the atomic bomb. It wasn’t a topic that greatly interested me at that juncture.
J. Samuel Walker's Interview
J. Samuel Walker's Interview
J. Samuel (“Sam”) Walker is the former historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the author of "Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan." In this interview, he describes the motivations behind President Truman’s decision to authorize the use of the atomic bombs. He explains the key differences between “traditionalist” and “revisionist” interpretations, and identifies weaknesses in each perspective’s argument. He also assesses the role of the Soviet declaration of war against Japan, whether the Japanese were ready to surrender before the bombs were dropped, and American plans for an invasion of mainland Japan. Walker concludes by recalling President Truman’s reaction to the human impact of the bomb.
J. Samuel Walker's Profile
Manhattan Project Location(s):
Date of Interview:
March 14, 2016
Location of the Interview:
Washington DC
Collections:
Atomic Heritage Foundation
Transcript:
Cindy Kelly: I’m Cindy Kelly. It’s Monday, March 14, 2016. We’re in Washington, D. C., and I have with me the author J. Samuel Walker. My first question to him is to tell me his name and to spell it.
Sam Walker: Well, my name is first initial J. Samuel Walker, so it’s J. S-a-m-u-e-l W-a-l-k-e-r. But, I go by Sam, S-a-m.
Kelly: Absolutely. Well, I know that he is a noted author on the Manhattan Project, and that’s why he’s here today. I wanted him just to give a nutshell summary of how he came to write about the Manhattan Project, what his career has been and his education.
Walker: Well, I’m trained as a historian. I have a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. My field in graduate school was American diplomatic history, and like many of my colleagues who got Ph.Ds. in the early 1970s, I couldn’t find an academic job. I got a job at the National Archives and worked there for three and a half years. I maintained my interest and did some publishing in diplomatic history, but not on the atomic bomb. It wasn’t a topic that greatly interested me at that juncture.
I had read Gar Alperovitz’s book [Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam] as an undergraduate, and found that fascinating because it took issue with the myth which had prevailed throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. That Truman had to use the bomb because the only alternative was an invasion of Japan that would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of lives. So, I read that and I thought, “Well, that’s really interesting,” and then I moved on.
When I left the Archives, I became the historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; a historian at that time, and later the only historian for the NRC. There, I wrote a bunch of books on nuclear power regulation, which again, had nothing to do with the atomic bomb. Except that people would call me up and say, “Was the first bomb used on Hiroshima a plutonium or a uranium bomb?” I didn’t know. And there were other questions like that. People would call the NRC because the first name in the agency’s title was “nuclear,” so they assumed that the historian of the NRC would know.
I was kind of embarrassed by that, so I did some reading. That was around the time of the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a lot of very interesting books came out. I thought, “Well, I’d like to catch up on this topic. It’s been almost 20 years since I was an undergraduate so I think I’ll do some reading and find out some more about this topic.”
As I read, I got interested and I wrote an article, which was published in the Journal of Diplomatic History in 1989 or ‘90, where I surveyed the literature on the atomic bomb and drew some conclusions. The article went well and got, at least by my standards for scholarly articles, more attention than other articles I had written. That’s how I got into the topic.
I got even more interested when the huge controversy broke out a few years later in the early 1990s – ’93, ’94, ’95 – over the Smithsonian’s plan for its ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit. The controversy was fascinating. But it was also a little disarming for me because the historiographical article I had written and published a couple of years earlier constantly got quoted out of context.
Oftentimes scholars on the left side of the spectrum in the atomic bomb controversy quoted me out of context and said, “Look, you know, even the conservative official historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agrees with me.” That really annoyed me, really, really annoyed me, because I thought it was unprofessional. I still think it’s unprofessional. And so at that point in 1995, I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll write a book,” because I thought there was a need for a short book on the decision to use the bomb that would appeal to students and the general public.
My objective was to outline my own views of why Truman used the bomb, which I hadn’t reached any conclusions about yet. I wasn’t certain. I truly went into this topic with an open mind about why the bomb was used, what the considerations were, and, most of all, what the context was in the summer of 1945. I wanted to write a short book, to draw some conclusions, and see where I came out. That’s how the book Prompt and Utter Destruction came about.
It was partly out of the pique on my part because I was tired of being quoted out of context on work not done or related in any way to my job at the NRC. It bothered me that people were using my position as a government historian to advance their own arguments or their own political position. For those two motivations, one of which is more noble than the other, I wrote that book evenings and weekends. I was working all day, writing the history of nuclear power regulation. Evenings and weekends one winter, I wrote Prompt and Utter Destruction. Once I got into it, the topic just doesn’t let go. It’s so fascinating and so interesting. And new documents were opening after the death of Hirohito, so new books were coming out. Since I started that book 20 years ago, I’ve been an atomic bomb decision junkie.
Kelly: That’s great. I want you to pretend I am 13 years old, in the middle of the country, and know nothing about World War II, President Truman, or the context of the decision to drop the bomb. In sort of simple terms for the uninitiated, can you start from the beginning and explain what was going on, what led to this decision, what the factors were? Just give a brief synopsis of your book.
Walker: Yeah, sure. I can do that if we have two or three hours. [Laughter]
Kelly: Yeah, we have some time.
Walker: The context of the bomb, of course, is World War II. There are literally thousands, probably tens of thousands, of books written about World War II. For anyone who wants to understand the modern world, it’s essential to know something about World War II, whether you’re a student or an adult.
If you read anything about World War II, it quickly becomes clear what a horrendous, horrendous world-wide disaster it was for the world. Upwards of 80 million people died. Though the numbers are not exact, they’re huge, and impossible to get your arms around. The amount of destruction in Europe and in other parts of the world was horrific. It’s simply impossible to overstate the destruction, the death, and the horrors of the war.
In that context, the war with Germany ended in early May 1945, but the United States was still at war with Japan. There were no prospects that the war with Japan was likely to end quickly or easily. Everyone knew Japan was in dire straits. The Japanese government certainly knew that. But Japan had given no indication at that point, in the summer of 1945, that they were ready to surrender. So, even though they were defeated, there was no sign they were going to surrender. American policymakers were concerned that the war was going to last perhaps a year or more, with a huge casualty list for American soldiers, Marines, and sailors.
The objective for Truman and his advisors in the summer of 1945 was to find a way to end the war as quickly as possible. The atomic bomb, which was tested for the first time successfully on July 16, 1945, appeared to be the most promising way to end a war quickly. No one knew, or no one assumed, that it would end the war immediately, but it appeared to be the best way, the most likely way to end the war most quickly, and that’s why it was used.
Within that context, the horrors of the war and the desire of Truman and his advisors to end the war as quickly as possible, the use of the bomb, which is so controversial now, was not at all controversial in the summer of 1945. It’s not as though Truman had to choose between advisors who were saying one thing and advisors who were saying something else. No, it was obvious to everyone that the bomb might end the war quickly and shock the Japanese into surrender. So, we should use it. There was no controversy; there was no real deliberation. Once it was ready, we were going to use it.
If you’re the 13-year-old, I would urge you to learn a little bit about World War II. Once you do that, I think you can understand why the bomb was, as I say in the book, an easy and obvious decision for Truman. Truman never agonized over using the bomb. It was just an obvious decision. We’ve got it, the Japanese are not ready to surrender, they’ve given no indication that they’re ready to surrender, and so we use it. And if it does what we think it’s going to do, it might shock them into surrendering.
Kelly: Can you talk a little bit about the ongoing conventional bombing on Japan?
Walker: Yeah, and we kind of lose sight of that. Since the B-29s had been developed – and the B-29 was the latest in airplanes and air warfare, in late 1944, early 1945 – the B-29s had bombed the smithereens out of Japan since early in the year. Because the B-29 had enough range to reach Japan from the Mariana Islands, which we had taken over in 1944, and made it possible for a B-29 to make a roundtrip from Saipan or Guam to Japanese cities and back again. That was something new.
Starting in the fall of 1944, and especially in the early months of 1945, huge fleets of B-29s firebombed, in most cases, or at least many cases, Japanese cities and caused just enormous, enormous destruction. There’s a photograph in my book of what happened at Tokyo. There was a firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 that wiped out huge sections of the city of Tokyo. If you look at that photograph, or any photograph, it looks like the photos of damage from the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bombing of cities and civilians was a well-established practice for the United States and, of course, it had been in Europe, too. There was nothing revolutionary about the use of an atomic bomb against civilian targets. This was viewed as unfortunate by Truman, and especially by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, but it was also viewed as necessary to win the war as quickly as possible. That’s another reason why the decision to use the atomic bomb for Truman was no big decision. It was just a bigger bomb. It was going to cause extensive damage by using a single bomb. But it was not a big step in terms of the power, in terms of the enormity of the destruction it caused, from sending fleets of 300 or 350 B-29s against Japanese cities.
Kelly: At the time, you said that Japan was all but defeated. Can you talk about where they were in terms of military abilities or strength, and then why they didn’t surrender?
Walker: Japan was in dire straits. Japan’s once proud air force was pretty much reduced to training planes. The pilots who had been so skilled were mostly no longer around, either killed or captured, most of them killed. So, the air force was a shell of what it had been when they bombed Pearl Harbor. The Japanese navy, another source of great pride for the Japanese, was virtually eliminated in terms of fighting ability. Japan was suffering from a very effective blockade that the American navy had mounted against the Japanese islands. It was also affected greatly by the bombings of Japanese cities.
The Japanese army was pretty much intact in China. China, or parts of China, had been overrun by the Japanese in the late 1930s. There were huge numbers of well-trained, well-armed, and well-rested Japanese troops in China, other parts of Southeast Asia, and some of the Pacific islands that had been bypassed when the United States hopscotched islands in the Pacific to get closer to Japan proper. So, it had an army, but the armies of Japan were isolated. The Japanese had a large number of troops in Manchuria, which they had overrun after 1931, and they had a large number of soldiers to defend the homeland. It’s just that those troops were not the best equipped, the best trained, the most experienced.
So, in terms of its ability to fight the war, Japan was fatally hampered, and the Japanese government knew that. Why didn’t they surrender? Well, they should have. As early as the summer of 1944, when the United States took over Saipan, Japanese officials—I’ve forgotten which official—a high Japanese official said, “We can no longer conduct this war with any chance of success.”
They knew that, and there was no dissent about that. They knew that as early as the summer of 1944. But it took them another year to decide to surrender. There are various reasons for that. These were not stupid people, but they acted stupidly. That might be the most important reason, but probably not. They wanted to make certain that when they surrendered, if they surrendered, it was done in a way that would be as painless as possible. And, above all, they were determined to keep the emperor on the throne as the head and symbol of the Japanese government.
The question becomes for the United States, for Truman and his advisors, what does it take to force the Japanese to surrender and how many American lives is it going to cost to do that? And that was very much an open question throughout the fall and winter of 1944, and the winter, spring, and summer of 1945.
There were high officials within the Japanese government who said, “Look, we have to surrender, we can’t fight this war. We can’t win this war. Our people are being slaughtered. We have to end the war because if we don’t, continuing the war might be the greatest threat to the emperor.”
They weren’t saying, “Oh, we’re losing tens of thousands of people, women and children.” It’s “We have to do what we have to do to save the emperor, and surrendering with the condition that the emperor be allowed to remain on his throne seems like the best way to do that."
The militants later in the summer of 1945 were saying, “No, no, we can’t do that. We’re not going to surrender unless other conditions are met. We have to keep the emperor on his throne. We also are not going to agree to an occupation of most areas of Japan. We want to disarm ourselves. We want to conduct our own war crime trials.”
Those four conditions. They were, of course, totally unacceptable to the United States and its allies. It was ridiculous for the militants to even think that they might be acceptable. But their thought was “If the United States invades, fine.”
I should go back to American plans for an invasion. An invasion was by far the least desirable and the most feared way of defeating Japan. But the plans went forward as they had to, because most military leaders, including the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, were convinced that an invasion of Japan was going to be necessary to force a Japanese surrender. So plans went forward for an invasion of Japan to begin on or around November 1, 1945.
The militants within the Japanese government were saying, “Yeah, let them come. We are going to kill so many of them when they invade that they will reduce their surrender terms. They will make it easier or more acceptable for us to surrender. That’s the plan. Let them invade. Sure, it’s going to cost millions of Japanese lives.” And they used those numbers. 80 million, I think, was the number that was thrown around, a very large number of Japanese lives. “But that’s okay, because that way we can keep the emperor and we can make surrender, we can make defeat, acceptable.”
Those were the two points of view being argued within the Japanese government and the Japanese hierarchy in the summer of 1945. No conclusion had been reached. The emperor couldn’t make up his mind. He would say one day, “Well, yes, peace would be a good idea. Let’s try for that.” And the next day, he would say, “Well, maybe we should mount a new offensive in China,” which he did say, in fact, in July of 1945.
So that was the situation. You had a Japanese government which knew it was defeated but wasn’t willing to surrender, and that was determined at the minimum to keep the emperor on his throne. The indications are that the idea was not to keep the emperor on his throne as a constitutional monarch, as kind of a figurehead, but to keep the emperor on his throne with the divine powers of a monarch, which is of course what he had before and during the war.
This again was totally unacceptable to the U.S. This was never spelled out, but a lot of good scholarship indicates that that’s what they had in mind up until the final surrender terms were agreed to by the Japanese and the United States after the two bombs and after the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
Kelly: Wow. Since you mentioned the Soviet invasion, go back to the agreements between the United States and Soviet Union on a Soviet invasion and what initial U.S. attitudes toward Soviet entry into the war were. How that changed, [Secretary of State] Jimmy Byrnes’s fears, and all of this.
Walker: One major objective of [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt at Yalta, which was in January of 1945, was to get [Joseph] Stalin to agree to enter the war against Japan. The Soviets, of course, had been fighting the Nazis, and that had been all they could do as long as the war in Europe was going on.
But by January of 1945, it was clear that the Nazis were all but defeated, and Roosevelt wanted an agreement from Stalin to enter the war against Japan. Japan and Russia had signed a non-aggression agreement, which both countries had observed because it was in their interests to do so. Roosevelt wanted Stalin to agree to come in to the war against Japan, and Stalin agreed to do that three months after the war in Europe was ended.
The reason Roosevelt was so anxious to have that happen is that the Russians could tie down the Japanese troops in Manchuria, of which there were many, so that they wouldn’t be able to be transferred back to mainland Japan. The blockade in January was not as tight as it was later in the spring and summer. But the idea was to get the Soviets to tie down the Japanese troops in Manchuria. For Stalin, it was a good deal because he would not only tie down Japanese troops but also increase his power in Asia.
That was the agreement and the thinking. American policymakers were clear that having the Soviets invade Manchuria would be very helpful for ending the war successfully. I haven’t found any place where anyone ever said that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria in itself would be enough to cause the Japanese to surrender.
When Truman went to Potsdam in July of 1945, his main objective, and he states this in his diary very clearly, was to get Stalin to reaffirm his commitment to entering the war against Japan the following month. The war in Europe had ended in May, and Stalin was due to enter in early August.
Truman’s first meeting with Stalin was an informal luncheon and Stalin said yes, that’s what he was going to do. Truman was delighted, because he’d gotten the main thing that he had gone to Potsdam for without any hassle. Stalin said, “Yeah, I’ll be in August 15.” Truman was – I think “ecstatic” would not overstate how he felt. Stalin didn’t do it as a favor. Of course, he had his own reasons for wanting to invade Manchuria, but still for Truman that was a big thing.
The documents at the time also made clear that although the U.S. thought this would be helpful, again, no one thought it was enough in itself. Truman made a famous diary entry where he wrote down some notes after his luncheon with Stalin. He says, “Fini Japs when that comes about.” Some scholars have said, “Well, here’s proof that Truman thought that a Soviet invasion would be enough to defeat Japan, and so he didn’t need the bomb.”
I’m convinced that we don’t know exactly what Truman meant. It’s something he jotted down. It’s not as though he thought about it. It’s absolutely clear he wasn’t hearing that from his military advisors, from Marshall, or Stimson, or from anybody else who was in charge of conducting the war, that a Soviet invasion in itself would be enough to defeat Japan. Later on, with Japanese documents and with [Operation] Magic intercepts – the United States was intercepting Japanese diplomatic traffic – we have more sources than we once did, and have had for the last 20 years or so.
It’s possible the United States underestimated the impact of the Soviet invasion on Japan, and that the impact was greater than what American policymakers thought at the time in the summer of 1945. But, clearly, at that time, in the context in which they were operating, they did not believe that the Soviet invasion in itself was going to be enough. They thought it would be helpful. It would put more pressure on the Japanese. It would be a shock to the Japanese. But they certainly didn’t conduct or make their policy on the assumption that once the Soviets entered the war, the war would end very soon after.
Did you ask me another part of that question?
Kelly: Well, just James Byrnes.
Walker: Byrnes was convinced that the bomb was going to help him negotiate with the Soviets. Tensions were already growing between the United States and the Soviet Union, and they had been throughout 1945, even before Roosevelt died. Roosevelt was concerned about what Stalin was doing in Eastern Europe. That was a major, major issue. It was the defining issue in the post-war world, in the post-war in Europe world.
Tensions were growing, and Byrnes was concerned about how this was going to affect American positions and American goals in Europe as well as in Asia. Byrnes made it very clear that he thought having the bomb—this is after the bomb has been successfully tested on July 16—was going to help him intimidate or at least impress the Soviets at the diplomatic table.
I don’t think any scholars have really gone to the next step, and I’m not sure there’s any way to go to the next step. It’s not clear to me how he thought that would work. If he was going to wave the bomb and say, “Hey, you know, you better back down, because we’ve got the bomb.” That’s perhaps a non-issue, but Byrnes clearly thought that, and he talked to Truman about that, at least some.
Truman’s attitude was kind of, “Oh, yeah, fine. If they do that, fine, fine.” But that’s not the reason that the bomb was used. The bomb was used for military reasons, because Truman was hearing from his military advisors. Byrnes was not a military advisor in any sense of the term.
Kelly: Can you remind people who he was?
Walker: James F. Byrnes was the Secretary of State. He was in charge of diplomacy, but he was not a military advisor, and the reason Truman used the bomb was that he heard from his military advisors that it might end the war more quickly.
Kelly: By military advisors, you mean George C. Marshall? Who was involved in this?
Walker: Well, the key advisors were Admiral Leahy, who was the White House Chief of Staff. William –“D” I think is his middle initial – William D. Leahy. George C. Marshall, who was the Army Chief of Staff, a man who commanded enormous respect from Truman and from everybody. And Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, a man of enormous gravity and dignity, who was respected by everybody. Truman didn’t have a great deal of affection – or at least he wasn’t close to Stimson – but he listened to Stimson.
Those were the top three who were advising him on military decisions and military actions. Truman, of course, was a former officer, so he had some sense of the military. He had military experience and that was of value to him as well.
Kelly: Can you tell us a little more about Stimson? Would you say that he was the one who was most closely involved with the actual development of the atomic bomb?
Walker: Yes. Stimson was the Secretary of War, so he was the one who made decisions. Once the Manhattan Project was authorized in the fall of 1941, Stimson was the top official who was responsible for the actions of the Manhattan Project. He appointed General [Leslie] Groves, who was the boot on the ground in terms of running the Manhattan Project. But Stimson was the highest official who was on top of the Manhattan Project on a day-to-day basis, who really understood what was going on without knowing all the technical details. He was keenly aware of progress on the Manhattan Project and what it meant.
By early 1945, when it was clear that the bomb was going to be built and likely to be successful, scientists were telling Stimson – and Groves had told Roosevelt – that the uranium bomb, the U-235 bomb which was used against Hiroshima, wouldn’t need any testing. They were so certain it would work. It was clear by early 1945 that we would have a bomb, because by then it was clear that you were going to have enough U-235 to build at least one bomb. Stimson got very concerned about what this meant for the post-war world in terms of American-Soviet relations, especially. Stimson was very thoughtful about what this means and what the overall impact is going to be, what the long-term impact is going to be, and what is going to happen if and after the bomb is used.
At first he said things that were similar to Byrnes’s view. “This is going to help us with the Russians,” kind of thing. I should know the quote, and I don’t have it at my fingertips—this is going to be the master weapon, this is going to be the decisive weapon. Again, it was kind of vague about how, but the fact that we would have this powerful new weapon, and nobody else would, would be helpful in dealing with the Russians.
As time went on, he became more concerned about what that meant. He was very concerned that Truman was overreacting to what the Soviets were doing in Eastern Europe, that things did not have to be so tense with the Russians. He factored the bomb into his thinking. And, by a month or so after the war ended, he changed his views enough that he was recommending to Truman we approach the Russians, offer to share basic scientific information. Not the engineering details on how to build the bomb, but basic scientific information about atomic energy as a way to try to win their trust. That was a big change from his views five or six months earlier.
Stimson was well informed, he was thoughtful, and he was concerned about what the advent of the bomb meant. But he also was convinced that it should be used as quickly as possible against Japan, that it was the most likely way to end the war as quickly as possible.
Kelly: We should go on with the story chronologically. We have the Japanese in sort of stalemate among their advisors, or at least there’s no sign that people are willing to admit defeat or accept the terms. Can you talk about how the Japanese responded to the bombs?
Walker: Yeah. From the evidence we have – the evidence is ambiguous and there’s still a lot of controversy – scholars who I respect and who’ve looked at Japanese sources are convinced that it was Hiroshima that finally convinced the emperor that the time had come to surrender. It didn’t mean he was ready to surrender on only one condition. He was still apparently talking about how the militants were right to ask for four conditions. But, at least—and, this is exceedingly important—it convinced the emperor the time had come to surrender, that Japan couldn’t continue any longer. You can make a case, I think, that the emperor reached that decision because the atomic bomb looked like it might be a major threat to his own, pardon the expression, rear end. The emperor should’ve ended the war a lot sooner. But Hiroshima finally convinced him that the time had come to end the war.
That was critical, because the emperor had vacillated for years. He knew the conditions were not good. We don’t know exactly how much he knew about how bad things were, but he had a sense. I mean, he did see the destruction the firebombing had caused in Tokyo in March. The first bomb was absolutely essential, the absolute key, to convincing the emperor the time for vacillation had ended. We have to end the war. Do you want me to go on to the second bomb?
Kelly: Yes, please.
Walker: It did not convince the militants, and so the Japanese government was still paralyzed. The emperor did something unusual. He went before the Japanese cabinet, and more importantly, a special body called the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, which was the highest officials in the government, at least on the military side. It was evenly split between those who thought Japan should surrender on the basis that the emperor remain on his throne, and those, the militants, who said, “No, we have to hold out and if they invade, fine.”
It took a couple of days to find out what had happened at Hiroshima. But it was the day after Hiroshima was bombed, on the seventh, late in the day, Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, got the word that Hiroshima had been destroyed by a single bomb. It was at that point that he said, “Okay, the war has to end.”
The next day he held a meeting with [Shigenori] Togo, the Foreign Minister, who was a member of the peace faction, and he made it clear that “I want the war to end on acceptable terms.” It wasn’t until the next day that there was a meeting of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, in which the emperor made an appearance and said, “I think the war has to end.” He listened to the arguments on both sides and he said, “The war has to end.” There was a lot of opposition from the militants. But the decision was made finally that the United States would be approached for an end to the war on the condition that the emperor be allowed to remain on his throne. That was the key.
But in the meantime, even as this was going on, while Japan was trying to decide what to do and the emperor was becoming convinced that the war had to end, Russia invaded Manchuria. This was the second great shock. The first shock was Hiroshima; the second great shock was the Soviet invasion. This did come as a huge setback for the militants. It’s not exactly clear why it was such a shock, because the Soviets had been mobilizing on the borders for months and the Japanese knew that. Some of the military thought they wouldn’t invade for another few months. Others simply didn’t believe it. It was not an exercise in very prescient analysis of what was going on, and what was facing Japan. But, the Soviets invaded on August 9 and overran Japanese troops in Manchuria very quickly, and in a very costly way in terms of Japanese lives.
Suddenly, the Japanese government was faced not only with the atomic bomb, but also with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. And, as I indicated earlier, this was probably more of a shock than American leaders realized. The combination of the two finally convinced the Japanese that they had to surrender on the sole condition the emperor be retained.
Historians argue about which is more important. Some say the atomic bomb wasn’t important at all, that it was the Soviet invasion. Some say it was the atomic bomb and the Soviet invasion was not very important. Most scholars now say it’s the combination of two and you can’t possibly sort out which was more important. But, it seems clear to me that the atomic bomb was the most important factor in convincing the emperor and that was a crucial step. So, some combination of the two, and it certainly varied from person to person which was more important, made Japan decide it had to surrender.
After that meeting, which was August 9, the Japanese send a message through Switzerland to the United States: “We’re willing to surrender if – if – the emperor remains on his throne.” I’ve forgotten the phrase, but it could be read to mean, and almost certainly meant, if he retains his power as a divine monarch. It was great news the Japanese sent a message that they were willing to surrender. But there was great concern about what this meant.
Truman gets this and he has a meeting with his top advisors and everyone’s saying, “Great. The Japanese are ready to surrender. Let the emperor remain as a constitutional monarch kind of thing.”
Byrnes, who’d been hearing this from his State Department experts, said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You know, we can’t have this, because this could leave the emperor on his throne with all the powers he has now, which is why we got into the war in the first place.”
Byrnes was also concerned about the political impact of allowing the Japanese to surrender with a condition. Because polls showed after Hiroshima by two to one or more that those Americans who were interviewed said, “No, we shouldn’t allow the Japanese any conditions. Get the emperor out of there. Try him as a war criminal. Hang him.” Byrnes was concerned, as Byrnes always was, about the political effects.
Truman said, “Okay, Jimmy, you go and draft something that will solve this problem.” It was a very delicate problem because we certainly wanted the Japanese to surrender. What we did not want was the emperor to remain as a constitutional monarch.
The message sent back to Japan in response to its peace offer was very vague about the emperor’s status and caused a new crisis in Japan, because the militants were saying, “No, this is not acceptable.” It finally required the advice of Hirohito’s closest advisor. His name was Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. I’m not sure exactly what that means and it doesn’t sound all that imposing. But Kido was a boyhood friend of the emperor and his closest advisor. Kido was convinced the war had to end. He convinced Hirohito to appear again before the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War and appeal again for peace.
That did it. The Japanese agreed to surrender on the sole condition that the emperor be retained. The terminology did not say constitutional monarch, but there was nothing in there about him retaining the prerogatives of his office as there was before. On that basis the war ended. But, it was a very, very close call and it was a very, very iffy thing.
One argument has been made by the scholar Richard Frank, and I find it wonderfully convincing. Richard makes the argument – going back to the atomic bomb versus the Soviet invasion – he says that the bomb was essential to convince Hirohito to surrender. But that it was the Soviet invasion that convinced the generals of all those armies in China and other parts of East Asia to surrender. Because there was genuine concern, both among American officials and Japanese officials, that the emperor’s order to surrender would not be obeyed by generals in East Asia, who had huge armies and who could’ve fought on for a very long time at enormous cost to everybody. Richard makes the argument that once the Soviets came in, then the generals out in the field, who were outraged by the idea of surrendering, knew they couldn’t defeat the Soviets. So they went along with it. It’s a very interesting argument that I think makes a very sensible separation of what the impact of the bomb was and the impact of the Soviet invasion.
Kelly: Well, that’s excellent. One thing I wish you could talk a little bit about are the back door negotiations the Japanese were pursuing with the Soviets. It is almost unbelievable that they would be approaching the Soviets, who had their own desires to enter the war and maybe take a piece of some of the things they had lost in the 1905 war. You mentioned Switzerland. There were U.S. channels there; there were Soviet channels there. There were lots of different signals being sent, to Russia, from Russia.
Walker: Yeah. Almost none of it was authorized. I mean, there were some Japanese officials in Switzerland who were saying, “Our government might surrender,” if the unconditional surrender, which is what was U.S. policy at the time, was modified to keep the emperor. But those were not authorized approaches at all. It’s not as though these officials had any approval to do that.
The emperor did decide, in response to the so-called peace faction within the Japanese government – and the militants went along – to approach the Soviets in June of 1945 in hopes that the Soviets would mediate a peace settlement between Japan and the United States. It was a futile hope.
The only reason it was done was because it was the one thing the faction that wanted to surrender and those who wanted to fight on could agree on. So, an envoy was sent to Russia. The Japanese ambassador’s name was [Naotake] Sato.
Sato and Togo, who was the Foreign Minister of Japan, exchanged a lot of telegrams in July of 1945, trying to figure out what to do with the Soviets and how this was going to work. Sato, who I don’t know much about, but obviously had his feet on the ground, was saying to Togo, who was his friend, “Look, if you people want me to approach the Soviets, you have to tell me on what basis we’re willing to surrender.”
Togo didn’t know, because the Japanese couldn’t agree on anything. At one point, Togo must have mentioned something about the four conditions the militants were talking about. Sato kind of knocked his hand against his forehead and said, “You know, that’s impossible. No one’s going to accept that. If things go well, if we’re lucky, and if we’re good, the only thing we can possibly get as a condition is that the emperor remains on his throne.”
Those kinds of wires were going back between Moscow and Tokyo and being intercepted and read in the United States. The exchanges between those two high-level officials, both of whom favored a surrender, made it clear that the Japanese were not ready to surrender.
There’s a famous wire, from July 16, that Togo sent to Sato saying, “Well, it appears that the main obstacle to surrender is the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender.” Some scholars have said this is proof that the Japanese were ready to surrender, if only we modified the formula for unconditional surrender.
That telegram, or that message, was intercepted, and General Marshall gave it to his Chief of Intelligence, whose name was John Weckerling. Weckerling was a general who had spent a lot of time in Japan, two terms of office, two or three years of peace, as a military attaché, so he knew Japan. Marshall says to Weckerling, “What does this mean? Togo, the Foreign Minister, is saying Japan might surrender. That the main obstacle to surrender is our demand for unconditional surrender.”
Weckerling said, “Well, you know, it could mean that the emperor has intervened in favor of surrender, but the chances of that are remote. It’s possible that the peace faction in Japan has triumphed, but we know from other evidence that that’s not the case, or at least all indications are that that’s not the case. It’s possible that this is a ploy by the Japanese to appeal to war-weariness in the United States, and that seems the most likely.”
Clearly, American officials did not view this message from Togo to Sato as proof that if only we had modified unconditional surrender, the Japanese would’ve quit the war. Clearly, they weren’t ready to do that. It’s one of those documents which is rare in historical research. It’s one of those documents, you read it and you say, “Hey, you know, this really convinces me or changes minds, because it’s clear.”
One of the arguments of the revisionists, who claim that the war could’ve ended more quickly if we had offered to modify unconditional surrender, is that the Japanese were ready to surrender and that the United States knew it. Well, the Weckerling memo makes it clear that the United States did not know it, and in fact was far from convinced – with good reason – that the Japanese were ready to surrender.
Kelly: You mentioned the revisionists. Can you tell us a little bit about these historians?
Walker: Do you want me to name names or–
Kelly: Whatever you think is–
Walker: Well, you know, this has been an enormous controversy. The decision to use the bomb is, I think, in terms of longevity and in terms of bitterness, the most controversial issue in American history.
There are basically two arguments. One is the traditional argument that most of us of a certain age grew up with, and which was set forth by Truman, Stimson, and others after the war. That the president faced a difficult decision between on the one hand authorizing the use of the atomic bomb, and on the other hand authorizing an invasion of Japan that was going to cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. That’s the traditional interpretation.
The revisionists say that’s completely wrong. They believe that Japan decided and was trying desperately to surrender on the sole and reasonable condition that the emperor be allowed to remain on his throne. They don’t say this, but presumably as a constitutional monarch. And therefore, that the traditional interpretation is wrong. They believe the bomb was not necessary to end the war—that it was totally unnecessary—and that it was used for some other reason. The reason that is cited most often is to intimidate the Soviets. This is where they bring in Byrnes as playing a major role in the use of the bomb as a diplomatic weapon against the Soviet Union.
Those are the positions. And as I, and a lot of others, argue – I’m certainly not alone – they’re both seriously flawed. The traditional view because Truman did not face a stark choice between the bomb and an invasion. The invasion was not going to begin until on or around November 1, and a lot of could’ve happened between August and November of 1945. Also the view that if an invasion had been necessary, it would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of lives: there’s simply no contemporaneous evidence that supports that argument. It was made after the war as a means to justify the use of the bomb against a really small number of critics, who in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, were saying that perhaps the bomb wasn’t necessary. It’s also beyond question that the invasion was not inevitable. I mean, the idea that Truman had to use the bomb because if he didn’t the only other option was an invasion is simply wrong. So, the traditional view in its pure form, that Truman used the bomb to avoid an invasion, simply doesn’t hold up.
Kelly: In the view of the revisionists.
Walker: No, in the view of those of us who are somewhere in between. What I argue is that Truman used the bomb for the reasons he said he did, to end the war as quickly as possible. No one in a position of authority or knowledge, and certainly not his chief and military advisors, told him in the summer of 1945 that if you don’t use the bomb, an invasion is inevitable and it’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Estimates for lives lost that were projected by military experts in the summer of 1945 were far less than that, and the numbers are far from hard evidence. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was ever told that hundreds of thousands of lives would be the cost of an invasion of Japan. That was something that came about later.
My argument is that Truman didn’t have to be told that an invasion would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He knew it was going to cost a lot of lives, tens of thousands, if an invasion was necessary. He also knew that even without an invasion, the war was still going on. Okinawa had been defeated in late June of 1945, so we had one month when there weren’t any major battlefronts between the end of the Battle of Okinawa and the end of the war, which is July 1945.
In that month, about 775 American soldiers and Marines were killed in combat. About another 2,300 or 2,400 died from other causes, disease, wounds, accidents, whatever. So, you had 3,000 soldiers and Marines who were killed in the month of July of 1945 without any major battlefronts.
You also had sailors being killed. The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis occurred July 28[misspoke: July 30], 1945, just a horrific event, in which a Japanese submarine attacked and sank the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Of the 1100 [misspoke: 1200] crewmembers, 880 died, either from the explosion of the ship or were stranded in water for a very long time and either died from exposure or from sharks. Just a horrific story.
As long as the war was going on, that was going to happen, and that’s what Truman and his advisors were concerned about. No one had to tell them that the alternative to using the bomb was saving far fewer lives. That number of 3,200 or 3,300 who died in July, that’s just soldiers and Marines, so you have sailors on top of that. That was plenty of reason to use the bomb if it had a chance to end the war as quickly as possible.
I think people lose sight of the fact that the myth grew up after the war that either you use the bomb or lose hundreds of thousands of lives in an invasion. That understates and underestimates the commitment of Truman and his advisors to ending the war as quickly as possible to save any number of lives.
When I give talks about this, I say, “Imagine Truman. An advisor comes up to him and says, ‘Mr. President, you can use the atomic bomb, or the alternative is to lose 40,000 American lives.” Use it. It’s easy.
“Mr. President, you can use the bomb, or if you don’t you’re going to lose an extra 10,000 American lives.” Use it.
“Mr. President, you can use the bomb, or the alternative is to lose an extra 1,000 American lives. Mr. President, you can use the bomb, or the alternative is to lose an extra 100 American lives. Mr. President, you can use the bomb, or the alternative is to lose an extra 10 American lives.”
Well, maybe then I have to think about it, and that’s imaginary, but I think it captures what Truman’s thinking was. It would’ve been a very small number for him to say, “Well, maybe we should think twice about this.”
I don’t know if Truman knew – no one knows if Truman knew – how many soldiers, sailors, and Marines died in the month of July. But Truman could pick up any newspaper from any city in the country and see pictures of soldiers, sailors, and Marines who had died. He certainly knew about that. It bothers me when people underestimate Truman’s commitment to ending the war for exactly that reason. The numbers are insignificant, and they’ve been the cause of whole lot of angry controversy among scholars.
It’s interesting; it’s not decisive to know what the estimates were. What’s important is to keep in mind that’s what Truman cared about. Students, and other people who have been in the audience, have asked me, 3,000 lives, and how many lives did the atomic bomb cost? Well, 166,000 or so in Hiroshima, another 80,000 or 100,000 in Nagasaki. And they say, “Well, how can he do that?”
The fact is, when you’re at a war, or in a war, you don’t make those kinds of calculations. That calculus is not done. The idea is to win the war. Certainly for us in 1945, the idea is to win the war as quickly as possible and save as many lives as possible. How many Japanese lives were cost, or assessed, or how many Japanese were lost by the atomic bomb was incidental. That’s the unfortunate, the tragic part, of any wartime situation. But when it comes to motives, the motive was clearly to save every single one of those lives as possible by ending the war at the earliest possible moment, and the atomic bomb looked like the best way to do that. It’s terribly tragic. If you read about the effects of the bomb, it just breaks your heart. I think we lose sight of the fact, or some people lose sight of the fact, that the Japanese should’ve surrendered in 1944, and that they prolonged the war for reasons which seem to me to be illegitimate.
One well-known factor in this whole thing was when Secretary Stimson came in after Truman returned from Potsdam. He met with Truman the morning of August the tenth, and showed him for the first time photographs of the damage to Hiroshima. Stimson said to Truman, “You know, 100,000 people probably died.” No one knew for certain, but the estimate that he gave to Truman was 100,000 lives were lost at Hiroshima.
I think that had a major impact on Truman. Because he went to a Cabinet meeting later that day and in talking about the war he said for the first time, “I have issued an order that we will use no more atomic bombs without my express authorization,” which hadn’t happened with the first two bombs.
He said he was greatly bothered by the fact that the bomb at Hiroshima had killed 100,000 people. He was greatly bothered by the fact that 100,000 people had died, and he didn’t like the idea of “killing all those kids.” So Truman, for the first time, became aware of what the human impact of the bomb was. I think we all need to be keenly aware of that, and yet we shouldn’t lose sight of what the motives were in using the bomb.
I mentioned the weaknesses in the traditional argument, and I should also mention what I consider fatal weaknesses in the revisionists’ argument. There are two central parts of the revision argument, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re both incorrect.
One is that the Japanese were trying to surrender. Japanese sources that have opened since Hirohito died in 1989 make it abundantly clear that Japan in fact had not decided to surrender before Hiroshima. Scholars who have used Japanese, of which there are several who are very good and who span the spectrum of opinion on Truman’s decision to use the bomb, all agree that Japan had not decided to surrender before Hiroshima. That’s one major element of the revisionists’ argument that simply doesn’t hold up.
The other is, and I think I got waylaid when I started talking about the Weckerling memo and how it’s one of those rare memos that really makes clear that the United States government did not believe that Japan was ready to surrender. The revisionists have said, “Oh, you know, Japan had decided to surrender and the U.S. knew that.” Well, the Weckerling memo makes it abundantly clear that, in fact, the U.S. didn’t know that and didn’t believe that.
There are other major problems with the revisionists’ argument. They put much more emphasis on the feasibility of the war ending without the bomb by taking advantage of other alternatives. I don’t think I want to get into the other alternatives. But the most common argument is if only we had modified unconditional surrender, and they use that Togo memo to Sato to say, “If only we had modified that, the war would’ve ended.” We know that’s not true now and we know that the U.S. didn’t believe that either.
So, the two major mainstays of the revisionists’ argument simply don’t hold any water based on recent, fairly recent, documents which have become available and some outstanding scholarship. What is defensible, and in fact true, about the revisionists’ argument is that impressing the Soviets was part of the motivation for the use of the bomb, but a secondary part, a bonus. The primary reason was to end the war as quickly as possible, and if it impressed the Soviets, well, fine, great, that’s a nice little addition.
There were other reasons as well. General Groves was concerned about if the bomb didn’t work, or if it wasn’t used, how would he explain what he had spent $2 billion on? So there were those kinds of reasons. Hatred of the Japanese, vengeance, and all those things played a role, but the primary reason was to get the war over hopefully as quickly as possible. So there are severe problems with both the traditional interpretation and the revisionist interpretation, and I and a lot of other very able scholars come out somewhere between.
Copyright:
Copyright 2016 The Atomic Heritage Foundation. This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced, or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
J. Samuel ("Sam") Walker is the former historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the author of Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan. He is also the author of five books on the history of regulating nuclear power, including Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective and The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States.
Former historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, J. Samuel Walker is the author of five books on the history of nuclear power regulation, including Three Mile Island (2004) and The Road to Yucca Mountain (2009), which received the OAH Richard W. Leopold Prize. He is also the author of Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (3rd edition, 2016) and Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 (2018), and a coauthor, with Randy Roberts, of The Road to Madness: How the 1973-1974 Season Transformed College Basketball (2016). He has appeared on network and cable television programs about the atomic bomb, Three Mile Island, and the history of college basketball.
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anatomy of a vicious American riot.
In a country that still has barely begun to reconcile with a long history of racism, white supremacy, and their consequences, Walker provides an important reminder about how any event related to these phenomena will have both deep roots and long-term consequences.
Walker, J. Samuel: MOST OF 14TH STREET IS GONE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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Walker, J. Samuel MOST OF 14TH STREET IS GONE Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 4, 2 ISBN: 978-0-19-084479-0
The anatomy of a vicious American riot.
In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, dozens of American cities exploded in violence. Following four summers of what had been termed "race riots" in American cities, most urban areas--poor, underdeveloped, and increasingly populated by African-Americans who had been abandoned by both fleeing white populations and increasingly neglectful local, state, and national policies--proved to be dry tinder vulnerable to any spark. Amid this chaotic landscape, Washington, D.C., experienced some of the worst rioting in the country's history. In this brief and brisk book, historian Walker (ACC Basketball: The Story of the Rivalries, Traditions, and Scandals of the First Two Decades of the Atlantic Coast Conference, 2011, etc.) provides an almost forensic history of the 1968 riots. After providing a capsule history of Washington and a chronicle of the city's increasingly fractious race relations, the author provides a blow-by-blow breakdown of the riots, especially in the most fraught 48 hours or so from the evening of April 4. He manages to balance the astringent realities of racism in the city with a full acknowledgement of the excesses of some of the participants in the devastation. Similarly, he reveals the many mistakes and missteps as well as the halting successes of those trying to combat the riots, including public officials at the local and national levels, mostly white, but also Walter Washington, one of the first black mayors of an American city. In fewer than 200 pages, the author provides both the vital background to the riots as well as the long tale of their legacy well into the 21st century.
In a country that still has barely begun to reconcile with a long history of racism, white supremacy, and their consequences, Walker provides an important reminder about how any event related to these phenomena will have both deep roots and long-term consequences.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Walker, J. Samuel: MOST OF 14TH STREET IS GONE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247943/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0e804a8d. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247943
Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman
Able Greenspan
MBR Bookwatch. (Apr. 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman
J. Samuel Walker, editor
Truman State University Press
100 East Normal Street, Kirksville, MO 63501-4221
http://tsup.truman.edu
9781612481593, $34.95, PB, 240pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: The nuclear policies and programs of President Harry S. Truman and his administration are probably the most significant and controversial aspects of his presidency. The essays comprising "Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman" examine Truman s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan in 1945, one of the most contentious issues in all of American history, and the use of atomic energy after the war, both as an important weapon in the arms race of the cold war era, and as a subject for research into its applications to medicine, industry, agriculture, and power production. In the pages of "Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman", seven prominent historians offer valuable perspective on these issues, using new information from Japanese sources and a wealth of primary source material to examine the decision to use the atomic bomb, as well as important questions relating to the nuclear arms race, the benefits and hazards of radioactive isotopes, and the development of nuclear power. Many of these issues that had their origins in the Truman era are still of great importance to the world today as well as to future generations.
Critique: Enhanced with illustrations, an informative introduction, a list of contributors and their credentials, as well as a 25 page Index, "Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman" is a model of erudite and seminal scholarship with the contributor's articles being presented in a roughly chronological order of events from 1945 to 1950. An essential and core addition to academic library collections, it should be noted for academia and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the subject that "Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman" is also available in a Kindle edition ($27.99).
Able Greenspan
Reviewer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greenspan, Able. "Nuclear Energy and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman." MBR Bookwatch, Apr. 2016. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A453290250/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2e0dfcff. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453290250
QUOTE:
lucid account of the accident
Meltdown jubilee
Rob Edwards
New Scientist. 181.2439 (Mar. 20, 2004): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 New Scientist Ltd.. For more science news and comments, see http://www.newscientist.com.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Full Text:
Three Mile Island by J. Samuel Walker, University of California Press, $24.95, 16.95 [pounds sterling], ISBN 0520239407
A FEW seconds after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania began, more than a hundred warning lights were flashing in me control room. "I would have liked to have thrown away the alarm panel," one of the duty operators, Craig Faust, said later. "It wasn't giving us any useful information."
Water pumps, the turbine and the reactor had all unexpectedly shut down. But none of the blinking lights told the operators what they needed to know--that cooling water was leaking from the reactor core through a valve that was stuck open. If they had realised that, they could have stopped half the core from melting and prevented the worst nuclear accident in the US.
J. Samuel Walker's lucid account of the accident, Three Mile Island, which happened 25 years ago this month, is riveting because of its detail. It shows how the companies, the regulators and the government all initially played down the risks, then had to eat their words. It gives a graphic insight into the chaos and confusion of the five-day crisis.
There was, for example, conflicting advice on whether local people should be evacuated. In the event, about 144,ooo people moved out. Walker, the official historian of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, points out that if the full extent of the core meltdown had been known at the time, hundreds of thousands more would have been told to go.
He also suggests that Three Mile Island proved both sides in the nuclear argument wrong. The industry had underestimated the risk of a core meltdown, while critics had exaggerated its consequences. Part of the melting core, it turned out, had solidified at the bottom of the reactor vessel, helping to prevent it from breaking and releasing a massive amount of radioactivity. A catastrophe was avoided--but only by luck.
Rob Edwards is a technology writer
Edwards, Rob
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Edwards, Rob. "Meltdown jubilee." New Scientist, 20 Mar. 2004, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A114786304/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42db420f. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A114786304
QUOTE:
Thoroughly researched administrative history
Walker, J. Samuel. Three Mile Island: a Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
Mary Carroll
Booklist. 100.14 (Mar. 15, 2004): p1248.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Walker, J. Samuel. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Mar. 2004. 315p. illus. index Univ. of California, $24.95 (0-520-23940-7). 363.17.
As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear accident approaches, the official historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) provides "the first comprehensive scholarly account" of the incident--and the first major study of the subject in more than 20 years. Walker, who has authored or coauthored three previous books on U.S. nuclear-power regulation during his 20 years at the NRC, opens this volume with three chapters of context: a description of the public debate over nuclear power before TMI, a survey of the history of U.S. regulation of this controversial power source, and a useful explanation of the design elements and operational techniques U.S. nuclear plants used to prevent accidents if possible and to minimize the impact of any unpreventable accidents. Chapters 4 through 8 anatomize the events of March 28 through April 1, 1979, at Three Mile Island and in the state and national capitals (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.), while chapters 9 and 10 review the immediate and long-term impact of those five frightening days. Thoroughly researched administrative history; includes photos, notes, and a useful essay on sources.
Carroll, Mary
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Carroll, Mary. "Walker, J. Samuel. Three Mile Island: a Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2004, p. 1248. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A114819063/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=66c5e30d. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A114819063
Truman
Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird
The Nation. 256.18 (May 10, 1993): p640+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text:
Last week a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to David McCullough for his biography of Harry S Truman. In a country where so few people buy books, let alone 1,000-page books, it should be heartening for writers of serious history to see McCullough's sunny appreciation on the bestseller lists. However, many scholars have been disturbed by McCullough's biography. The problem is that in painting his exceedingly generous portrait of this man of the people, McCullough simply either does not know - or purposely refuses to engage - a vast literature of critical archival findings published over the past two decades. His book is thus symbolic of the growing gap between what expert scholars of the twentieth century - and in particular of the cold war - are writing and what the general public is willing to read and believe about our history.
As biography, Truman is a work that appeals to a cardinal American myth, that of the ordinary man - in this case, the failed haberdasher - who nevertheless is able to rise to great heights. Not surprisingly, both candidates in last year's presidential campaign tried to appropriate this image of Truman. McCullough was invited to the White House to brief George Bush on Truman, and Bush modeled his own campaign on Truman's 1948 effort. Al Gore was seen carrying a copy of the book, and Bill Clinton complained that he knew Truman and George Bush was no Truman.
Serious historians, however, increasingly attribute an astonishingly long list of costly mistakes to the Truman presidency. Ronald Steel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his highly respected biography of Walter Lippmann, pointed out in The New Republic that Truman was the President, after all, who "unleashed the atom bomb without seriously considering alternatives, instituted a witch-hunt program within the federal government, proposed a doctrine that inspired decades of ideological crusades, involved the nation in a war with China that he could neither win nor end, and presided over the transformation of a political contest with communism into a global struggle for military supremacy that consumed the nation for the next forty years." C. Vann Woodward, writing in The New York Review of Books, observes that McCullough quite simply "does not ... address the vast revisionist literature on the origins of the cold war."
A recent massively researched volume by Melvyn Leffler, for instance, paints quite a different portrait of the Truman presidency. At best, writes Leffler in A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War [see Carolyn Eisenberg, May 25, 1992], Truman and the men who advised him were "partly wise, partly prudent and partly foolish." Because the United States held "preponderant" power throughout the cold war - including a nuclear monopoly at the outset and overwhelming economic might - Leffler argues that ultimately the United States also bears preponderant responsibility for turning the usual squabbles between major powers into a wild, wasteful and ultimately insanely overmilitarized four-decade-long conflict.
Another extraordinarily researched and highly respected two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War, by Bruce Cumings, points out, "For Americans the war began with a thunderclap in 1950.... For Koreans, it began in 1945." Cumings's somber conclusion is blunt: Korea "was the worst of American post-war interventions, the most destructive, far more genocidal than Vietnam."
But perhaps the general point is best illustrated in connection with one major issue that we ourselves have studied at considerable length: the myth surrounding Truman's decision to use atomic weapons against two Japanese cities.
McCullough would have you believe Truman's own justification for use of the bomb - that it saved half a million American combat deaths. The problem is that this morally reassuring explanation of why perhaps a quarter-million residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - mostly civilians and mostly women and children - were killed is no longer credible to most specialists on the subject. Consider the following statement, taken from a recent review of the relevant literature in the respected academic journal Diplomatic History: "The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.... It is certain that the hoary claim that the bomb prevented one-half million American combat deaths is unsupportable." The writer is hardly a revisionist; he is J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Historians, of course, continue to debate why Truman dropped the bomb. But an avalanche of archival documents released or discovered over the past decade - including Truman's "lost" diary and a series of revealing letters to his wife, Bess - leaves no doubt that Truman knew the war would end "a year sooner now" and without an invasion. One of the main reasons was his awareness that the shock of an early Soviet declaration of war was expected to jolt Japan into surrender long before an invasion (tentatively set for planning purposes in November) could begin. After receiving Stalin's confirmation that the Soviets would enter the Pacific war by August 15, Truman wrote in his diary, "Fini Japs when that comes about." Also contributing to Truman's change in attitude was his reading of secret intelligence intercepts of Japanese diplomatic cables, including one that he characterized straightforwardly in his handwritten, personal diary as the "telegram from [the] Jap Emperor asking for peace."
The discovery of these and other previously classified or unavailable documents has forced a momentous shift in scholarly judgment. University of Illinois historian Robert Messer, author of a widely respected biography of James F. Byrnes, bluntly observes in another recent journal essay that the Truman diary revelations have been "devastating" to the conventional argument that the bomb was the only way to avoid an invasion.
Still other respected writers, such as Rufus Miles Jr. and Stanford University's Barton Bernstein, have effectively refuted Truman's oft-repeated argument about the number of American lives saved by the bomb. Citing the most recently declassified materials, Bernstein could not find a worst-case prediction of lives lost higher than 46,000 - even if an invasion had been mounted, which, as noted, was deemed highly unlikely by July 1945. Most estimates went no higher than 20,000 combat deaths. "The myth of the 500,000 American lives saved," Bernstein concludes, "thus seems to have no basis in fact."
A wide range of scholars also now accept the once controversial view that at least one of the factors in the minds of those making the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima involved geopolitical and diplomatic concerns about the Soviet Union. A diary entry by Walter Brown, an assistant to Secretary of State Byrnes, for instance, is one of many documents that clearly suggest Truman and Byrnes saw the bomb as a way to reduce Soviet political influence in Asia. Brown noted that Byrnes, whom Truman had designated his main adviser on the issue, was "hoping for time, believing that after [the] atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill, thereby being in a position to press for claims against China."
The striking thing about the Hiroshima decision is that with the passage of time - and the discovery of more and more previously unavailable documents - it has become more, not less, of a puzzle. In the case we know best, McCullough ignores much of this modern evidence and airily dismisses an extremely serious debate long under way in some of the nation's most important scholarly journals and among the nation's leading historians.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Alan Brinkley suggested that McCullough's book was the "culmination" of the late President's "rehabilitation." But if this is the high point in the public's affirmation of the Truman presidency, the road from here can only lead downhill. In our judgment, the distance between what the archives increasingly reveal and what the American people have been led to believe is now so great it is doubtful that comforting presentations of the conventional wisdom can much longer survive comparison with the documentary record.
Gar Alperovitz, author of Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (Penguin), is president of the National Center for Economic Alternatives and a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C Kai Bird, a contributing editor of The Nation, is the author of The Chairman: John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment (Simon and Schuster).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Alperovitz, Gar, and Kai Bird. "Truman." The Nation, 10 May 1993, p. 640+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A13827999/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=14fecb42. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A13827999
Walker, Samuel J. The road to Yucca Mountain: the development of radioactive waste policy in the United States
QUOTE:
valuable account of the history/ongoing issues related to this significant problem.
R.M. Ferguson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 47.7 (Mar. 2010): p1379+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
47-4112 TD898 2008-50739 CIP
Walker, Samuel J. The road to Yucca Mountain: the development of radioactive waste policy in the United States. California, 2009. 228p index afp ISBN 9780520260450, $34.95
This work details the complex challenges the nuclear power industry faces. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1956 that a deep geological repository was the best alternative for disposal of high-level waste from nuclear reactors. After considering many sites, Yucca Mountain was selected in 1987, with a planned opening in 1998. Walker, a US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) historian, reports that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel was rejected after technical problems became evident, and then-President Carter postponed commercial reprocessing indefinitely. Although billions of dollars have been spent on developing a geologic repository under Yucca, political/economic problems have delayed the required permitting process. Walker documents government decisions made over almost 60 years, but recent developments have created the need for an update. Yucca's 70,000 metric-ton limit will be reached in a few years. The Obama administration cancelled construction funds for the nearly completed Yucca repository in early 2009 while allowing funding for the NRC licensing process to continue. Currently, 121 sites in 39 states host spent fuel rods in dry storage casks and ponds. Failure to solve this nuclear waste issue may create a Department of Energy liability in excess often billion dollars by 2020. A valuable account of the history/ongoing issues related to this significant problem. Summing Up: Recommended. ** All levels/ libraries.--R. M. Ferguson, emeritus, Eastern Connecticut State University
Ferguson, R.M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ferguson, R.M. "Walker, Samuel J. The road to Yucca Mountain: the development of radioactive waste policy in the United States." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2010, p. 1379+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A251860997/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bc28904e. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A251860997
QUOTE:
This book is highly recommended for all libraries and students of politics, government bureaucracy, and environmental history.
Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
Thomas R. Wellock
The Historian. 67.3 (Fall 2005): p547+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Full Text:
Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. By J. Samuel Walker. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 303. $27.95.)
No one has written a scholarly history of the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident in the twenty-five years since the incident. J. Samuel Walker, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) historian, has produced what may be the last book ever needed on the subject. Walker's thoroughly documented account is a gripping and fair-minded tale of the human mistakes that nuclear industry officials and federal regulators made during the accident.
The author divides his work into three parts. In the first section, he lays out a brief history of opposition to nuclear power in the 1970s and efforts by regulatory officials to deal with a changing political and economic climate for reactors. The 1970s began with high hopes for nuclear power, but the energy crisis, cost overruns, regulatory delays, antinuclear activism, and high interest rates drove up the cost of nuclear plant construction. By 1979, when the accident occurred, reactor orders had slumped badly. The industry was, in the words of one publication, in "utter chaos" (8). Walker shows that the TMI was merely the final push that toppled an already troubled industry.
Walker, in the main section of the book, provides a detailed account of the accident and efforts by the industry, the state of Pennsylvania, and the NRC to understand what was happening in the reactor building, while trying to keep the public informed. The author does a wonderful job of extracting riveting material that the layman can understand out of dry technical reports, memos, government documents, and depositions. This story should be required reading for anyone in business or government as an example of the failure of crisis management. Reactor operators were not trained to deal with accident conditions, and the NRC had not established effective communication with utilities. Moreover, once the accident occurred, the lines of authority proved to be ill defined. The public received conflicting reports that caused needless panic and evacuations. It was these systemic weaknesses in the regulatory system that allowed gifted people to make the mistakes they did.
The episode left a mixed legacy, the author concludes. It did not only force regulatory and operational improvements on a reluctant industry, but it also increased opposition to nuclear power and eliminated the atom from America's energy options. In Walker's balanced analysis, neither the critics nor proponents are completely vindicated. Antinuclear advocates were right: a nuclear accident was likely, and the industry was not prepared for it. But their predicted worst-case accident, called the "China Syndrome," did not transpire. For its part, the industry claimed that it had reformed itself, but by then few were listening. Support for nuclear power plummeted with only thirty-eight percent of the public willing to have a nuclear plant built in their communities. Like other calamities of the 1970s such as Vietnam and Watergate, the key casualty of TMI was trust, perhaps best summed up in the T-shirt "I Survived Three Mile Island ... I Think" (208). This book is highly recommended for all libraries and students of politics, government bureaucracy, and environmental history.
Thomas R. Wellock
Central Washington University
Wellock, Thomas R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wellock, Thomas R. "Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective." The Historian, vol. 67, no. 3, 2005, p. 547+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A158156350/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4672a755. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A158156350
QUOTE:
This is a comprehensive historical account, with 42 pages of notes, an essay on sources and a 13-page index. But despite these scholarly trappings and the complexity of the events described, the book is eminently readable.
March Madness
Robert M. Bernero
American Scientist. 92.6 (November-December 2004): p561+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
http://www.americanscientist.org/
Full Text:
Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. J. Samuel Walker. xii + 303 pp. University of California Press, 2004. $24.95.
The accident at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, was "the single most important event in the fifty-year history of nuclear power regulation in the United States," says J. Samuel Walker. Many critics of nuclear power point to the accident as a turning point for the industry, noting that no new plants have since been ordered in the United States and that many planned in prior years were subsequently canceled.
Walker provides a gripping, detailed account of the accident and an analysis of its impact and significance in Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. It is his fourth book as the official historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In the preface Walker assures readers that he had complete independence as the author and that the NRC placed no restrictions on what he could say. However, Walker provides an historical account of the events; he does not evaluate the performance of the NRC during those events.
The first two chapters effectively fill readers in on the historical context for the accident, giving a brief overview of the government-supported growth of commercial nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s, and describing the emerging controversy during that period over the safety of nuclear power. The public worried both about the risk of accidents and about routine low-level releases of radioactive material. (The latter concern was inspired in large part by fears of cancers caused by exposure to radioactive fallout from nuclear-weapons testing.)
Many people contended that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) could not acceptably regulate nuclear power at the same time that it was engaged in promoting it. So as Walker recounts, Congress passed the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, dividing the AEC into two entities: the NRC, which was charged with regulating commercial nuclear technology, and the Energy Research and Development Administration, which assumed all of the other roles of the AEC and later evolved into the U.S. Department of Energy. Walker provides some interesting descriptions of the last days of the AEC and the selection of members of the new commission.
Reacting to the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, the Nixon and Ford administrations launched Project Independence, an effort to meet our energy needs without depending on foreign sources. President Ford, in his 1975 State of the Union address, set a goal of having "200 major nuclear power plants" in operation within 10 years. Nevertheless, a "nuclear power slump" ensued. Walker attributes the failure to follow Ford's plan to rising costs--the energy crisis drove up the fuel prices for electric utilities, and the then-rampant inflation in interest rates made it hard to raise capital for new plants--and to a decline in the demand for electricity that occurred because the country was in a recession. Very high interest rates persisted through the end of the 1970s. By late 1975, 122 out of 191 nuclear power projects had been deferred and 9 had been canceled.
In chapter 3, Walker gives a simplified explanation of the principal safety issues with reactors of the same type as Three Mile Island Unit 2, where the accident took place. Even though he uses fairly plain language, readers who are not already familiar with the technology involved may find this material tough going. Nevertheless, this chapter is a useful technical preamble to the account of the accident itself.
The core of the book consists of six chapters, one covering each of the 5 days (Wednesday, March 28, through Sunday, April 1, 1979) of the crisis phase of the accident and another covering its immediate aftermath. Walker draws on the full panoply of sources for his presentation of events, but principally on the report of the Kemeny Commission, which President Carter appointed immediately after the disaster to investigate its causes and make safety recommendations, and the Rogovin Report, which was the product of the NRC's own inquiry into the matter. These chapters are well annotated: References include the full set of specific sources for a passage, not just citations for quotations.
Walker describes events and actions in language that any reader can easily understand. His account is quite accurate. I was a member of the NRC staff assigned to prepare the Rogovin Report, and I feel that Walker has caught the essential character of the remarkable degree of confusion that prevailed throughout the course of the emergency. That confusion was caused by the inadequate flow of information between all of the responsible parties: the plant operators (Metropolitan Edison Co.) and their own management, Governor Richard L. Thornburgh and other Pennsylvania authorities, the NRC headquarters staff and the Commission, and the NRC regional staff and headquarters staff who went to the site early in the accident. Walker includes short background descriptions of key participants to enhance understanding of their actions.
The chain of events that precipitated the crisis at the plant included a number of minor equipment failures, but operator errors (to which design flaws contributed) converted those malfunctions into a major accident. The first problem occurred at about 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday in the turbine building, in the condensate cleanup system, while the plant was operating at about 97 percent power. The pumps in the condensate system turned off for unknown reasons, leading to a trip, or shutoff, of the turbine and the pumps that fed water back into the steam generator. This in turn caused the nuclear reactor to automatically shut down--a response the operators were trained to expect. They were also trained to expect that an energy surge into the steam-generating system would follow, because even after a reactor trips from full power and nuclear fission stops, immediate radioactive decay of isotopes in the core continues to generate about 5 percent as much heat as is produced when the plant is operating at full power.
The energy surge into the steam-generating system increased pressure in the reactor coolant system and in a device called the pressurizer, causing the pilot-operated relief valve (PORV) to open to relieve that pressure. This too the operators were trained to expect, but they were not trained to recognize the symptoms that would ensue if the valve stuck open, as it did. They had no way of directly ascertaining the water level in the pressurizer. When the valve stuck open, venting steam and reactor coolant into the containment building, water was being lost from the pressurizer, but operators didn't realize it; instead they got the false impression from the high pressure readings that the reactor cooling system was overfilling, and they worried that the pressurizer was "going solid"--reaching a state of being entirely filled with water (rather than water plus a cushion of steam)--a condition they were trained to avert. For hours the operators acted on the misperception that the cooling system was overfilling (taking such ill-advised steps as turning off the water pumps in the emergency core cooling system) and ignored all other contrary signals, including high temperatures in the core, instability in the flow of reactor coolant, high radiation in the containment building and so forth. It was not until 6:22 a.m. that a shift supervisor who had just arrived on the scene figured out that the PORV must be stuck open, and closed its backup, a block valve.
Therein lies the confusion that characterized the accident: The operators did not really understand what had happened and were unable to explain it to their own management, to the NRC, to the State of Pennsylvania or to the public.
The devastation of the reactor core--about half of which melted, releasing great amounts of hydrogen gas into the reactor coolant system and into the containment building--was essentially over by the evening of the first day, Wednesday. Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday were occupied by slowly cooling down the reactor and venting the hydrogen from the reactor coolant system. An understanding of what had happened was slow to penetrate the fog of confusion that prevailed at all levels. So there was an evacuation crisis on Friday morning, and fears that the hydrogen bubble might catch fire or explode extended even into Sunday, when President Carter visited the site. Fortunately, the grievous damage to the reactor did not result in any injuries or deaths, in large part because of the robust design of all of the plant's systems.
The book describes all this and concludes with an interesting discussion of the long-term effects of the crisis at Three Mile Island. This last chapter covers the extensive investigations that followed the accident, and the analyses, recommendations and reforms that resulted from them. The incident was "a major embarrassment and a severe setback" to the fortunes of the nuclear industry; however, it was not really a singular turning point, since--as noted above--many nuclear power projects had already been deferred or canceled years earlier. After the accident, another 19 planned nuclear plants were canceled, including some that were nearly completed.
The TMI-2 cleanup took 11 years and cost about $1 billion. Although at the time of the accident, damage to the core was believed not to be extensive, continuing investigations ultimately revealed that about 70 percent of the core had been damaged and 50 percent of it had melted. Some nuclear critics had asserted that a core meltdown would inevitably breach containment. In the 1960s, nuclear critics had coined the term "the China syndrome" to describe an accident in which a core would overheat and melt through the bottom of a plant and down through the Earth's core toward China, and two weeks before the accident at Three Mile Island, a movie called The China Syndrome was released, a thriller about the dangers of nuclear power. But at Three Mile Island, the pressure vessel did not fail (which would have allowed the core to fall into the containment structure), even though it was not designed to withstand the heat the accident generated. Researchers concluded that when a portion of the molten core first reached the bottom of the vessel, it was cooled by the small amount of water that was still there and solidified into a crust that helped protect the vessel floor from the heat.
Walker reports that studies looking for long-term health effects from radiation released during the accident have reached conflicting conclusions. But it appears any increase in cancers is slight enough that it may have occurred by chance.
This is a comprehensive historical account, with 42 pages of notes, an essay on sources and a 13-page index. But despite these scholarly trappings and the complexity of the events described, the book is eminently readable.
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You've probably often seen diagrams that show space as a rubber sheet being warped by bowling-ball-like masses. But who can really claim a solid understanding of this modern view of gravity? Those who want to get a better grasp of it without having to wrestle with the mathematical details of general relativity should pick up Bernard Schutz's Gravity from the Ground Up: An Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity (Cambridge University Press, $45), which is delightfully thorough yet easy to read. Schutz nurtures an intuitive understanding of the subject, relegating more quantitative descriptions to sidebars. His book is full of historical detail. He describes, for example, a toy given to Einstein, containing a ball on a string that in turn is attached to a weak spring, one not quite strong enough to draw the ball up into a cup. This gadget is suitable for demonstrating the equivalence principle: To capture the ball, just make it "weightless" (for a brief time) by letting the toy free-fall. Astronauts in training experience temporary weightlessness similarly, on aircraft sent along a parabolic, free-fall trajectory (below).
--D.A.S.
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Whose View of Life? (Harvard University Press, $27.95), Jane Maienschein's book about the ethical debates over cloning and its equally provocative siblings, stem cell research and gene therapy, has much to recommend it: accessibility, fine-grained detail, thoughtful analysis and a grand historical sweep. The discussion leaps from Aristotle (the debates have their intellectual roots in ancient Greece) to Arthur Caplan (perhaps the most quoted bioethicist working today), from Leonardo da Vinci to Wilhelm His (whose techniques and practices shaped modern human embryology), from geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan to Ian Wilmut (who cloned the sheep Dolly). At the crux of the debate is nothing less than the nature of life, a slippery, superstition-plagued subject. But Maienschein provides readers with the scientific background and the social and political context needed to understand the issues. The result is part textbook on the new biology, part horror story of the nearsightedness of public policies, and part extended op-ed calling for a more reasoned approach. This is a first-rate volume for philosophers (armchair or professional) as well as scientists, but it may appeal most to biologists who, because of the current trend toward microspecialized research, may have missed bits and pieces of a story that concerns them greatly.
--C.B.
Nanoviewers: Christopher Brodie, Robert Dorit, Amos Esty, Greg Ross, David A. Schneider
Robert M. Bernero is a retired engineer living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, who served from 1972 to 1995 on the staff of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he held numerous positions, including director of risk analysis research and director of the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. He currently consults on nuclear safety-related matters, particularly regarding nuclear materials licensing and radioactive waste management.
Bernero, Robert M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bernero, Robert M. "March Madness." American Scientist, vol. 92, no. 6, 2004, p. 561+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A123449679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=32e56215. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A123449679
The turning point
John Abbotts
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 60.5 (September-October 2004): p66+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
http://thebulletin.org/
Full Text:
Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective By J. Samuel Walker University of California Press, 2004 315 pages; $24.95
TMI 25 Years Later: The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Accident and Its Impact By Bonnie A. Osif, Anthony J. Baratta, and Thomas W. Conkling Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004 160 pages; $24.95
SAMUEL WALKER OPENS THREE MILE Island with a description of a malfunction at a commercial nuclear power plant. Events were complicated by a faulty indicator, which led control room operators to take actions that exacerbated the situation. The plant was near a population center, and consequently a throng of reporters rushed to cover the story. Statements from officials of the operating utility generated public mistrust and suspicion. After a period of suspense, uncertainty, and conflicting statements from experts, the reactor was stabilized with limited impact on public health. But under other circumstances, it could have been much worse. An independent physicist warned that a more serious accident could "render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable" from radioactive contamination.
Walker took his opening narrative from The China Syndrome, a fictional movie released in mid-March 1979, starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, and Jack Lemmon. Less than two weeks after its release, the worst accident in the history of U.S. nuclear power took place at the Three Mile Island Reactor Unit 2, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with eerie similarities to the movie. The movie's "size of Pennsylvania" warning had been taken from a federal study calculating the consequences of a commercial reactor accident. Three Mile Island (TMI) thus became a strange case of reality imitating art imitating reality.
On the occasion of the accident's twenty-fifth anniversary, these books offer retrospection on events at the time. Each rendition has its particular strengths. TMI 25 Years Later was written by engineering librarians and an emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University. The professor, Anthony Baratta, was involved in post-accident decontamination of the reactor, and one chapter covers decontamination activities, accompanied by an interesting set of figures and photos from those activities.
But Walker's book is clearly the stronger. His account is more detailed, more comprehensive, and provides historical perspectives both before and after the accident. As a published historian, Walker regards "fair and balanced" as a standard, not just a slogan, and he meets that standard admirably.
Walker establishes the context by describing how public opposition to atomic energy had developed even before Three Mile Island.
The accident began during the graveyard shift, in the early hours of March 28, 1979, when the feedwater pumps failed. That led to a turbine trip, a shutdown to protect the reactor, and the lifting of a relief valve to reduce pressure in the reactor cooling system. All these events were expected under the circumstances. But the relief valve stuck open, even though power to operate the valve, and its indicator light in the control room, shut off. Control room operators thus received conflicting signals--rising water levels in one section of the reactor, but decreasing pressure in the coolant system. Operators responded by turning off pumps supplying water to the fuel rods. In hindsight, this caused about half the reactor fuel to melt and release its radioactive contents. A supervisor fresh on the scene averted a more serious accident two hours into the event by determining that the relief valve was stuck and closing another valve.
Walker then provides daily narratives over each of the next four days. He presents a picture of people trying to do the best they could under extraordinary and unexpected circumstances. The utility's engineering staff worked to stabilize the reactor in consultation with--and under the scrutiny of--outside technical experts and federal regulators. Reporters hungry for news took information as they could find it, but conditions were changing and public statements from the utility, the state government, the federal government, and even different speakers from the same organization, could be inconsistent. Consequently, information that the general public received, including estimates on the potential for more serious accident developments, was incomplete, subject to change, and at times contradictory.
On March 30, on the recommendation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburgh advised pregnant women and preschool-age children within a 5-mile radius around TMI to evacuate as a precautionary measure. This advisory covered about 4,200 individuals. But faced with an uncertain situation, many more evacuated on their own: An estimated 144,000 people within a 15-mile radius of TMI left the area at some point during the days after the accident.
After several days, the reactor was brought under control; there were only limited releases of radioactivity offsite. Long-term health consequences from the accident remain a point of controversy, but as Walker points out, the scientific consensus is that public exposures were relatively low, and subsequent epidemiological evaluations of the "downwind" population have not detected statistically significant differences in health outcomes compared to those expected in populations not exposed from TMI. In contrast, the Chernobyl reactor accident in 1986 released much larger quantities of radioactive material and produced dramatic and measurable human health effects.
Perhaps the clearest long-term effects of the TMI accident are the financial impacts on the atomic industry. Removing damaged nuclear fuel and decontaminating Unit 2 cost nearly $1 billion, a sum beyond the capabilities of General Public Utilities (GPU), the holding company owning the reactor. GPU paid only $367 million of this sum; the remainder came from the insurance industry, other atomic utilities, taxpayers in the form of federal funds, and state taxes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the states served by GPU. It cost more to decontaminate the plant than it did to build it, Osif and coauthors report. These financial consequences, even from an accident where most of the reactor's radioactive inventory remained within the containment building, should give serious second thoughts to any utility executive contemplating investments in atomic power.
Consequently, the U.S. nuclear power industry has stagnated. No nuclear plants have been ordered since 1979, and all reactors ordered after 1973 have since been canceled. The industry peaked in 1990, at 112 operating reactors. The Energy Department's current count is 104, due to the retirement of some older units.
Nuclear energy provides about 20 percent of U.S. electricity, representing about 8 percent of total U.S. energy consumption. In contrast, the nation's foremost energy source remains petroleum, which represents nearly 40 percent of total consumption, and most of that consumption goes to automobiles and trucks. Moreover, imports now supply about half of U.S. petroleum consumption.
During the early days of the George W. Bush administration, rhetorical support for atomic energy resurfaced in both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. But the events of September 11, 2001 muted official support. With nuclear plants representing potential terrorist targets, public statements about safe and clean nuclear power evaporated. Recently, however, industry confidence in nuclear power seems to have reawakened; in late April a consortium of atomic energy companies offered to design a new reactor--if they can receive $400 million in federal subsidies.
After decontamination, TMI Unit 2 was placed in "post-defueling monitored storage" in December 1993. Twenty-five years after the accident, TMI remains a symbol of the potential dangers of nuclear energy. National energy policy should give priority to the more efficient use of energy, through applications that are economically feasible, and to renewable energy for new power sources. At 6 percent of U.S. energy use, renewable sources currently provide nearly the same amounts of energy as atomic power, and public discussion should turn to measures to expand this contribution.
John Abbotts, who lives in Seattle, Washington, writes frequently on science, technology, and public policy.
Abbotts, John
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Abbotts, John. "The turning point." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 60, no. 5, 2004, p. 66+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A122104572/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2bf62bbf. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A122104572
Meanings of a meltdown, after the facts
Gene I. Rochlin
Science. 305.5681 (July 9, 2004): p181.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 American Association for the Advancement of Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/
Full Text:
Three Mile Island
A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
by J. Samuel Walker
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004. 315 pp. $24.94, 16.95 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-520-23940-7.
Some 25 years after the accident at Unit 2 of Three Mile Island (TMI-2), J. Samuel Walker has produced a superb and balanced account, one of the few that attempts to set both the accident and the efforts to understand and cope with it into a broader historical and regulatory context. The bulk of Three Mile Island is devoted to the events themselves and their short-term political and social consequences. Walker combines this with a history of the prior controversies over nuclear regulation and plant safety design that framed the design, construction, and operation of American pressurized-water reactors. He thereby provides a coherent and useful framework for understanding how and why the nuclear industry, and its regulators, acted and reacted the way they did as the events unfolded and afterward.
In March of 1979 when the accident occurred, I was in Germany with an international team of environmentalists, debating a group of German scientists and nuclear experts about the siting of a nuclear waste facility. In those days before CNN and global telecommunications, all of us spent a great deal of time on the telephone to the United States, trying to ascertain just how serious the accident was, whether the core had actually melted, and whether a dangerous hydrogen bubble had actually formed in the pressure vessel. What we could not know was that over the next few days and weeks those in Washington, D.C., and on the scene in Harrisburg were not much better informed than we were, some thousands of miles away. Although the book is not the first, or even the most detailed, account of the events of those tension-filled days and weeks, it is by far the clearest and most accessible.
The sequence of events that caused the initial accident, and the subsequent misinterpretations that exacerbated it, have been reviewed and re-reviewed in enormous depth and detail. The reports of both the Kemeny and the Rogovin commissions provide an exhaustive compendium that defies most attempts to summarize it. In this slim volume, Walker compresses those thousands of pages in a way that captures the confusion, frustration, and drama of people trying to make sense, and policy decisions, out of an unprecedented sequence of events without being able to ascertain what had actually happened to the core. As historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Walker was able to conduct a series of extensive personal interviews. From these and the documents available to him, he reconstructs those tense days with remarkable clarity.
Over time, the accident at Three Mile Island has accumulated many layers of discourse. Coming as it did on the heels of the movie The China Syndrome, "TMI" passed into the language of nuclear critics as a signifier for the risks of nuclear power, whereas in the eyes of nuclear power's proponents, it became an exemplar of the manipulation of media and the public by anti-nuclear activists. In retrospect, there was little or no immediate physical harm to the public. Yet, as Walker points out, the sociopolitical consequences remain. Although the growth of nuclear power in the United States had already slowed to a near halt in the mid-1970s, the accident at Three Mile Island led to new difficulties and delays. And although the industry argued that TMI-2 proved that even a major core disruption in U.S. reactors would not cause serious harm, it did become coupled in the public mind with the later and far more serious catastrophe at Chernobyl.
The book's only weakness lies in its final chapter. Emphasizing the human failures that took place, Walker argues that the physical and technical aspects of commercial nuclear plants were more robust than their critics had feared but were undermined by human shortcomings. In separating human from technical factors, he couples TMI-2 with Chernobyl as accidents caused primarily by "operator errors that exacerbated design flaws or mechanical malfunctions." But the interpretation of all human failures to manage complex and demanding technologies simply as "errors" is as dated as the events themselves. It does not pay sufficient attention to the subsequent social and organizational research on the difficulties of assuring the reliable operation of complex, tightly coupled technical systems. Charles Perrow, for example, is dismissed as having predicted subsequent accidents that have not occurred. This ignores the impact of Perrow's analysis on a growing literature on the risks of safety-critical operations for which the performance of human operators is not so easily partitioned from the character and demands of their machines.
Human operators may err by deliberate choice, as happened at Chernobyl, but they may also be placed by design or contingency into situations where they must make critical choices under conditions where neither sufficient time nor adequate information is available. That was manifestly true for both the operators and the regulators at TMI-2, as it was for those responsible for Challenger and Columbia. Presented as clearly, expertly, and gracefully as Walker has done here, Three Mile Island is more than just an interesting historical story. The accident provides a case study of how difficult it is, in demanding and complex technical systems, to diagnose and manage failures that emerge from unanticipated interactions between humans and machines. In the past quarter-century, we have built many more safety-critical systems that are at least as complex and at least as demanding as Unit 2 of Three Mile Island. What is not clear is whether our capability to manage and operate them safely has advanced at the same pace as our ability to design and deploy them.
The reviewer is in the Energy and Resources Group, 310 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. E-mail: hirel@berkeley.edu
Rochlin, Gene I.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rochlin, Gene I. "Meanings of a meltdown, after the facts." Science, vol. 305, no. 5681, 2004, p. 181. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A119613422/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5704d5fd. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A119613422
QUOTE:
Walker has provided a concise and objective analysis of the myriad of issues surrounding Truman's search for the best way to end World War II in the Pacific.
was necessary to end the war at the earliest possible moment and to save thousands of American lives and that these were Truman's main reasons for approving its use.
This book would deserve to be purchased by every college undergraduate, or anyone else wanting a thorough background in the issues surrounding the use of the atomic bomb,
Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan
Conrad C. Crane
The Historian. 61.3 (Spring 1999): p692.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Full Text:
Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. By J. Samuel Walker. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiii, 142. $34.95.)
This book is the academic equivalent of the Defense Department's infamous two-hundred-dollar hammer. It performs a valuable function in a superlative manner, but it is unfortunately not worth the exorbitant cost.
J. Samuel Walker initially made his mark with a noteworthy 1990 historiographical essay on the decision to drop the atomic bomb. The attention he garnered during the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, along with questions about his own opinions, inspired him to write this book. Though it is difficult to contribute something genuinely new to the swirling debate, Walker has provided a concise and objective analysis of the myriad of issues surrounding Truman's search for the best way to end World War II in the Pacific. His balanced and thoughtful approach to the mass of documentary evidence has much in common with the most recent work of Barton Bernstein, whose help is noted in the book's introduction.
The only time Walker's objectivity wavers is in his denunciation of those who objected to the script for the 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian, but his own conclusions also go against many of the revisionists and support key elements of the traditional explanation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While acknowledging the alternatives to the use of the bomb and the many motivations behind it, Walker argues convincingly that the bomb was necessary to end the war at the earliest possible moment and to save thousands of American lives and that these were Truman's main reasons for approving its use. The president had no compelling incentive not to do so, and considering the situation in mid-1945 it is difficult for Walker to envision any other American president making a different choice. Walker contends that even the Nagasaki bomb served a useful purpose, demolishing the arguments of Japanese diehards who did not believe one atomic weapon destroyed Hiroshima, or that the United States had any more, and furthering the process that led to surrender. He asserts that scholars must at least consider the position of Gar Alperovitz that the bomb was aimed more at the Russians than the Japanese, but this book is very effective at demolishing Alperovitz's arguments as well, with an astute and thorough analysis of the most recent evidence.
Walker writes very well, and provides exemplary notes and bibliographic information. He demonstrates his mastery of his subject's historiography throughout the book, and also explains which questions about the bomb will probably never be answered clearly, and why this is so. This book would deserve to be purchased by every college undergraduate, or anyone else wanting a thorough background in the issues surrounding the use of the atomic bomb, if it were reasonably priced. Unfortunately that is not the case. Charging 35 dollars for barely 100 pages of large print text is outrageous. Hopefully University of North Carolina Press will reprint this fine book in a 50 page paperback and make it available to the wide audience that it merits.
Conrad C. Crane
United States Military Academy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Crane, Conrad C. "Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan." The Historian, vol. 61, no. 3, 1999, p. 692. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A55426801/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2aaa5b9a. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A55426801
QUOTE:
Walker's book is the most useful layman's synthesis of the debate in print.
Prompt and Utter Destruction: President Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan
Tony Capaccio
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 54.2 (March-April 1998): p66+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
http://thebulletin.org/
Full Text:
By J. Samuel Walker University of North Carolina, 1997 152 pages; $14.95
Tourists entering the National Air and Space Museum's Enola Gay exhibit in Washington are greeted by an unusually blunt narrative recounting the 1994 firestorm that erupted over what version of history to depict on its walls. Laid out in black letters over a tan backdrop is a message from Smithsonian Secretary Michael Heyman explaining why he pulled a punch in depicting the dawn of the Atomic Age. Heyman acknowledges that the museum "planned a much larger exhibition which concentrated attention on the devastation caused by the atomic bombings and on differing interpretations of the history surrounding President [Harry] Truman's decision to drop them."
In understated prose, Heyman recounts how the planned exhibition "provoked intense criticism from World War II veterans and others ... who stated that it portrayed the United States as aggressor and Japanese as victims and reflected unfavorably on the valor and courage of American veterans." Faced with such criticism, "The museum changed its plan substantially, but the criticism persisted and led to my decision to replace that exhibition with a simpler one."
In this case, "simpler" means an exhibit with little or no sense of the historical debate, an exhibit that is top heavy with gleaming chunks of bomber fuselage. "It's an exhibit," says Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) historian Samuel Walker in his book Prompt and Utter Destruction, "filled with largely innocuous descriptions of the aircraft and its restoration." The exhibit contains labels, says Walker, that seriously underplay the state of historiography about President Truman's best known decision.
Walker takes to task one description in particular. Use of the bomb, declares the museum, "made unnecessary the planned invasion of Japan." While not necessarily inaccurate, writes Walker, the label reinforces one of the great pieces of conventional wisdom handed down by a generation of brave World War II veterans and policy-makers--that Truman faced a stark, unequivocal choice between dropping the bomb or ordering an invasion. "In the Enola Gay exhibit, the myths about the decision to use the bomb prevailed over the historical evidence that revealed the complexities of the events and considerations that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Exploding these "myths" is the theme of Walker's book, a judicious attempt at historical arbitration. One of the most reasoned voices in the atomic bomb debate, Walker, who stresses in the introduction that his work is not an official NRC product but his own, entered the fray with a survey of the historical literature published in the Winter 1990 edition of Diplomatic History. His survey, "The Decision to Use the Bomb: An Historiographic Update," concluded that alternatives to the bomb clearly existed, and Truman and his advisers knew it. Further, there was no evidence that U.S. policymakers had claimed an invasion would have cost the U.S. military a million casualties. Nonetheless, "that number, or an often embellished variation of it, became etched into the mythology of the decision to use the bomb," Walker writes.
The book carefully reviews each issue in the post-1995 Enola Gay controversy. It is likely to anger both hard-core American Legionnaires and Air Force Association zealots who incessantly attacked the museum and its curators, as well as the proponents of the so-called revisionist school. Walker takes a critical look at the theories of revisionist historians bent on believing that diplomatic considerations--namely, impressing the Soviet Union--played the biggest role in Truman's decision. The strength of Walker's narrative is not that he simply debunks conventional wisdom. He successfully dissects and distills the latest scholarship and deftly deflates some of the most cherished notions of the revisionist school.
One article of faith among revisionists is the Soviet connection, most stridently argued by Washington historian Gar Alperovitz in The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb. Based on his assessment of the literature and documentary evidence cited by Alperovitz, Walker concludes that Truman did not drop the bomb primarily to intimidate or impress the Soviets, although "growing differences with the Soviet Union were a factor in the thinking of American officials about the bomb." Walker does not offer a point-by-point rebuttal about the primary evidence cited by revisionists who argue the primacy of the so-called "Soviet factor." He agrees with Stanford University professor Barton Bernstein, a dean of the atomic bomb debate--and somewhat of a centrist--that any diplomatic advantage resulting from the bomb's use was considered a "bonus."
Walker, like Bernstein, disagrees with Alperovitz and another prominent revisionist, Robert L. Messer, that U.S. policy-makers believed that Soviet entry in the war against Japan might, by itself, bring about Japans surrender. Basing his conclusion on a reading of contemporary views of U.S. military officials, Walker argues that military leaders viewed the prospects of a Soviet entry as helpful but not essential.
In one of the books most useful sections, Walker examines another revisionist tenet--that modifying the terms of unconditional surrender to allow the emperor to remain would likely have led to a negotiated peace. Walker's conclusion on this point hinges on a close reading of the U.S. MAGIC signals intelligence intercepts of secret Japanese-Soviet communications.
Revisionists interpret the communications traffic as signaling that Japan was ready to make a deal. But to Walker, the cable traffic depicted high-level vacillation and showed "beyond a doubt the lack of consensus within the Japanese government on the question of ending the war. This was strong indication that offering the imperial institution to remain was not sufficient in itself to induce surrender."
Perhaps Walkers most important contribution to the debate is clarifying the emotionally charged issue of the number of casualties that were expected in an invasion. This reviewer, and countless baby boomers like him, grew lip with the notion that the atomic bombs had saved "one million" U.S. servicemen, including our fathers, Yet, there is no doubt today, says Walker, that defenders of the conventional wisdom are at their weakest arguing this point.
This is not to say that Truman would not have been justified in dropping the bombs to save a "few" thousand GI's, only that the inflated numbers cited after the war to justify the use of Little Boy and Fat Man distort the record.
Walker is persuasive when he states there is no evidence that Truman received information during the summer of 1945 that U.S. casualties or deaths would approach 500,000 to a million. The largest figures circulated by military planners in Washington were 46,000 American (lead and 174,000 wounded or missing--still a horrendous number.
Readers looking for a definitive word from Walker about why the bombs were dropped may be disappointed. Walker gives a "yes ... and no" answer that leans toward, but does not fully adopt, a revisionist view. Yes, lie says, the bomb was necessary to end the war quickly in mid-1945, a goal Truman and all of America wanted. But no, the, bomb was not necessary to prevent an invasion of Japan. Walker finds it "reasonable" to conclude that a combination of continued B-29 raids with conventional bombs, the ongoing naval blockade, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, "and perhaps a moderation of the unconditional surrender policy would have ended the war without an invasion and without the use of the atomic bombs."
However, Walker does not discuss the possible consequences of this alternative strategy or how long it would have taken to bring an already reeling Japan to its knees. It is impossible to guess how long and how many more deaths it would have taken to force a Japanese surrender without the bomb. Nevertheless, any historical argument over Truman's decision that Us to grapple with this question is incomplete.
But this flaw aside, Walker's book is the most useful layman's synthesis of the debate in print.
Tony Capaccio, former editor of Defense News, is currently the Pentagon correspondent for Bloomberg News. He co-authored a major review of the media's coverage of the Enola Gay controversy in the July/August 1997 edition of the American Journalism Review.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Capaccio, Tony. "Prompt and Utter Destruction: President Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 54, no. 2, 1998, p. 66+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20348031/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b754147a. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20348031
QUOTE:
Every reader will benefit from this public historian's willingness to criticize the agency that he chronicles, and Walker, of course, deserves a great deal of the credit for this. But it must also be noted that Walker's employer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was born of the very criticism that Containing the Atom levels at the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission.
Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971
Brian Balogh
Business History Review. 67.4 (Winter 1993): p671+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 Business History Review
Full Text:
J. Samuel Walker, historian at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, wisely chose "a changing environment" as his subtitle for Containing the Atom. In the decade that this volume covers, Americans' attitudes toward their political, technological, and natural environment underwent a dramatic shift that permanently altered the course of nuclear development. Walker deftly charts the contours of this change, relying on extensive research into agency files, congressional testimony, and publications by a wide range of supporters and critics. His account is informative and fair to both sides of this increasingly contentious issue. Containing the Atom is the second in a series of volumes that document the history of nuclear regulation in the United States. Like the first volume, Controlling the Atom (1985), it is a model public history.
Walker has organized his narrative around a series of public controversies that buffeted nuclear development as it lurched from dreams of power "too cheap to meter" in the 1950s to the realities of full-scale implementation by the late 1960s. Before embarking, he provides readers with a three-chapter guide to the history of nuclear technology, regulation, economics, and politics. Once armed with the necessary acronyms and political scorecard, readers are well prepared to follow the bureaucratic infighting behind the nuclear industry's efforts to site large reactors in metropolitan population centers and on or near seismic faults. Walker traces the emergence of concerns over low-level radiation releases and the growing fear of catastrophic accidents. The final third of the book dwells on the impact of the growing environmental movement and concerns that ranged from thermal pollution to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)'s compliance with the Environmental Protection Act. The one omission in an otherwise comprehensive account is an extended treatment of the nuclear waste controversy.
Walker's greatest contribution to scholars working in this field is his prodigious research into the archives of the Atomic Energy Commission. The footnotes to Containing the Atom will guide a generation of scholars to tens of thousands of previously classified documents--documents that the Department of Energy has been reluctant to release. For a broader audience interested not only in the nuclear debate but also in government-business relations, Walker's account illuminates the trade-offs inherent in the Atomic Energy Commission's dual responsibilities for promotion and regulation. That this dual role ultimately created far more problems than it resolved is Walker's central theme. According to Walker, both promoters and regulators at the AEC tried to carry out their mission. Thus critics of nuclear development will be surprised to learn of the numerous instances in which the regulatory staff said no to the nuclear industry and its advocates inside the Atomic Energy Commission. Nevertheless, promoting nuclear power remained a central mission and the Atomic Energy Commission pursued that mission vigorously, often at the expense of environmental concerns. Proponents of nuclear power and business people in general who read Walker's account in an age of deregulation might benefit from this case study's object lesson: public trust requires the perception of regulatory independence, regardless of the substance.
Every reader will benefit from this public historian's willingness to criticize the agency that he chronicles, and Walker, of course, deserves a great deal of the credit for this. But it must also be noted that Walker's employer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was born of the very criticism that Containing the Atom levels at the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission. Perhaps this series has stumbled on the ideal environment for writing objective public history: another agency's backyard.
Brian Balogh is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author of Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Power, 1945-1975 (1991) and is currently working on a book entitled "Selling Big Government: The Political Culture of State Building in Twentieth-Century America."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Balogh, Brian. "Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971." Business History Review, vol. 67, no. 4, 1993, p. 671+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A15638203/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=57a1d6d3. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A15638203
QUOTE:
This well-referenced book (75 pages of notes) is a necessity for anyone writing on or teaching about nuclear regulation in the United States.
Walker's book provides an excellent source that is well written by a professional historian.
Ahearne, John F.
Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971
John F. Ahearne
American Scientist. 82.5 (September-October 1994): p495+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
http://www.americanscientist.org/
Full Text:
Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971. J. Samuel Walker. 533 pp. University of California Press, 1992. $50.
Samuel Walker is the historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory commission and coauthor of an earlier volume, which covered the beginnings of nuclear regulation, 1946-1962. As he notes, "This volume picks up the story about the time that the nuclear industry experienced an unprecedented and unanticipated boom." The book ends as Glenn Seaborg steps down after nine years as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and James Schlesinger takes over, which signaled "a sharp break with the AEC's history and ... a new direction in the agency's approach to an attitude toward its regulatory responsibilities."
Containing the Atom addresses the regulatory side of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which was created by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and was later split (in 1975) into the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Walker provides answers to questions that continue to be of significance today, such as: "Why did the overwhelming acceptance of nuclear power in the early 1960s give way to growing skepticism by the end of the decade?" Walker's history indicates that a major reason for the change was that the AEC focused most of its attention on developing nuclear weapons and commercializing nuclear power, and very little on regulation. The call for the AEC to separate regulation from promotion was sounded as early as 1955--one year after its establishment.
Walker notes that "the 1954 act specifically excluded the AEC's weapons production facilities from compliance with the licensing requirements that private companies would be expected to meet.... The director of regulation could provide advice and recommendations but did not exercise jurisdiction over the safety of AEC-owned reactors." This inconsistency laid the foundation for the many severe problems uncovered in the late 1980s at the government's reactors and weapons facilities.
The AEC saw nuclear power as a great good. Glenn Seaborg and William Corliss, a free-lance technical writer, wrote in 1971, "Nuclear power will soon be so cheap and so abundant that it will greatly accelerate the development of the hungry, poor parts of the world. If energy is cheap and abundant, so will be food, water, clean air, and all the amenities of what we call civilization."
Walker describes the key participants in the early regulation of nuclear power, including Congressman Chet Holifield, "Mr. Atomic Energy," who served on the Joint Committee from 1946 until his retirement from Congress in 1974, and provides evidence that the Joint Committee and the AEC were not always in agreement about government's role in promoting nuclear power. The first operating license ever issued to a privately owned reactor went to General Electric's experimental reactor at the Vallecitos, California, Atomic Laboratory in August 1957, and the 180 megawatt Dresden, Illinois, plant became, in 1959, the first privately owned commercial reactor in the United States to go on line. Walker notes that utilities were slow to endorse nuclear power. The author describes the battle between coal and nuclear advocates, following General Electric's 1963 offer of a "turnkey" contract for a 515-megawatt plant in New Jersey. General Electric "anticipated that it would lose money on its fixed-price contract of $66 million ... [but] Oyster Creek ... was the first case in which the estimated cost of nuclear power competed successfully with fossil fuel ... without any direct subsidies from the AEC...."
These observations capture the flavor of Walker's book, which offers many insights into later events. He recounts the competition between Westinghouse, leading manufacturer of pressurized-water reactors, and General Electric, sole manufacturer of boiling-water reactors. And he reviews the rapid growth in plant size, during which time plant size tripled before construction and operation experience had been absorbed, and the concern within the nuclear industry about the lengthy and complex licensing process. Walker describes the way the regulatory staff could pressure an applicant to make changes, including dropping a request, as happened when Pacific Gas & Electric proposed to build a nuclear plant at Bodega Head, north of San Francisco. Particularly interesting are the issues that led to what has since become a major target of those criticizing nuclear power, the Price-Anderson Law, which provides insurance coverage for the owners of nuclear power plants. "The original law, sponsored by Senator Clinton P. Anderson and Representative Melvin Price and passed as amendments to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, was intended to remove a major impediment to the development of nuclear power as well as to ensure that victims of a severe accident would receive compensation." Although eventually nuclear proponents were successful, "the effort to secure its passage produced some unintended long-term results: tensions between coal and nuclear interests increased and the AEC committed itself to an update of the WASH-740 report."
WASH-740 was the first attempt to develop an estimate of the probability and the consequences of a major reactor accident. The draft report, by Brookhaven National Laboratory, "projected that an accident could contaminate with significant levels of radioactivity an area of 10,000 to 100,000 square kilometers and cause damages of $17 billion." The AEC suppressed these results.
Difficulties in funding safety research have a long history. Walker recounts that, in the mid-1960s, one member of the AEC's reactor advisory committee said "that much of the safety research program was a 'man-sized boondoggle.'" In what became the nuclear community's mind set, unbroken until the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, "Agency officials regarded the research agenda as important but they did not think it was pressing. They were convinced that [the] operating power reactors were safe and that careful evaluation of individual applications would ensure that new plants were equally safe." Walker describes the controversy around emergency core-cooling systems (ECCS), which forced the AEC to review its efforts on safety research and convinced major advocacy groups that nuclear reactors were undesirable. The ECCS controversy was a significant step in building public mistrust. Walker notes that "by placing undue emphasis on trying to reassure the public about reactor safety, [the AEC] took a worrisome technical question and turned it into a public relations disaster."
Many issues that were prominent in the 1980s existed as early as the mid-1960s, including hydrogen explosions, steam explosions, pipe cracking, retrofitting, plutonium proliferation risks and the danger of low levels of radiation.
Walker describes the environmental controversy that developed over the AEC's refusal to impose constraints on thermal pollution, the discharge of heated (but non-radioactive) water into rivers and other bodies of water. The AEC was attacked by environmental groups, the Fisheries and Wildlife Service and senior members of Congress.
The significance of this controversy was great:
The most important effect [was] that the image of nuclear power as
the antidote for the environmental hazards of electrical production
was irreversibly tarnished. Thermal pollution was the first issue to
raise widespread skepticism about the environmental benefits of
nuclear power, and it laid the foundations for subsequent
controversies over the dangers of the technology....
Walker reviews in detail the late-1960s radiation-effects debates, involving the University of Pittsburgh professor Ernest Sternglass and Livermore scientists John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, in which the three raised alarms about the dangers of radiation from fallout from weapons tests and from normal operations of nuclear power plants. The AEC pressured the Livermore scientists to withhold their public criticism. The pressure, of course, had the opposite effect: "... Gofman and Tamplin ... began to assert that their estimates of the increase in the incidence of cancer from nuclear plant emissions had been too low; they revised the figure from 17,000 to 32,000 cases every year if the entire population received the permissible doses. They also suggested that 'all of the major forms of cancer and leukemia are induced by radiation.' [Also,] they urged ... that allowable limits ... be lowered to zero."
In Walker's judgment, "Gofman's and Tamplin's contribution to the debate over radiation was more rhetorical than substantive.... While Gofman and Tamplin succeeded in helping prompt the AEC to tighten its regulations, they also needlessly alarmed the public with their implausible estimates of cancer potentially caused by nuclear power and their allegations that the AEC was indifferent to the hazards of radioactivity."
Walker describes the major controversies of the 1960s and early 1970s that led to public skepticism of nuclear power. He writes: "Because the technology was complex and innately frightening to many people and because uncertainties about important questions remained to be resolved, the credibility of the AEC's regulatory positions depended heavily on faith in its judgment and its commitment on safety. By 1971, the arguments of antinuclear leaders had severely undermined that faith.
The AEC sabotaged its own credibility and enhanced that of its
critics by consistently emphasizing the development of the nuclear
industry rather than the prompt resolution of regulatory issues ...
Nuclear advocates ... continued to insist that the benefits of the
technology far exceeded the risks ... Critics offered a contrasting
view that gained increasing prominence and acceptance.
Although Walker criticizes the AEC's failure to separate regulation from promotion, he does describe several major issues on which the regulatory staff prevailed against the industry. The book ends with the new AEC chairman telling the leaders of the nuclear industry: "Let me reiterate: the Atomic Energy Commission, any government agency, exists to serve the public interest. The public interest may overlap, but it is not coincident with private interests...."
This well-referenced book (75 pages of notes) is a necessity for anyone writing on or teaching about nuclear regulation in the United States. As is the case with any history, this one does suffer from being based on documentary evidence. After 25 years in government, I support Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, analysis. After the noted historian of the Roosevelt presidency served in the John F. Kennedy White House, he remarked that documents give a weak and often critically flawed picture of how decisions really were made. Nevertheless, Walker's book provides an excellent source that is well written by a professional historian.
Ahearne, John F.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ahearne, John F. "Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971." American Scientist, vol. 82, no. 5, 1994, p. 495+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A166995739/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=371d215b. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A166995739
QUOTE:
Containing the Atom is meticulously researched, rich in detail, and clearly written. This is traditional government history only in the sense that an in-house historian was granted broad access to the available documentation. But the study is not a rigid institutional history. To his credit, Walker has chosen to focus on the major environmental issues confronting the AEC in the 1960s--metropolitan and seismic siting, reactor safety, thermal pollution--and the commission's responses.
Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment
Martin V. Melosi
Reviews in American History. 21.3 (Sept. 1993): p494B+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 Johns Hopkins University Press
http://www.press.jhu.edu
Full Text:
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xiii + 533 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00.
The central role of the federal government in the fives of the American people is a defining characteristic of the post-world War II years. The books under discussion directly address the role of the federal government in shaping energy and environmental policy after the Second World War, and to greater or lesser degrees the precarious balancing act between promoting economic growth and protecting resources.
Two of the books focus on nuclear power, which posed unique problems and opportunities for the federal government. Spawned by war, and because of its awesome military potential, nuclear power was immediately regarded as crucial to national defense and security. The federal government ultimately became the exclusive producer of fissionable material and literally dictated all of the uses of atomic energy. Nuclear power, therefore, garnered a new place in the energy history of the United States. Its promotion was not so much linked to the larger interest in national economic growth as to the more narrow goal of finding peaceful uses for what had been dramatically unveiled as the ultimate destructive force. Its environmental implications, as much or more than its economic viability, became the focus of intense debate.
The literature on the development and commercialization of nuclear power has been prolific, from the earliest memoir literature and polemic pieces to more recent scholarship which has enriched our knowledge of this epoch-making technology.[1] Both J. Samuel Walker's Containing the Atom and Brian Balogh's Chain Reaction are major contributions to that story, and both grapple effectively with the role of the federal government in attempting to secure a place for nuclear power in the domestic energy market. Each book, however, paints a quite different picture of the governmental policies--primarily focused on the actions of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC:) and the joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE)--dealing with commercialization of nuclear power.[2] Walker offers a "rational actor" decision-making model in which key officials within the AEC perform their functions according to the stated objectives of the organization. Balogh focuses on the bureaucratic politics of the AEC and JCAE through which experts in the field have a decided advantage in establishing policy.
Containing the A tom is the second volume in a series on the history of nuclear regulation sponsored by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first, Controlling the A tom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962 (1984), was the result of a collaboration of NRC historians Walker and George Mazuzan. While Mazuzan drafted three chapters in this newest volume, the bulk of the work is Walker's. Like the first volume, Containing the Atom is meticulously researched, rich in detail, and clearly written. This is traditional government history only in the sense that an in-house historian was granted broad access to the available documentation. But the study is not a rigid institutional history. To his credit, Walker has chosen to focus on the major environmental issues confronting the AEC in the 1960s--metropolitan and seismic siting, reactor safety, thermal pollution--and the commission's responses. Of course, Walker's perspective tends to give the impression that the AEC gave high priority to environmental issues, when in fact they were often less central than the commission's promotional interests. This is not to suggest that Walker distorts the record, but the reader needs to be aware of the intended context.
Walker is even-handed in treating the key players in the story, including those outside of AEC, and in evaluating the outcome of policy decisions. He rightly portrays the utility companies as initially reluctant to participate in the effort to commercialize nuclear power, and--with the exception of AEC critics John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, whose allegations he characterizes as "self-righteous, uncharitable, and often inaccurate" (p. 362)--gives credit to environmentalists for some legitimate concern over the safety issue. Nor does he shy away from pointing a finger at shortcomings or faulty results: "A shock as unsettling as the Calvert Cliffs decision was probably necessary to shake the AEC out of its complacency toward environmental issues"[3] (p. 386). Yet Walker's attempt at balance sometimes borders on ambivalence. The underlying tone of the book suggests that AEC officials simply acted according to their mandate, often taking the middle ground between utilities and vendors wanting the agency to act more assertively in their behalf and plant opponents criticizing the AEC for its emphasis on development at the expense of safety.
In Containing the Atom, therefore, Walker's portrayal of AEC officials holding the middle ground leads to the conclusion that the failings of the commercialization program came primarily from without. The AEC was not insensitive to environmental concerns, he argues, but it could not increase its regulatory activities given the pace with which the new industry grew in the 1960s and the fact that federal budget constraints prevented expansion of its staff: the forces of history outpaced the ability of officials to make effective course corrections. Walker's AEC is no beacon of light nor dastardly villain, but an agency staffed with well-intentioned officials who sometimes failed to see the larger picture.
Chain Reaction does not contradict Walker's broad interpretation of events, but Balogh clearly sets a different mood and his goals are much more ambitious. A student of business historian Louis Galambos and a proponent of his "organizational synthesis," Balogh uses the commercialization of nuclear power as a case study for examining how "expertise has played an increasingly important role in modern American politics" (p. 1). Given the significance of that theme, one is tempted to view Chain Reaction as two books in one--a theoretical discussion of the nature of federal governance and bureaucracy and an institutional study of AEC and JCAE.
Balogh reinforces the notion that 1945 was a watershed year for federal involvement in the life of the nation by focusing on the changing role of experts in policymaking. In the postwar new world, experts in several fields did not simply apply their skills to specific tasks in government, but set agendas and made policy. This is particularly crucial because the government's regulatory role expanded dramatically in these years. In addition, the federal government was not simply the employer of expert talent, but the producer of that talent as well. Federal project funding, especially as a result of the "permanent crisis" of the Cold War, provided a means to produce thousands of science-based professionals willing to serve a variety of agencies. The Manhattan project in particular, and World War II in general, "demonstrated in dramatic fashion that expertise--directed and funded by the national government--could produce in a crisis" (p. 13). Thus nuclear power became the testing ground for the establishment of a "symbiotic relationship" between professionals and the federal government that Balogh labels the "proministrative state" (p. 21).
Focusing on the efforts to commercialize nuclear power between 1945 and 1975, Balogh turns his attention to the "iron triangle" of the AEC, the JCAE, and the burgeoning nuclear industry to explore the new postwar bureaucratic process at work. Unlike in Walker's scenario, the AEC shares the stage with an increasingly influential joint Committee and a nuclear industry which seemed to more quickly lose its reluctance to develop commercial nuclear power than has been portrayed in other studies. In this matrix, AEC does not act as an umpire between rival forces, but as one of the major players that must work out practical bargains to meet the ends of establishing a viable commercial program. For example, industry officials sought a relaxation of safety standards as a subsidy for investing in nuclear power. In all cases, some form of compromise or consensus was necessary to move the process forward. And given the nature of the activity, the nuclear community depended on expertise as, what Balogh calls, its "political trump card" (p. 181).
On the surface, Balogh's nuclear bureaucracy suggests a certain cynicism about political behavior within government institutions. But in essence it offers a careful assessment of internal interest group politics within a rather unique community. In addressing the question of safety, for example, Balogh argues persuasively that competing centers of safety expertise existed within AEC rather than an AEC standard as Walker infers. But like Walker, Balogh recognizes that some externalist challenges--namely in the environmental community--placed the safety program on the defensive. This challenge came in at least two forms. First, Balogh argues, the nuclear community had a deeply rooted concern about public acceptance of nuclear power. Criticism from environmentalists threatened that acceptance. Second, environmentalism developed its own institutional bases in the late 1960s and early 1970s and attracted its own experts to challenge those of the AEC.
The main thrust of Balogh's argument about the faltering of commercial nuclear power was not intended to mirror Walker's emphasis on the threats from without. Balogh concentrates on the increasingly destructive internal debate within the nuclear community and its inability to contain that debate. Almost like a China Syndrome, questions of safety and economic viability of nuclear power broke out of the security of its internal authority into the external realm where efforts at seeking public acceptance exposed nuclear experts to counterattacks and eroded the advantages they had held when external interest group politics and partisan support were not regarded as necessary to shape and direct policy.
However unintentional, Balogh nevertheless gives substantial credit to certain external forces in undermining commercial nuclear power and not enough to others. While making the case that the need to market the programs' services clashed with a desire for political insulation, he concludes that the breakdown occurred internally. But the contrary argument could be made that external forces ultimately undermined a vulnerable institutional structure which, when challenged, exposed its inherent weaknesses. Also--although the point is raised briefly--Balogh does not make enough of the fact that market forces undermined the ability of nuclear power to challenge other energy sources, at least in the short run.
Chain Reaction will be at the center of stimulating discussion over the nature of modern American politics and bureaucracy for many years to come. It is, indeed, an exciting book to read. However, with respect to nuclear power, two questions remain: To what extent are internal and external factors in the failing of commercial nuclear power in the United States obscured by the discussion of a proministrative state? To what degree may Balogh's bureaucratic model be difficult to generalize beyond the rather special character of the nuclear establishment?
To broaden the gauge of his study, Balogh notes in his introductory chapter that "The sharpest confrontation between experts and democratic participation was over the environment" (p. 16). In Government and Environmental Politics the centrality of scientific expertise is obvious: in this case the experts are not hiding behind government walls but are the front line troops of all the major constituencies.[4] Whereas Balogh sports a bureaucratic model for his study, the collected works in this volume tend to reinforce the notion of interest group politics influencing environmental policy.
Growing out of a conference on environmental policy held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., Government and Environmental Politics offers eight essays spanning a wide range of topics, from wilderness and land policy to wildlife, from atomic energy to toxic wastes. (A major omission is a single essay dealing in depth with water and waterways.) Each author was to "intercept the flow of events in the early postwar era, contrasting what was emerging with the received heritage," to describe the "leading features of the developing postwar environmental policymaking apparatus," and to speculate on future developments (p. 3).
What emerges in aggregate about environmental policy making is a picture quite different than in the nuclear power field where one designated agency manages the executive department's program and a single industry shares in the government's largesse. But like the confrontation over safety, issues, a wide spectrum of interest groups share in a concern about the implications of government action or lack of action. This portrayal of rather diffuse policy making represents an accurate image of a complex, multifaceted issue which cannot be reduced to easily demarcated contrasting positions.
Samuel Hays's "Three Decades of Environmental Politics" does an excellent job of providing a context for the remaining essays.[5] Hays, like Balogh--who pays justifiable homage to Hays's work in Chain Reaction--views the postwar years as a clear break with the past. In the case of environmentaLism, however, the line is too sharply drawn. "Although some beginnings could be seen in earlier years, in the rising interest in outdoor recreation in the 1930s, for example, or in the few cases of concern for urban air and water pollution in the nineteenth century," Hays asserts, "these trends are little more than precedents" (pp. 21-22). While the difference between "environmentalism" and "conservation" is more than cosmetic, this rejection of any continuity tends to narrow the breadth of environmentalism in the modern era. To define prewar environmental issues as responding only to problems of production and to cast postwar issues as responding primarily to consumer wants is simplistic.
Nevertheless, Hays's discussion of the vast arena in which environmental policy was articulated and debated is a valuable contribution--as is his identification of the wide array of participants-environmental groups, scientists, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. Particularly useful--and something largely missing from the works of Walker and Balogh--is the attention Hays gives to those individuals and groups in opposition to environmental action. He notes quite perceptively that environmental opposition was successful in shaping the terms of the environmental debate and in demanding higher levels of proof of harm, especially in the area of pollution control.
Hays also views the debate over modern environmental policy originating in the public arena and ending up enmeshed in the federal bureaucracy. (This is in contrast with Balogh's portrayal of the nuclear issue and with his own interpretation of the origins of conservation policy in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 1959.) "As environmental politics evolved," he argues, "its context shifted from broader public debate to management" (p. 49). Hays, nonetheless, shares with Balogh the important role of the federal bureaucracy in shaping environmental policy, and in a phrase reminiscent of Balogh argues that "When environmental political choice shifted from the wider public arena to the realm of administration and management, it was transformed into a vast array of technical issues" (p. 49). But Hays's realm of "technical politics" includes a wider variety of policymakers--managers as well as scientists. This distinction is suggestive of the broader nature of environmental affairs as compared with nuclear power.
The essays that follow not only speak to specific areas of environmental interest within the federal bureaucracy, but reflect the variety of interest groups supporting environmental action and the myriad governmental responses to those groups. Robert Cameron Mitchell clearly describes the development of modern environmental lobbies, suggesting that among three basic tactical options--education, direct action, and policy reform--national environmental groups chose policy reform. The major instrument to achieve their goals was litigation. And what had begun as a movement directed by amateurs shifted to advocacy staffs dominated by professionals. Thomas Dunlap discusses the "dramatic shift" in the nature and extent of government protection for wildlife in the postwar years. In this well argued essay, he gives central attention to the way in which ecology transformed the preservationists' views on wildlife and how scientists played a central role in addressing the issues to the public. Michael Smith, in "Advertising the Atom," presents a valuable companion piece to Walker and Balogh by discussing the social context of nuclear power, in which nuclear power plants serve as "badges of American technological and political superiority at home and as adjuncts of atomic diplomacy abroad" (p. 241). From this vantage point, Smith comes to a conclusion similar to Balogh that the AEC "like all agents of government power" became increasingly preoccupied with credibility (p. 259).
Joseph Sax, cutting across the grain, argues that parks and wilderness areas were "not the product of the modern growth of regulatory government or of the expansion of the federal role in American life" but "elements of a peculiar byway of American government, an experiment in public ownership and management that has no significant counterpart in our national experience" (p. 115). Sax denies that wilderness decisions were scientific or technical; instead they resulted from a consensus of interest groups mediated by various government agencies. Frank Gregg reinforces the interest group perspective by discussing public land policy in terms of the debates over privatization. Malcolm Baldwin went so far as to suggest that while the federal impact on private rural lands was extensive, that environmental attention to the issue has been marginal. And Christopher Schroeder in an important cautionary note argues effectively that we must avoid speaking about a single toxic policy, which leads to oversimplification in constructing policy. The most difficult task in dealing with toxics, he argues, is statutory and regulatory fragmentation.
This brief scan of the range of environmental issues and the governmental and public responses offered by the authors in Government and Environmental Politics suggests that interest group politics deserves equal status with the bureaucratic process in attempting to understand the origins and application of environmental policies, including how they affect nuclear power. But both Walker, and especially Balogh, strongly suggest that the structure and role of the federal government has not been static and has changed with the times as new organizations and institutions emerged to address key political and social issues. MIssing, however, is a thorough discussion of the role of the courts and the impact of the law on all the contesting parties and on the institutions themselves. Nevertheless, all three of the books under discussion demonstrate how far the literature on energy and environment has come in the last several years. In the past, environmental advocacy or opposition turned many studies into polemics, tried to find heroes and villains, and often obscured the evolution and implementation of policy. The emphasis upon organizational models, interest group actions, and institutional dynamics helps us to put the white hats and black hats aside. [1.] Footnote 63 on page 15 of Chain Reaction is a good starting point for examining the literature of commercial nuclear power. See also, Robert S. Friedman, "American Nuclear Energy Policy, 1945-1990: A Review Essay," Journal of Policy History 3 (1991): 33148. [2.] The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created the Atomic Energy Commission and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. The AEC held a virtual monopoly over atomic energy development and was responsible for establishing regulations and standards for those licensed to use fissionable material. However, not until 1974 was the long-standing conflict of interest between its promotion and regulation duties dealt with by abolishing the AEC and dividing its functions between the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The JCAE's primary functions were main taming legislative power on all atomic energy bills, acting as a watchdog over matters of secrecy and security, maintaining policy and review functions on nuclear programs, and providing and gathering information on nuclear power. Those not associated with the committee in Congress resented its sweeping power. In 1977 it was abolished and its responsibilities split among several standing committees. For an overview of the origins and development of nuclear power, see Martin V. Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (1985), pp. 217-40, 304-12. [3.] Calvert Cliffs Coordinating Committee v. AEC grew out of a citizen protest against the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Generating Station near Lusby, Maryland. In July 1971, the Federal Court of Appeals found AEC regulations in violation of the NEPA mandate to make a detailed assessment of costs, benefits, and the environmental impact of nuclear power plants before licensing them. [4.] For recent studies dealing with environmental history, see Richard White, "American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review 54 (August 1985): 297-335; Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth (1988). [5.] The piece is an earlier version in what has appeared with greater elaboration in Hays's book, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (1987).
Martin V. Melosi, Director of the Institute for Public History, University of Houston, is the author of several books and articles on energy and the environment, and is currently completing a study entitled, "Technological Choice and Urban Growth: The Development of Sanitary Services in America, 1801-1970."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Melosi, Martin V. "Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment." Reviews in American History, vol. 21, no. 3, 1993, p. 494B+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A14568850/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd883391. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14568850
QUOTE:
In Containing the Atom J. Samuel Walker offers a wealth of raw materials for understanding the roots in the 1960s of the controversy that blossomed fully in the 1970s. Intended as a history of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1963 to 1971 (the period of Glenn Seaborg's reign as chairman), this beautifully written account provides more details concerning the civilian development of nuclear power in the United States during that period than any other work ever has - or perhaps ever will.
Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971
James M. Jasper
Science. 259.5097 (Feb. 12, 1993): p996+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 American Association for the Advancement of Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/
Full Text:
In the 1970s nuclear reactors became one of the most controversial technologies in history, as enormous opposition movements developed around the globe. The conflict has differed from earlier controversies over new technologies, one difference being that other such technologies have usually been opposed - as was the case with the machine-smashing that occurred in the 19th century - as a threat to jobs, whereas nuclear energy was widely defended as creating them. A small library of books and articles has been generated in attempts to understand the battle, and the field of risk analysis was developed largely to explain antinuclear sentiments. It is crucial to understand this conflict, since it raises important issues of the role of experts in democratic countries.
In Containing the Atom J. Samuel Walker offers a wealth of raw materials for understanding the roots in the 1960s of the controversy that blossomed fully in the 1970s. Intended as a history of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1963 to 1971 (the period of Glenn Seaborg's reign as chairman), this beautifully written account provides more details concerning the civilian development of nuclear power in the United States during that period than any other work ever has - or perhaps ever will. As the official historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the AEC's successor, Walker had unprecedented access to internal memos and documents (as the 75 pages of notes demonstrate), a concern with covering all aspects of nuclear regulation, and the time to check his facts carefully. Because every aspect of nuclear development raised regulatory issues, his book approximates a general history of American nuclear energy rather than merely a history of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Walker organizes his book around a series of issues that regulators faced as they tried to balance their conflicting roles as promoters of the new technology and protectors of public health and safety. Despite the polite tone of the account, the evidence Walker presents is damning. Time after time, the promotional concerns won out, owing in some cases to the entreaties of the nuclear industry, in others to the coercion of Congress's powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and in others yet to the preferences of regulators themselves. I was struck by the number of controversies in this period, the golden age for American nuclear energy, the height of "the great bandwagon market" for reactors in the United States. Most of Walker's substantive chapters deal with debates and controversies: over proposals to put nuclear reactors in cities or near earthquake faults, over reactor safety and the odds for major accidents, over radiation standards and the effects of low doses of radiation. In many cases, the AEC and the nuclear industry treated nuclear critics brutally but learned from them in adopting new standards.
During the period from 1963 to 1971 nuclear fission seemed to achieve commercial success, with almost 80 reactors ordered from 1966 to 1968 - representing almost half of all electrical generating capacity ordered in those three years. Virtually all the reactors ordered in this period were vastly larger than any then in operation. Only the contagious enthusiasm of nuclear energy's promoters, and some loss-leading plants sold by Westinghouse and General Electric, could persuade utilities to buy a technology about which so little (including its costs) was known. So the AEC was extremely successful in its promotional role. Unfortunately, expert understanding of nuclear plant operations and safety was not keeping pace, a lag that contributed to the financial disaster of the 1970s as utilities had to "backfit" safety features.
Containing the Atom, although smoothly written, is hardly casual reading. But anyone who has followed one or more of the issues in the debate over nuclear energy will find chapters of interest here, as most of the abiding questions were first asked in the 1960s. What is striking is how few had been resolved, and how much the technology and its regulation were still evolving, in 1971. Anyone interested in the interplay of democracy, technology, and expertise will be stimulated by these stories.
One of the book's lessons is that skeptics have an important role to play in the development of risky technologies. Civilian nuclear reactors, in an age when fossil-fuel prices and energy costs were falling, lacked the urgency of the wartime Manhattan Project, but they were nonetheless promoted with an impatient enthusiasm that dismissed opponents as ill-informed or malevolent (communists, for instance, or agents of the coal industry). The AEC tended to dismiss not only protestors (who in the 1960s were often less informed than those of the |70s) but journalists who pointed out the lack of evidence for nuclear energy's safety and cheapness (Science, for one, published some skeptical reportage) and unconvinced scientists (including many who worked within the AEC's vast empire). In too many instances the skeptics proved right.
In the absence of solid evidence about the effects of a technology, one can only base predictions on one's intuitions about how the world works: about the rapidity of technological development, about the competence of experts, about the ability of private corporations to balance profits and public safety, about the willingness of government regulators to oversee those corporations. Walker tells the story of people who, albeit with frequent exceptions, had an unquestioning faith in technology, experts, electric utilities, and government regulators. Other voices, of those who lacked that faith, were systematically excluded. But it is also the story of the skeptics' persistence, so that by 1971, whether right or wrong, they could no longer be ignored. There can be no simple explanation for the emotional controversy over nuclear energy, but Walker has provided much valuable raw material for building a complex one.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jasper, James M. "Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971." Science, vol. 259, no. 5097, 1993, p. 996+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A13458289/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d45e9715. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A13458289
QUOTE:
Prompt & Utter Destruction is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of atomic weapons and warfare, the Truman administration, U.S. - Soviet relations, World War II, or who are simply curious about why Truman decided to use not one, but two atomic weapons on Japan.
Prompt & Utter Destruction, Revised Edition
Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. By J. Samuel Walker. (Read How You Want: 2009) EasyRead Large Edition. [Originally Published in Standard Print by The University of North Carolina Press.] ISBN: 978-1-4429-9475-1
Reviewed by Rochelle Caviness - October 20, 2009
Within weeks, if not days, of the United States dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, word began to spread that the reason that the bombs were used was to save American lives. It was said that hundreds of thousands, upwards to a million, American military causalities were saved by the dropping of the Atomic bombs. Lives that would have been lost if the American's had invaded Japan, as planned, in an attempt to bring the War in the Pacific to a close. We were also told that the use of these horrific weapons also saved an untold number of Japanese causalities, both civilian and military, that would have been lost in the invasion of the Japanese homeland. It made sense, and it salved the conscious of a nation. But, was it true? In the revised edition of Prompt & Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, historian J. Samuel Walker provides a step-by-step analysis of what led the American's and President Truman, in particular, to use Atomic bombs against Japan as a means of forcing a Japanese surrender and to bring World War II to a conclusion. He details the machinations that went into making this decision, how it was carried out, and its political ramifications. He also explores the testy question of whether or not the atomic bombs were really necessary to force a Japanese surrender and what other steps could have been taken to achieve the same goal. As well, he provides an analysis of the mythology that grew up surrounding the decision to drop the atomic bombs, and the veracity of the statement that their use saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and drastically reduced the length of the war.
In this book, Walker does not conclusively declare that the use of the bombs was, or was not, necessary to end the war and save American lives. What he does show, through careful analysis, is that the reason that the bombs were used was complicated. The decision encompassed not only a desire to end the war as soon as possible, but also to 'show up' the Soviets on both a military and diplomatic front, to get revenge on the Japanese for Pearl Harbor and other perceived atrocities, for Truman's own political purposes, and to justify the cost and manpower that had been devoted to the creation of the atomic bombs, to name just a few reasons. Walker also examines what other options were available to Truman for ending the war, and how long these options, if they had been implemented, would likely have taken, and the cost in American casualties that could have been anticipated. Why these options were not chosen, is also covered.
What I found to be of most interest is that Walker was carefull to differentiate between what information was actually known by Truman and his advisors at the time that they were making the decisions about using the atomic bombs, and what information has been derived from 'what might have been' scenarios that are based on hindsight and consequently was information that Truman was not privy to. As well, Walker examines Truman's personality, his decision making process, and highlights the fact that no one seems to have ever considered not using the atomic bomb against Japan. After all, the bombing of civilian targets had been into the American, and Allied, policies as shown by the carpet bombing of Dresden and other German cities. If by killing large numbers of civilians you could shock a people, or government, into capitulating, it was deemed, now, as a normal cost of war. As well, Walker provides insights into the thought processes of many of Truman's advisors, often by allowing them to speak for themselves via quotes and excerpts from speeches, letters, personal diary's and other first person sources.
In his analysis of Truman's decision to use the Atomic bomb on Japan, Walker also looks at how the success of the 'Trinity' test (the United States's first test of an Atomic device) influenced his behavior at the Potsdam meeting between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, and how their interaction at this meeting shaped the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan. Walker also examines the role played by Truman's success in getting the Soviet's promise to enter the war in East Asia by invading Manchuria, and how this invasion, once it began, altered the face of the War. Interestingly, Walker also includes data gathered in part from Gallup Polls that show how average Americans felt about the use of the Atomic bomb against Japan.
From beginning to end, Prompt & Utter Destruction is an eminently readable book that is accessible to both scholars and general readers alike. Walker not only takes the reader on a guided tour of Truman's decision making process and shows what prompted him to give the order to use the Atomic bomb on Japan, but Walker also explores the historical situation that led to this decision. Walker also examines the Japanese viewpoint, not only in regard to the impact of the Atomic bombings on their decision to surrender, but also how the Allies call for an unconditional surrender, one that could conceivably have led to Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, being tried for war crimes, may have made the Japanese reluctant to surrender even in the face of a crushing defeat! Walker also provides insights into the role that the use of the Atomic weapons had on the Japanese decision to surrender. As with the decision to use the bombs, their decision to surrender was not as clear cut and easy to define as one would first imagine.
Prompt & Utter Destruction is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of atomic weapons and warfare, the Truman administration, U.S. - Soviet relations, World War II, or who are simply curious about why Truman decided to use not one, but two atomic weapons on Japan.
Prompt & Utter Destruction is available in a variety of formats including Braille, DAISY, and five different large print formats that range from 16-24 point fonts, from Read How You Want, an on-demand publisher. The RHYW editions of the book are complete and unabridged and included Walker extensive endnotes. In addition, the print versions of this book includes the same illustrations as the standard print version. Once you read this book, you'll understand that the decision to use the Atomic bomb against Japan was not a simple decision based solely on speeding up the end of the war or saving American military personnel from having to invade the Japanese home islands. Rather it was a multi layered decision that still has repercussions today...