August 21, 2024 • 49 mins
Author Evan Thomas joins Misha to talk about his new book Road to Surrender and the atomic bombing of Japan.
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(00:00):
[MUSIC]
>> Michael Auslin (00:09):
Welcome back to the Pacific Century, a Hoover Institution
podcast on China, America, andthe fate of the world in the 21st century.
I'm your host, Michael Auslin, and
it is a real pleasure today to be joinedby not just an historian and a scholar,
but someone whom I have admired andwhose work I've admired for years.
(00:32):
Ever since I was, in fact,back in college and read his first book,
co-authored, which was the Wise Men.
And that, of course, forthose of you who don't know,
which I can't imagine is anyone,is Evan Thomas.
Evan is a graduate of Harvard Universityand University of Virginia law School.
(00:52):
He started off as a reporter at time and
then in 1991 joined Newsweek,where he reported for 24 years.
But he is best known, probably,for not only his historical work,
but in particular,his group biographies, again,
starting with The Wise Men, which wasco-authored with Walter Isaacson.
But books that many of you know,including The Very Best Men,
(01:15):
The Early Years of the CIA,Sea of Thunder,
Four Naval Commanders andThe Last Sea War, The War Lovers,
Roosevelt Lodge, Hearst, andthe Rush to Empire, 1898.
And then a host of single focusedbiographies, including on Eisenhower,
Nixon, John Paul Jones, andRobert Kennedy, among others.
(01:37):
So in addition to being one ofthe most prolific authors and
historians we have today.
Evan is just a wonderful person andsomeone who is so
interesting to talk to, which iswhy I wanted to have him on today,
to talk in particular about hisbrand new book, Road to Surrender,
three men andthe Countdown to the end of World War II.
(02:01):
So, Evan Thomas,welcome to the Pacific century.
>> Evan Thomas (02:05):
Hi, and thanks for having me.
>> Michael Auslin (02:07):
Well, it's great to do this publicly.
Of course, we've met privately andbeen able to talk, but
I thought that given the book and thetimeliness of the book Road to Surrender.
It'd be a wonderfulopportunity to have you
reflect a little bit onwhy you wrote this book.
Now, it focuses on the droppingof the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
(02:30):
And of course, for historians andthose who deal with Asia,
this is not uncharted territory.
People have written about the atomic bomb,
they've written aboutthe decision to drop the bomb.
But you once again took ona slightly different approach,
which was the group biography,focusing on three critical
individuals during that period,the very last months of World War II.
(02:54):
Which is, of course, secretary of warHenry Stimson, Carl Tooey Spataz,
who was the head of our strategicbombing arm in the Pacific.
And I think perhaps most interesting,the Japanese foreign minister,
Togo Shigenori,Togo being his family name.
So before we get into youranalysis of the decision and
(03:16):
some of the controversies thatstill arise from the decision.
Evan, why did you write this book?
>> Evan Thomas (03:25):
Well, I had a personal connection.
My father had beena junior officer on a LST,
a Landing Ship Tank,that was on its way from Europe,
where he'd been at D-Day andother European theater things.
And on his way to the Pacific for
the scheduled invasion ofJapan in the fall of 1945.
(03:48):
And the legend in my family always wasthat my sisters and I existed because
of the atom bombs, because if therehadn't been those atom bombs.
He would have died,that's not totally far fetched.
There are war gaming thatshowed that in the first day,
a couple hundred LSTs would be sunk.
(04:09):
The Japanese had 7000 Kamikazeplanes hidden in caves and
around the landing beach at Kyushu.
Then it was gonna be,I think pretty well accepted, a bloodbath.
There's an argument over how biga bloodbath, but a big bloodbath, and
that could have included my father.
So that was always the family legend.
(04:30):
But also, growing up, as many ofyour listeners had, I had a pretty
heavy dose in school and collegequestioning, why did we really do this?
There's a whole school of scholarship thatGar Alperovitz is the most famous member.
But there are others who say, really,did we really have to drop those bombs?
(04:50):
And did we have to drop two of them?
And couldn't we have warned the Japanesesomehow or negotiated a settlement?
And that question kinda gnawed at me fora long time, and so that drew me into it.
But really why I did this book wasI'm interested in moral ambiguity.
And I suspected from my earlier booksthat this was not an easy black and
(05:15):
white yes, no question [COUGH].
That even though the decisionwas to drop them,
that didn't mean that the people who madethose decisions had an easy time of it.
I'm also super interested in the Japaneseside because you mentioned an earlier
book I wrote called Sea of Thunder.
And that was about the Battleof Leyte Gulf, and
(05:36):
that I decided to do the Japaneseside as well as the American side.
It turns out that the Japanese side[LAUGH] is in some ways more interesting
than the American side, because when youtalk about moral ambivalence, it's so
hard for us westerners to get this.
And I'm not an expert, I had a lot of helpfrom Japanese people helping me with this.
(05:56):
I'm a westerner.
I don't claim super knowledge on this,but I reached out to the Japanese
side of the story and went to Japan andtalked to people there.
And I'm fascinated by moral ambiguity,and it was intense on both sides.
With dropping the atom bomb, therereally was not much of a decision there,
(06:17):
but there was a lot of angst over it,a lot of private hand wringing.
And so on the American side, I pickedthese characters who were very phlegmatic.
And in that generation especially,never complain, never explain.
You don't whine about what you're doing,there's no Internet.
This is all before the me generation.
(06:39):
[LAUGH] These people are all, don't beselfish, don't even talk about yourself.
But that doesn't mean they didn't worryand so what I wanted to do is get at that.
And in the case of Henry Stimson,the Secretary of War,
who really was really the chairmanof the board of the atom bomb.
The war secretary is running the Manhattanproject from afar, but he's running it.
(07:03):
In his diary,he called it by its code name, S1.
But he also called it the awful,the terrible, the diabolical,
a Frankenstein monster.
He was just very upset about this.
And this really got my attentionon the morning that he showed
Harry Truman the photographs of whatHiroshima looked like after the bomb.
(07:28):
So these are aerialphotographs of the damage.
What does Hiroshima look like?
The inside of an ashtray, I mean,there is nothing left there.
And Stimson that morninghas a heart attack.
Now, he's 77 years old,he's got a heart condition.
Maybe it's a coincidence,but I don't think so.
I think he was just traumatized by this,and I know he was guilty about it.
(07:49):
In later years, one of the reasons why therevisionists really dug in was that they
saw Stimson's guilt about it,and they thought, whoa,
if Henry Stimson's guilty about it,Maybe we shouldn't have done it.
Now I think I show that wewere gonna do it anyways, and
matter how much guilt he felt.
And this is important andit was the only real choice.
(08:12):
Not a good choice, butthe only real choice.
So in looking at moral ambiguity,I wanted to do a military operator.
Somebody was involved in the delivery ofthe bomb, and I decided to do 2e Spaatz.
General Carl Spaatz, who was the headof strategic bombing in the Pacific,
but before that had donestrategic bombing in Europe.
(08:33):
And that interested me, because in Europe,
we killed a lot of civilians,and we didn't want to.
We called a precision bombing.
We said we were aiming at militarytargets, and we tried to hit, but
we missed.
The technology was imperfect,the Norton bomb site didn't work.
(08:53):
The Germans were shooting at us,the weather was bad.
We killed a lot of civilians.
And on the night that wekilled a lot of civilians,
which was when we bombedDresden in February 1945,
a lot of your listeners will rememberthis, the firebombing of Dresden.
It was both a British operation,but also US.
Two nights after we bombed Dresden,2E Spaatz blew $1,700 on a poker game.
(09:20):
That's the way he relieved the tension,he didn't complain about it.
He didn't write whiny letters.
He did complain to his wife a little bit,but he just didn't know what else to do.
So he blew two months salary on a pokergame, I think that's revealing.
>> Michael Auslin (09:36):
So one of the things that you do uniquely, I think,
in this book, compared to some ofthe other books that have dealt with
the question of the bomb,building it and using it, is,
as you've been intimating,though haven't explicitly said here,
is that you're trying to get intothe minds of these characters.
But you're getting into their thoughts andwords by using their diaries,
(09:59):
by using letters, by peeling backfrom the official, as you say,
sort of the office workto the work at home.
So whether it's Stimson and his wife,very close relationship, and as you said,
one where he's in ill health, spats tryingto figure out how to blow off steam.
What about Togo Shigenori?
(10:20):
Very rarely do we get, I mean, obviously,there have been books on the end of
the war from the Japanese perspective,but very rarely have we focused,
I think, as carefully as you do onone of the key Japanese antagonists.
So maybe tell us, if you would,a little bit about him.
Why'd you choose him?
Why not Hirohito?
Why not Togo?
Someone else.
>> Evan Thomas (10:40):
Well, writing about Japan is especially challenging.
For one thing, the Japanese don'tbelieve in speaking ill of the dead.
We say that, but they actually mean it.
So in their post war recollections,they write around a lot of their problems.
Indirection is for people who havestudied Japan, been to Japan.
They know that indirectionis part of the culture.
Certainly was in the 1940s,and so that's a problem.
(11:03):
But I focused on Togo Shigenori,just say it the Japanese way,
because he's the only memberof the Supreme War Council.
People who actually run Japan.
There are six people who basically runJapan, and they are military, all of them,
except for Togo.
He's the foreign minister, war minister,chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy.
(11:26):
But the one civilian is Togo, and
he's a very interesting characterto me because he's anti-Nazi.
That was interesting for a foreignminister, he thinks Hitler's a thug.
He's not even Japanese,well, he's Korean by blood.
He changed his name,his family bought a Samurai name.
(11:46):
Their name had been Park, sohe's a bit of an outsider.
That's important,because if you're an outsider,
you're not totally drinking the Kool-Aid,and you feel like an outsider.
He's an admirer of Germanintellectual history.
He's a little different also, andthis makes him really different.
He's blunt, he's straightforward.
(12:07):
He says what's on his mind, that makeshim very different from his peers.
Now, he has a very difficult task,and he's really the only guy doing it.
Trying to bring the Japanese governmentto surrender in the summer of 1945.
There are others in the government, buthe's the top guy who's trying to do it.
And he puts himself at risk ofassassination, because if you're for
(12:29):
surrender in Japan in 1945,the word surrender has been forbidden.
You can't even use the word, and theseyoung hothead colonels will kill you.
It's not an idle threat.
In Japan in the 1930s, I think two orthree prime ministers were assassinated.
There were famous assassination attempts,and
there's graffiti in the walls of Tokyo.
(12:52):
They wanna kill, what do they call them?
They use this Italian word, I'm suddenlyforgetting it, but it means traitor.
They're looking for traitors, anybodywho wants to surrender is a traitor.
So the point is, he's a personal risk.
So how do I get at this story?
(13:12):
Well, I had the good fortuneof finding his grandsons, and
this is important in this kind of history,to find family members.
And in this case,one of the grandsons had his diary,
which has never been published before,and it's in Japanese.
I had help from Kazu Togo,who was a pretty westernized guy.
(13:36):
He's Japanese diplomat,had been ambassador to Netherlands.
And so he's quite westernized but even so,there are problems of loss in translation.
And I had a lot of help from an American,a guy named Brian Walsh,
who is a Princeton PhD.
He teaches in Japan,he teaches history in Japan.
His wife is Japanese andhe acted as my translator,
(14:00):
but also my interpreter.
There can be a lot of lostin translation here and so
we would have these Zoomcalls between Kazu.
We also got his twin, Shige,on the phone, on the Zoom, and Brian.
And we would talk through, really tryingto understand Togo Shigenori's diary,
(14:20):
what he meant, what he's thinking,and that's that.
You said, getting into the head,that is what I'm trying to do.
It's tricky, but with the diary,those are imperfect devices.
I'm sure your readerswill understand this.
People write diaries for lots of reasons,they're not always honest.
They can be written forthe record or for history, so
(14:41):
you have to be careful with it.
But I did the best I can with hisgrandsons interpreting his diary.
And it is a record,it's an important record.
And it showed his own angst over all this,how exhausted and
worn he was by this nearly futile attemptto bring around the Japanese government.
(15:03):
He succeeds finally,because the emperor of Japan, Hirohito,
who's been a tool of the militarythrough most of the war,
finally gets fed up with his own generals.
The key moment is a few months beforethe bomb in June, when the military wants
to move the emperor up into the mountainsto their redoubt, to a palace.
(15:27):
And I don't think really,it's a palace to a bunker, really.
And they've got an armoredtrain to take him there.
And the Emperor says, no, this is new.
The Emperor defying the military.
This is an unusual move, and it shows he'sfinally getting sick of these generals who
are taking this countrydown the road to perdition.
And it's tricky forhim because he's afraid of a coup.
(15:49):
And not that he would be killed,but he would be essentially
become the captive of the military orbe replaced by one of his brothers.
That could also happen, in any case,
the Emperor is starting to havesome distance from the military.
The other big factor is the atom bomb,the atom bomb falls on Hiroshima.
And this, the Emperor thinks,are they coming for me next?
(16:14):
His entourage tells him that they'rehearing the radio signals of the 509th
Composite group, the Air Forcegroup that dropped the atom bomb.
They hear their signals,they're in the air again.
And the Emperor is worried, the Air Forcehas already burned his palace by mistake.
In May, when we were firebombing Tokyo,
not intentionally aiming at the palace,but the firestorm jumped the moat and
(16:38):
burned down a number ofbuildings in the palace grounds.
So the point of this is that the Emperoris afraid for his own safety, and
he's worried that the atombomb is coming for him.
And that finally helps bring him around tosurrender, the records on this are spotty.
The Japanese have never fullyrevealed the record of the Emperor.
(17:01):
They sort of dole it out bit by bit butthere's some recent stuff.
There's a Chamberlain who has talked aboutwhat I've just finished talking about,
that he was worried about the atom bomb.
There's a story named Rich Frank, who'sprobably known to some of your listeners,
who's onto this and writing a very longthree volume work on the Pacific war.
(17:23):
And he told me about this chamberlainwho has this recent stuff about the.
So the point is, I'm piecing togetherbits and pieces from diaries and
recollections to tell this storythat has been told in various ways,
but not quite as directly as I do,and also not for a popular audience.
(17:43):
One thing I'm doing here is I'mnot writing academic history.
I'm writing for a popular audience.
I have to be accurate, andI have it vetted by academics.
And I'm careful, I got a lot of footnotes,but I'm writing, and I'm writing.
I actually ended up writinga thriller I didn't set out to.
It's about half the lengthof one of my usual books.
(18:04):
And what happened was I decidedto write in the present tense to
make it more immediate, andthat made it move along fast.
And the story itself was morethrilling than I realized, cuz again,
it's the Japanese side.
I didn't realize how close it was,how close they came to not surrendering.
That really has not been brought out wellin other books, rich Frank gets at it,
(18:25):
some others get at it.
But that's the heart of my book isthis kind of thrilling last couple
of weeks when it's not, you know wewon the war, we dropped the bomb.
But [LAUGH] l in a way,you don't know, it's thrilling.
You sort of can't believewhat a close run thing it is.
>> Michael Auslin (18:43):
Well, I think that's exactly one of the things I want to bring
up, two things.
One is exactly that, which is, yeah,of course, if you're an academic and
you've studied it, you know thateven after the bombs were dropped,
there was questions within the highcouncils and the Supreme War Council.
Would they surrender?
Would they not, could they keep fighting?
(19:05):
But you really bring that tolife in a way that I think
shows that there reallywas no other option.
Meaning that for all the questions aboutthe peace feelers through the Russians or
the peace feelers through the Swiss,that they were hopelessly deadlocked.
And even after Hirohito had prettywell made clear his own desires
(19:29):
that the war end,they still dragged it on.
So this was not by any means a sure thing.
Leading back to that question of,did we actually have to do it?
>> Evan Thomas (19:39):
Yeah, this is an important point, because in the revisionist school,
the United States has broken the Japanesediplomatic code, and we intercept
these messages that make it pretty clearthe Emperor is saying, I want peace.
But if you look closely at the decodedmessages at the dialogue between Togo,
(19:59):
my guy, the foreign minister, andthe Japanese ambassador to Moscow, who's
supposed to go to the Russians and getthe Russians to mediate a peace effort.
It's pretty clear fromthe decoded messages that it's
somewhat of a half hearted attempt.
And the Japanese ambassador says, look,
(20:20):
you're not gonna get this unless youagree to unconditional surrender.
And Togo says, no,we're not doing that and why?
Because the war council doesn'twanna do unconditional surrender,
what do they want?
They know they've lost the war, it's notlike the Japanese think they're gonna win.
They know that they've lost,their fleet has been sunk.
(20:44):
But what they want is to forcean invasion that will be so
bloody that the Americans finally say,enough,
no mas, andgive them what they really want.
What do they really want?
No American occupation andno war crimes trials.
(21:04):
Because remember, who's gonna behung in the war crimes trials but
the Japanese military leaders?
So the guys making the decision,no, the noose is around their neck.
So they want no war crimes trials andthey wanna keep the Emperor and
they want all those three things.
And they think that it's not crazy,it's not really irrational.
They think if they can make usbleed enough, they'll get that.
(21:26):
So that's why they wannaforce an invasion.
The atom bombs change the equationbecause they can beat and
they can have a bloody invasion.
But if we just keep dropping atombombs on them, that's not an invasion.
That's just the fairly quickdeath of all of Japan.
So there's a squabble,how many bombs do we have?
(21:46):
Do we have more than one?
Well, actually, it turns out we do,cuz we drop a second bomb.
But even after the second bomb,there's a scene.
The war council's meeting, andword comes to them, Hiroshima.
Not just Hiroshima, but now,second bomb, a Hiroshima style bomb,
has just taken out Nagasaki.
(22:07):
And what is the war minister?
The most powerful man in the room,Anami, General Anami.
He's the war minister, what does he say?
He says, wouldn't it be beautiful ifthe whole nation was to die like a flower?
This is the way they talked.
Now he's blustering for his subordinates,
(22:27):
who he doesn't wanna getkilled by them either.
So some of this is bluster butthe point, they're tied.
The war council is not voting to surrendereven after the second bomb, it's divided.
It's a three to three deadlock.
In order to get anything done in Japan,you have to have a consensus.
So the war council is deadlocked,so it's gonna just drag on.
Fortunately, Emperor, that night,finally comes around and says, no,
(22:52):
I agree with Togo.
I agree with a foreign minister,we're gonna surrender, are we done?
No, because the message thatgoes to Washington says, okay,
we surrender, butthe Emperor has to be sovereign.
Well, the message gets to Truman andStimson and Byrnes,
the secretary of state, andthey go, whoa, wait a second.
(23:15):
You can't have a sovereign, you can'tpreserve the Japanese imperial system,
that's gotta go.
So we sent a message back saying, okay,well, great, you accept your surrender,
but the Emperor is not gonna be sovereign.
It's gonna be subject tothe supreme allied commander.
They don't want the Emperorreporting to God, he's a deity.
They want him reportingto Douglas MacArthur.
(23:36):
Well, they're back at square onebecause the Japanese can't accept that.
They can't accept the Emperorlosing their sovereignty.
So this rattles on forfour or five more days.
Meanwhile, a coup attempt is launched, and
the war minister half goes along with it.
It's unclear what his motivations are,and I think he's deeply ambivalent.
(23:58):
I spoke earlier about moral ambivalence,which is a big theme of my book.
Anami, I think, is ambivalent.
He doesn't wanna cross the Emperor,but on the other hand,
he doesn't want to surrender.
So he kind of half encouragesthis nutty coup attempt.
But it's not that nutty, because whileAnami commits suicide, Harakiri, he takes
his sword and plunges it in his stomach,right, because what else is he gonna do?
(24:21):
These crazy colonels kill the head ofthe imperial guard and they forge orders,
giving them control of the palace.
And the night before the Emperor'sscheduled surrender speech,
there are soldiers running throughthe imperial palace trying to find
the recording of his speech,of the emperor's speech.
So they can break it, sothat there won't be a speech.
(24:43):
We`re back, if that happens,we're back in, who knows?
Civil war, military,government, who knows?
It's just complete chaos.
Fortunately, the soldierscannot find the recording.
It's hidden in a room reserved forthe ladies in waiting to the empress.
You can't make this stuff up,it's a movie.
(25:04):
And the chief plotter at that pointis a young colonel, he goes out and
he shoots himself.
And finally they surrender.
And the Emperor gives his famous address,saying,
war is not going as well as anticipated.
They've been nuked in two days,I mean, twice in ten days,
so it's a very close run thing.
And my book, I think,captures the drama of this.
>> Michael Auslin (25:25):
One thing that you talk about that, honestly,
I'd like to think I had forgotten it,meaning I did know it at some point,
but I honestly am not sure I did.
We've always been told we only hadtwo bombs, we used the two bombs.
If the Japanese hadn't surrendered,we were out of Schlitz.
We had nothing more to use toforce them into a surrender.
(25:47):
And yet you talk about a third bomb,so when I first read that,
I thought, I got him, the mistake.
There's no way, I know this period.
And you go through and you talk aboutthe preparations that were going on.
General Groves, who was the operationalhead of the Manhattan project,
(26:07):
preparing a third bomb that theythought would be ready within the fall.
And the target forthat most likely would have been Tokyo.
And you go through some of those debates.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
Cuz I think, to me, that was actually new.
>> Evan Thomas (26:23):
Yeah, again, remember, I'm a journalist here.
I'm not making new academic discoveries,and I don't wanna claim to.
So other scholars have unearthedthe record that shows there
was a third bomb that wouldhave been ready by August 20th,
actually, pretty soon,not just the fall, but August 20th.
(26:46):
And initially Truman gets Truman is soshocked,
he gives control to the militaryover dropping the bomb.
The order goes out, initially sayingbombs is made ready for targets.
But then when Truman sees the photographsof what Hiroshima looks like,
he takes civilian control back,no, no, no, no more bombs.
(27:07):
He doesn't even know aboutthe Nagasaki bomb that goes off,
he doesn't know the timingof it that goes off.
Now he's got civilian control again,the president's control.
He says, no more bombs.
So they stop the transmission of,the sending of the third bomb is actually
halted for a couple of days, and thenthey're getting ready to resume it again,
because the Japanese are not surrendering.
(27:28):
So they would have had a third bomb readyfor delivery on about August 20, where?
Well, my character, General Spots and
his buddies at Atinian wannapick the next target, Tokyo.
Now that sounds a little grimmer than itis because they don't mean to drop it on
(27:48):
the palace.
After all,somebody's gotta surrender here.
They're not trying to kill the Emperor,they wanna drop it on a burned out area.
There's a lot of burned out Tokyo,maybe 20 square miles, maybe even more.
So the thinking is do itas a kinda a demonstration.
So what they call the scare radius,the flash and the boom is big enough, loud
(28:11):
enough so the Emperor and his governmentcan see how terrible a third bomb.
So now we got three, andthat that would force him into surrender.
And Truman, we know this froma document from the british archives.
On the day before the Japanese surrender,the official surrender,
(28:32):
Truman is meeting with Britishdiplomats and interestingly,
the Duke of Windsor, who's in Washington.
And he says, according to the Britishdocument, he says, sadly,
he says, we're gonna have todrop a third atom bomb on Tokyo.
And that is five hours before they getword the Japanese has finally surrendered,
(28:57):
this time for real, sothat bomb never gets dropped.
But it's even worse than thatbecause there's also a record that
General Marshall, the saintedGeneral Marshall, the army chief of staff,
is thinking,the Japanese are not surrendering here.
We're gonna have to invade after all.
Marshall's thinking abouttactical nuclear bombs,
(29:20):
using nine nuclear bombson the beaches of Kyushu.
It's sort of hard to believe, I thinkwe would have had about seven ready by
the day of the invasion, November 1st,but maybe would have had a couple more.
In any case, he's asking fornine atom bombs.
He asked, how is this gonna work?
And they say, well,the invading forces should lay back for
(29:44):
48 hours before we go over.
They didn't understand radiationas well as they should have.
I think there was somewillful denial on this,
there's some very goodscholarship on this.
Sean Malloy, who's very good on this,is sowing kind of a willful denial,
(30:04):
not just by the military,but by Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer is not ascurious about radiation and
the effects of radiation as he might be,why?
Cuz I think he wants to drop this bomb,he wants to do this demonstration and
show the world this is not in the movie.
They don't really get into this,but there's a lot of evidence,
(30:25):
and again, there's a scholar namedSean Malloy who's gotten into this,
that they should have known moreabout radiation than they did.
And Groves, the head of the Manhattanproject, he covers it all up.
But Oppenheimer's in cahoots,not just Oppenheimer, but
President Conant of Harvard is not ascurious about the effects of radiation as
he might have been.
(30:46):
I'm pretty sure that's because theydidn't want to have a big discussion
about poison.
Poison gas had been provedawful in World War I,
it had not been used in World War II.
The people making the bomb did not wannaget into a big discussion about radiation
cuz it's like poison gas, and sothey kind of skipped past the risk.
(31:07):
They knew the risks, butthey minimized them.
And then when they were confronted withradiation poisoning in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, they were kind of in denial fora while.
>> Michael Auslin (31:18):
It's actually fascinating, and again,
something that I myself,I'm not that familiar with.
To play devil's advocate for a second onanother issue, though, you saying that.
Interestingly, almost couldbe used to give credence to
the argument that we werethinking about these bombs for
(31:41):
an incipient Cold War,meaning there was an international
agreement after World War Inever to use poison gas again.
And the argument is Hitler adheredto it in World War II because he was
a victim of poison gas.
>> Evan Thomas (31:58):
Right. >> Michael Auslin
gas attack in World War I.
So even he bizarrely, even forHitler, poison gas was too much,
at least on the battlefield,obviously not against civilians and
Jews in the concentration camps.
So if the same dynamic had takenplace of radiation poisoning,
it's a horrible thing.
We're gonna ban the use of the bomb but
(32:18):
why wouldn't you wannaban the use of the bomb?
Only if you see its utility in post war,a post war environment.
There's a division, I think, on this.
The person who's thinkingthe most about the atom bomb and
Russia is Secretary Jimmy Byrnes.
He wants to use it as a diplomatic weapon,like a pistol in your pocket,
(32:41):
to intimidate the Russians.
And I think he does think that way, andI think Truman does a little bit as well.
Stimson is more ambivalent, in his diary,he says, this is our master card.
But he changes his mind.
He initially thinks,we can use this to threaten the Russians,
maybe to make the Russians liberalize.
(33:02):
But then he decides, after we've droppeda couple of these bombs, he just says, no,
we need to bring the Russians intothe tent, share the secret with them and
have some arms control.
He gives the first ever arms controlspeech to the Aussie bowl club in,
I think it's early September, 1945, rightaround the time of the Japanese surrender.
He makes a plan to sharethe bomb with Truman.
(33:25):
He shows it to him in September and Trumanrejects it, and the arms race is on.
Why does Truman reject it?
It's not all that unreasonable in thesense that the idea that Stalin is gonna
allow inspectors intoRussia is far fetched.
The Russians are building their own bomb,I don't think they're gonna share with us.
(33:47):
I'm torn by this.
I'd like to think if only the UnitedStates had proposed to the Russians arms
control right away, nuclear freeze,basically international control,
the whole world would have been better.
I'd like to think that.
But at the same time,not that I'm a Russian expert,
I have a hard time seeing Stalinagreeing to this sort of freeze and
(34:10):
agreeing to allow western inspectors in.
It's just so un-Russian to do that,
especially since they had stolenthe secret of the bomb and
were building their own,which they had within four years by 1940.
>> Michael Auslin (34:21):
And we hadn't told them at all about the bomb preparations
officially during.
So they already felt,well, we can't trust them.
They're not gonna share with us.
>> Evan Thomas (34:28):
How do they trusted us anyways, neither side trusted the other.
I think realistically, I don't thinkarms control could have happened.
I say that with regret, and I find thisa difficult subject to know for sure.
This is all historical counterfactuals,and those are always hard, but I don't
think we could have trusted the Russiansand they wouldn't have trusted us.
>> Michael Auslin (34:51):
One thing I wanted to go back to just very briefly,
because we overlook it, andyet it's an indication of just
how revolutionary andtransformative the atomic bomb was.
You mentioned, of course,that Truman initially said to the Army,
as soon as you get them use them.
And the Army Air Forces and then hesaw the devastation of Hiroshima and
(35:14):
took control.
Now, we take that for granted today, but Ithink it's worth remembering that never in
American history had an American presidenttaken personal meaning in his position.
Civilian control of a weapon.
Of course, he was commander in chief,sends the army and the Navy, but
he actually took control of thisweapon and without much of a fight.
(35:37):
I mean, whether that's because ofthe strength of the constitution or
because everyone understoodhow unique this was.
I just think it's worth rememberingthat if it had gone differently,
we could have had the militaryin charge of the weapon.
>> Evan Thomas (35:48):
Yeah, no, Truman himself is somewhat ambivalent about it.
He later talked about howit was my decision and
I never lost a minute's sleep about it.
But I think the evidence is thathe did lose some sleep about it.
And one bit of evidence is that, just,as you say, he took control of it,
having given the military control,he took it back and he kept control.
(36:10):
The Atomic Energy commissionkept control of those bombs.
They didn't give him back to the military,I believe until Korea, is that right?
I think the AEC had control ofthose bombs until the Korean War.
They didn't transfer the actualphysical control of the weapons
back to the military until the Korean War.
And even then, the chief executivekept control over the decision.
>> Michael Auslin (36:35):
Over the usage, that's right.
Right, andyou have the famous anecdotes of
Douglas MacArthur stating,this changes war forever.
Bernard Brody, the naval theorist whobecomes really our first atomic theorist,
who says, up until now,
(36:55):
the whole point of building weaponshas been to prepare to fight wars.
Now we have to prepare not to fight wars.
That's the whole point of the military,
because we have the nuclear weapon,that this really was transformative.
And since we're getting towardsthe end of the interview,
I'd actually like to begin transitioning,if we could, towards the present.
(37:20):
Your book brings to lifea period of history that many,
there are still people who remember.
They remember the firstreports of the bomb.
They certainly remember the earlydays of the atomic age, and
those people are getting fewer and fewer.
But we also, since the end ofthe Cold War, have largely,
at least in this country, sort of putthe nuclear question back in the bottle.
(37:43):
The genie back in the bottle.
Doctor Strangelove has folded up the tent,but
that's not how the worldhas acted in many ways.
>> Evan Thomas (37:49):
Unfortunately, I mean, I'm certainly of that generation.
>> Michael Auslin (37:52):
We're back in a nuclear world.
>> Evan Thomas (37:53):
I hate it.
I mean, I grew up with duck andcover drills and all that, and I was so
grieved in 1989, 1990, 1991,when the genie went back in the bottle.
Well, it's out again, andit's kind of unstable.
Scary way,
because the Russians have talked abouttactical use of tactical nuclear.
Putin is using tactical nuclear weaponsin Ukraine, let's hope he doesn't do it.
(38:16):
It's terrible military weapon.
But I'm actually more worried aboutthe Pacific theater because the war
game scenario there that I think isall too plausible is some kind of
naval engagement happens over Taiwan orjust over freedom of the seas.
But anyways,we get into a sea fight with China, and
(38:37):
the problem, and you probably know moreabout this than I do, but I believe
that China has land based missilesthat they would use to sink our ships.
>> Michael Auslin (38:47):
Yes.
>> Evan Thomas (38:48):
And so they are shooting at us from their land base, so
what do we do?
We take out their landbased missile sites.
Now the United States of Americais attacking Chinese mainland, so
what's the next step?
Well, it wouldn't be crazy to usea tactical nuclear weapon against
the American fleet.
For the Chinese to use a tactical nuclearweapon against the American fleet.
(39:12):
Now we are into what they euphemisticallycall limited nuclear war.
I have my doubts about whether youcan fight a limited nuclear war.
I have these doubts just cuzit seems crazy to me, but
also because Dwight Eisenhower,I wrote a book about Dwight Eisenhower,
who never really, in the 50s, peoplestarted talking about limited nuclear war.
(39:36):
And the think tanks at Rand andHerman Kahn and all that and game theory.
And I remember Eisenhowernever really bought that.
He thought if you start these wars,you're all in, and he would bluff.
I wrote a book called Ike's Bluff aboutEisenhower's bluff with nuclear weapons
cuz he was an all in guy.
Either you fight with these all away ordon't.
(39:59):
I mean, or don't even tempt fate,
do not get into an engagement thatcan escalate into a nuclear war.
I have this fear now about the Pacificthat we could get into a military
engagement that would tempt fate bytempting the Chinese to use a tactical
weapon against our fleet.
And then who knows, forone thing, you've got cyber.
(40:20):
So while all this is going on,they're knocking out satellites.
What's to stop the Chinese from turningthe lights out in the United States?
People have not come to grips with thesescenarios that are scary as all hell.
It's not some nice little 19thcentury naval battle of ships shooting
at each other that we're getting into.
(40:41):
We're shooting at main lands andcyber attacks on the United States, for
one thing, the economy goes to hellright away cuz stock market collapses.
I mean a war with China is gonna be
a really ugly, scary thing.
I'm not saying doomsday,although you can get to doomsday, but
(41:03):
these scenarios are very-.
>> Michael Auslin (41:05):
These scenarios are very frightening, for sure.
And you raise and questions that backthen they really had no idea about.
So for example, you don't have to set offa tactical nuclear weapon against our
forces, but you could set off an EMP,an electromagnetic pulse,
with a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere.
Now how do we respond to that?
And if we don't respond,does that embolden them?
(41:27):
There's other scenarios, by the way.
You brought up the question of usattacking their land-based missiles to
protect not just our ships, butour bases in the region, in Japan,
on Guam, perhaps South Korea.
There are scenarios where the mostassured way of doing that is by launching
our own missiles, not just from planes,but ballistic missiles.
(41:48):
Where if you're the Chinese and you seea ballistic missile coming in, do you wait
to make sure it's conventional and notnuclear before you decide to launch yours?
So you're exactly right I thinkto raise this question of
the uncertainties in the Pacific,perhaps proximately it's
more worrisome in Ukraine right now,but over the long run.
(42:10):
And these are, as you point out,scenarios that we simply haven't had
fully thought through, I mean hopefullythere are some people doing it.
But what's so interesting then, to go backto the book as we begin to finish up,
is of course that was a nuclear monopoly,
an atomic monopoly thatthe United States had for four years.
(42:31):
And so when you talk about Stimson,and Truman, and Oppenheimer,
and Groves, and Byrnes, and all of them.
That was the royal flushof all royal flushes,
you don't get anything better,and yet it was ephemeral.
>> Evan Thomas (42:47):
Yeah, yeah, people forget.
I mean there was no risk ofescalation in 1945 cuz we were
the only people who had the bomb.
Now, nine countries have bombs,and our immediate foes,
Russia and China, they got bombs.
Iran could have a bomb soon.
I mean you're in an escalatoryworld which didn't exist in 1945,
(43:08):
it does now andit behooves us to think about that.
In fact, I'm a little surprised thatwe're not thinking about it more,
that this is not more a publicquestion that is debated in either
the think tank world,which you're familiar with.
Or maybe it is,maybe I'm not well enough educated.
(43:28):
And I do know there is some talk aboutthis in the scholarly journals, but
I'm surprised there'snot more talk about it.
>> Michael Auslin (43:37):
Well, I think that's exactly right.
There are people that talk about it, but
it's the same thing that happened toRussian studies after the Cold War.
We sort of closed up shopon the nuclear question,
assuming we didn't have to worry about it,and
we didn't train a new generationof nuclear thinkers for 30 years.
There were some,of course there were some, but
not like how we did during the Cold War.
(43:59):
Nor did we do it in a way thatthe nuclear question was intimately
related to every strategicquestion we discussed because we
understood that ultimatelyit could come into play.
And after 1989, 1991, we just figured wellwe didn't have to think about that, and
you're right.
So I think it's a loss of muscle memory,
(44:20):
it's a loss of institutional intellectualcapacity, which we have to build up.
And while there are some attempts at that,and we talk about war games and
the like, I think that a lot of it isdone with a sort of post 1992 mindset.
Not a post 45 mindset where youvery quickly had a pure competitor,
(44:40):
the Soviet Union,that could deliver missiles or
could deliver bombs and then had missiles.
But I think we sort of take it with the,well,
we've got such overwhelming power that wedon't have to really worry about this.
So I think in a lot of ways it isworth going back to the book and
the angst questions, the moralambiguity that you raise as starting
(45:02):
points to talk about,how do we ensure that this never happens?
They were dealing with it, as you pointout, because in essence it had to happen,
they needed to use it.
But we need to think about howyou never need to use it, but
with the same sets of questions.
So to leave us then,is there anything from the book,
Evan, that you would say isthe most important lesson?
(45:25):
If there's one that you can draw out forus today,
is there one, or is it just it's so
overwhelming that you sort of haveto take it in its own totality?
>> Evan Thomas (45:38):
There's no great moral bottom line here.
There's a wish that our leaderswill be serious about this and
think about it in a more serious way.
Politics is a joke right now,it's pathetic and
it's almost amusing, butit's kinda darkly amusing.
(46:01):
And we need, this kinda sounds ridiculous,but we need more serious leaders.
That's sort of pathetic to say that, but
we need more serious leaderswho are thinking this way.
Now having said that,
I think at the presidential leaderlevel they may not be so serious.
That's not fair, actually,Trump is a joke.
(46:23):
But Biden has been aroundthe track a few times,
I shouldn't be so critical of him.
But our general political discourse today,
our public discourse,is laughably naive and
focuses on things that are notthe things that are gonna kill us.
(46:49):
We need to be more focused onthe questions that we're talking about.
>> Michael Auslin (46:54):
Well if anything,
that brings into even starker relief thecharacter of someone like Henry Stimson,
the core, the central figure in your book.
>> Evan Thomas (47:03):
Yeah, I hope we have some good, I mean I hope our presidents,
this is obvious, buthave some serious people.
I think Jake Sullivan's a serious person,I don't mean to say they're not.
And I think Trump,
even in Trump's presidency he hadsome decent people advising him.
I'm not sure in a secondTrump presidency if he would,
I'm not sure who those people are.
(47:24):
In the first Trump presidencyhe did have some serious and
good people, butlet's hope if Trump wins he does it again.
It's hard to even imagine,to tell you the truth.
>> Michael Auslin (47:37):
Well that's why I think the value of going back and looking at
that's what history does for us, right,as you have done through 11 books,
shown people, mostly men giventhe periods that you're dealing with.
But people who dealt very carefully, andsoberly, and seriously with questions,
(47:59):
and honestly none perhaps asgrave as that of the atomic bomb.
So I think that's a goodpoint to wrap it up.
And again, the book is Road to Surrender,the author Evan Thomas.
Most of you have read at least one,if not more, of his books,
I urge you to get this one as well.
(48:19):
And Evan, it has been a great pleasurehaving you on The Pacific Century.
>> Evan Thomas (48:23):
Thanks, Michael, I really enjoyed it.
>> Michael Auslin (48:25):
So for The Pacific Century, I'm Michael Auslin.
It's been, as always, great to have youwith us, and we will see you next time.
>> Female Speaker (48:41):
This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution,
where we generate andpromote ideas advancing freedom.
For more information about our work,to hear more of our podcasts, or
view our video content,please visit hoover.org.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
>> Michael Auslin (00:09):
Welcome back to the Pacific Century, a Hoover Institution
podcast on China, America, andthe fate of the world in the 21st century.
I'm your host, Michael Auslin, and
it is a real pleasure today to be joinedby not just an historian and a scholar,
but someone whom I have admired andwhose work I've admired for years.
(00:32):
Ever since I was, in fact,back in college and read his first book,
co-authored, which was the Wise Men.
And that, of course, forthose of you who don't know,
which I can't imagine is anyone,is Evan Thomas.
Evan is a graduate of Harvard Universityand University of Virginia law School.
(00:52):
He started off as a reporter at time and
then in 1991 joined Newsweek,where he reported for 24 years.
But he is best known, probably,for not only his historical work,
but in particular,his group biographies, again,
starting with The Wise Men, which wasco-authored with Walter Isaacson.
But books that many of you know,including The Very Best Men,
(01:15):
The Early Years of the CIA,Sea of Thunder,
Four Naval Commanders andThe Last Sea War, The War Lovers,
Roosevelt Lodge, Hearst, andthe Rush to Empire, 1898.
And then a host of single focusedbiographies, including on Eisenhower,
Nixon, John Paul Jones, andRobert Kennedy, among others.
(01:37):
So in addition to being one ofthe most prolific authors and
historians we have today.
Evan is just a wonderful person andsomeone who is so
interesting to talk to, which iswhy I wanted to have him on today,
to talk in particular about hisbrand new book, Road to Surrender,
three men andthe Countdown to the end of World War II.
(02:01):
So, Evan Thomas,welcome to the Pacific century.
>> Evan Thomas (02:05):
Hi, and thanks for having me.
>> Michael Auslin (02:07):
Well, it's great to do this publicly.
Of course, we've met privately andbeen able to talk, but
I thought that given the book and thetimeliness of the book Road to Surrender.
It'd be a wonderfulopportunity to have you
reflect a little bit onwhy you wrote this book.
Now, it focuses on the droppingof the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
(02:30):
And of course, for historians andthose who deal with Asia,
this is not uncharted territory.
People have written about the atomic bomb,
they've written aboutthe decision to drop the bomb.
But you once again took ona slightly different approach,
which was the group biography,focusing on three critical
individuals during that period,the very last months of World War II.
(02:54):
Which is, of course, secretary of warHenry Stimson, Carl Tooey Spataz,
who was the head of our strategicbombing arm in the Pacific.
And I think perhaps most interesting,the Japanese foreign minister,
Togo Shigenori,Togo being his family name.
So before we get into youranalysis of the decision and
(03:16):
some of the controversies thatstill arise from the decision.
Evan, why did you write this book?
>> Evan Thomas (03:25):
Well, I had a personal connection.
My father had beena junior officer on a LST,
a Landing Ship Tank,that was on its way from Europe,
where he'd been at D-Day andother European theater things.
And on his way to the Pacific for
the scheduled invasion ofJapan in the fall of 1945.
(03:48):
And the legend in my family always wasthat my sisters and I existed because
of the atom bombs, because if therehadn't been those atom bombs.
He would have died,that's not totally far fetched.
There are war gaming thatshowed that in the first day,
a couple hundred LSTs would be sunk.
(04:09):
The Japanese had 7000 Kamikazeplanes hidden in caves and
around the landing beach at Kyushu.
Then it was gonna be,I think pretty well accepted, a bloodbath.
There's an argument over how biga bloodbath, but a big bloodbath, and
that could have included my father.
So that was always the family legend.
(04:30):
But also, growing up, as many ofyour listeners had, I had a pretty
heavy dose in school and collegequestioning, why did we really do this?
There's a whole school of scholarship thatGar Alperovitz is the most famous member.
But there are others who say, really,did we really have to drop those bombs?
(04:50):
And did we have to drop two of them?
And couldn't we have warned the Japanesesomehow or negotiated a settlement?
And that question kinda gnawed at me fora long time, and so that drew me into it.
But really why I did this book wasI'm interested in moral ambiguity.
And I suspected from my earlier booksthat this was not an easy black and
(05:15):
white yes, no question [COUGH].
That even though the decisionwas to drop them,
that didn't mean that the people who madethose decisions had an easy time of it.
I'm also super interested in the Japaneseside because you mentioned an earlier
book I wrote called Sea of Thunder.
And that was about the Battleof Leyte Gulf, and
(05:36):
that I decided to do the Japaneseside as well as the American side.
It turns out that the Japanese side[LAUGH] is in some ways more interesting
than the American side, because when youtalk about moral ambivalence, it's so
hard for us westerners to get this.
And I'm not an expert, I had a lot of helpfrom Japanese people helping me with this.
(05:56):
I'm a westerner.
I don't claim super knowledge on this,but I reached out to the Japanese
side of the story and went to Japan andtalked to people there.
And I'm fascinated by moral ambiguity,and it was intense on both sides.
With dropping the atom bomb, therereally was not much of a decision there,
(06:17):
but there was a lot of angst over it,a lot of private hand wringing.
And so on the American side, I pickedthese characters who were very phlegmatic.
And in that generation especially,never complain, never explain.
You don't whine about what you're doing,there's no Internet.
This is all before the me generation.
(06:39):
[LAUGH] These people are all, don't beselfish, don't even talk about yourself.
But that doesn't mean they didn't worryand so what I wanted to do is get at that.
And in the case of Henry Stimson,the Secretary of War,
who really was really the chairmanof the board of the atom bomb.
The war secretary is running the Manhattanproject from afar, but he's running it.
(07:03):
In his diary,he called it by its code name, S1.
But he also called it the awful,the terrible, the diabolical,
a Frankenstein monster.
He was just very upset about this.
And this really got my attentionon the morning that he showed
Harry Truman the photographs of whatHiroshima looked like after the bomb.
(07:28):
So these are aerialphotographs of the damage.
What does Hiroshima look like?
The inside of an ashtray, I mean,there is nothing left there.
And Stimson that morninghas a heart attack.
Now, he's 77 years old,he's got a heart condition.
Maybe it's a coincidence,but I don't think so.
I think he was just traumatized by this,and I know he was guilty about it.
(07:49):
In later years, one of the reasons why therevisionists really dug in was that they
saw Stimson's guilt about it,and they thought, whoa,
if Henry Stimson's guilty about it,Maybe we shouldn't have done it.
Now I think I show that wewere gonna do it anyways, and
matter how much guilt he felt.
And this is important andit was the only real choice.
(08:12):
Not a good choice, butthe only real choice.
So in looking at moral ambiguity,I wanted to do a military operator.
Somebody was involved in the delivery ofthe bomb, and I decided to do 2e Spaatz.
General Carl Spaatz, who was the headof strategic bombing in the Pacific,
but before that had donestrategic bombing in Europe.
(08:33):
And that interested me, because in Europe,
we killed a lot of civilians,and we didn't want to.
We called a precision bombing.
We said we were aiming at militarytargets, and we tried to hit, but
we missed.
The technology was imperfect,the Norton bomb site didn't work.
(08:53):
The Germans were shooting at us,the weather was bad.
We killed a lot of civilians.
And on the night that wekilled a lot of civilians,
which was when we bombedDresden in February 1945,
a lot of your listeners will rememberthis, the firebombing of Dresden.
It was both a British operation,but also US.
Two nights after we bombed Dresden,2E Spaatz blew $1,700 on a poker game.
(09:20):
That's the way he relieved the tension,he didn't complain about it.
He didn't write whiny letters.
He did complain to his wife a little bit,but he just didn't know what else to do.
So he blew two months salary on a pokergame, I think that's revealing.
>> Michael Auslin (09:36):
So one of the things that you do uniquely, I think,
in this book, compared to some ofthe other books that have dealt with
the question of the bomb,building it and using it, is,
as you've been intimating,though haven't explicitly said here,
is that you're trying to get intothe minds of these characters.
But you're getting into their thoughts andwords by using their diaries,
(09:59):
by using letters, by peeling backfrom the official, as you say,
sort of the office workto the work at home.
So whether it's Stimson and his wife,very close relationship, and as you said,
one where he's in ill health, spats tryingto figure out how to blow off steam.
What about Togo Shigenori?
(10:20):
Very rarely do we get, I mean, obviously,there have been books on the end of
the war from the Japanese perspective,but very rarely have we focused,
I think, as carefully as you do onone of the key Japanese antagonists.
So maybe tell us, if you would,a little bit about him.
Why'd you choose him?
Why not Hirohito?
Why not Togo?
Someone else.
>> Evan Thomas (10:40):
Well, writing about Japan is especially challenging.
For one thing, the Japanese don'tbelieve in speaking ill of the dead.
We say that, but they actually mean it.
So in their post war recollections,they write around a lot of their problems.
Indirection is for people who havestudied Japan, been to Japan.
They know that indirectionis part of the culture.
Certainly was in the 1940s,and so that's a problem.
(11:03):
But I focused on Togo Shigenori,just say it the Japanese way,
because he's the only memberof the Supreme War Council.
People who actually run Japan.
There are six people who basically runJapan, and they are military, all of them,
except for Togo.
He's the foreign minister, war minister,chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy.
(11:26):
But the one civilian is Togo, and
he's a very interesting characterto me because he's anti-Nazi.
That was interesting for a foreignminister, he thinks Hitler's a thug.
He's not even Japanese,well, he's Korean by blood.
He changed his name,his family bought a Samurai name.
(11:46):
Their name had been Park, sohe's a bit of an outsider.
That's important,because if you're an outsider,
you're not totally drinking the Kool-Aid,and you feel like an outsider.
He's an admirer of Germanintellectual history.
He's a little different also, andthis makes him really different.
He's blunt, he's straightforward.
(12:07):
He says what's on his mind, that makeshim very different from his peers.
Now, he has a very difficult task,and he's really the only guy doing it.
Trying to bring the Japanese governmentto surrender in the summer of 1945.
There are others in the government, buthe's the top guy who's trying to do it.
And he puts himself at risk ofassassination, because if you're for
(12:29):
surrender in Japan in 1945,the word surrender has been forbidden.
You can't even use the word, and theseyoung hothead colonels will kill you.
It's not an idle threat.
In Japan in the 1930s, I think two orthree prime ministers were assassinated.
There were famous assassination attempts,and
there's graffiti in the walls of Tokyo.
(12:52):
They wanna kill, what do they call them?
They use this Italian word, I'm suddenlyforgetting it, but it means traitor.
They're looking for traitors, anybodywho wants to surrender is a traitor.
So the point is, he's a personal risk.
So how do I get at this story?
(13:12):
Well, I had the good fortuneof finding his grandsons, and
this is important in this kind of history,to find family members.
And in this case,one of the grandsons had his diary,
which has never been published before,and it's in Japanese.
I had help from Kazu Togo,who was a pretty westernized guy.
(13:36):
He's Japanese diplomat,had been ambassador to Netherlands.
And so he's quite westernized but even so,there are problems of loss in translation.
And I had a lot of help from an American,a guy named Brian Walsh,
who is a Princeton PhD.
He teaches in Japan,he teaches history in Japan.
His wife is Japanese andhe acted as my translator,
(14:00):
but also my interpreter.
There can be a lot of lostin translation here and so
we would have these Zoomcalls between Kazu.
We also got his twin, Shige,on the phone, on the Zoom, and Brian.
And we would talk through, really tryingto understand Togo Shigenori's diary,
(14:20):
what he meant, what he's thinking,and that's that.
You said, getting into the head,that is what I'm trying to do.
It's tricky, but with the diary,those are imperfect devices.
I'm sure your readerswill understand this.
People write diaries for lots of reasons,they're not always honest.
They can be written forthe record or for history, so
(14:41):
you have to be careful with it.
But I did the best I can with hisgrandsons interpreting his diary.
And it is a record,it's an important record.
And it showed his own angst over all this,how exhausted and
worn he was by this nearly futile attemptto bring around the Japanese government.
(15:03):
He succeeds finally,because the emperor of Japan, Hirohito,
who's been a tool of the militarythrough most of the war,
finally gets fed up with his own generals.
The key moment is a few months beforethe bomb in June, when the military wants
to move the emperor up into the mountainsto their redoubt, to a palace.
(15:27):
And I don't think really,it's a palace to a bunker, really.
And they've got an armoredtrain to take him there.
And the Emperor says, no, this is new.
The Emperor defying the military.
This is an unusual move, and it shows he'sfinally getting sick of these generals who
are taking this countrydown the road to perdition.
And it's tricky forhim because he's afraid of a coup.
(15:49):
And not that he would be killed,but he would be essentially
become the captive of the military orbe replaced by one of his brothers.
That could also happen, in any case,
the Emperor is starting to havesome distance from the military.
The other big factor is the atom bomb,the atom bomb falls on Hiroshima.
And this, the Emperor thinks,are they coming for me next?
(16:14):
His entourage tells him that they'rehearing the radio signals of the 509th
Composite group, the Air Forcegroup that dropped the atom bomb.
They hear their signals,they're in the air again.
And the Emperor is worried, the Air Forcehas already burned his palace by mistake.
In May, when we were firebombing Tokyo,
not intentionally aiming at the palace,but the firestorm jumped the moat and
(16:38):
burned down a number ofbuildings in the palace grounds.
So the point of this is that the Emperoris afraid for his own safety, and
he's worried that the atombomb is coming for him.
And that finally helps bring him around tosurrender, the records on this are spotty.
The Japanese have never fullyrevealed the record of the Emperor.
(17:01):
They sort of dole it out bit by bit butthere's some recent stuff.
There's a Chamberlain who has talked aboutwhat I've just finished talking about,
that he was worried about the atom bomb.
There's a story named Rich Frank, who'sprobably known to some of your listeners,
who's onto this and writing a very longthree volume work on the Pacific war.
(17:23):
And he told me about this chamberlainwho has this recent stuff about the.
So the point is, I'm piecing togetherbits and pieces from diaries and
recollections to tell this storythat has been told in various ways,
but not quite as directly as I do,and also not for a popular audience.
(17:43):
One thing I'm doing here is I'mnot writing academic history.
I'm writing for a popular audience.
I have to be accurate, andI have it vetted by academics.
And I'm careful, I got a lot of footnotes,but I'm writing, and I'm writing.
I actually ended up writinga thriller I didn't set out to.
It's about half the lengthof one of my usual books.
(18:04):
And what happened was I decidedto write in the present tense to
make it more immediate, andthat made it move along fast.
And the story itself was morethrilling than I realized, cuz again,
it's the Japanese side.
I didn't realize how close it was,how close they came to not surrendering.
That really has not been brought out wellin other books, rich Frank gets at it,
(18:25):
some others get at it.
But that's the heart of my book isthis kind of thrilling last couple
of weeks when it's not, you know wewon the war, we dropped the bomb.
But [LAUGH] l in a way,you don't know, it's thrilling.
You sort of can't believewhat a close run thing it is.
>> Michael Auslin (18:43):
Well, I think that's exactly one of the things I want to bring
up, two things.
One is exactly that, which is, yeah,of course, if you're an academic and
you've studied it, you know thateven after the bombs were dropped,
there was questions within the highcouncils and the Supreme War Council.
Would they surrender?
Would they not, could they keep fighting?
(19:05):
But you really bring that tolife in a way that I think
shows that there reallywas no other option.
Meaning that for all the questions aboutthe peace feelers through the Russians or
the peace feelers through the Swiss,that they were hopelessly deadlocked.
And even after Hirohito had prettywell made clear his own desires
(19:29):
that the war end,they still dragged it on.
So this was not by any means a sure thing.
Leading back to that question of,did we actually have to do it?
>> Evan Thomas (19:39):
Yeah, this is an important point, because in the revisionist school,
the United States has broken the Japanesediplomatic code, and we intercept
these messages that make it pretty clearthe Emperor is saying, I want peace.
But if you look closely at the decodedmessages at the dialogue between Togo,
(19:59):
my guy, the foreign minister, andthe Japanese ambassador to Moscow, who's
supposed to go to the Russians and getthe Russians to mediate a peace effort.
It's pretty clear fromthe decoded messages that it's
somewhat of a half hearted attempt.
And the Japanese ambassador says, look,
(20:20):
you're not gonna get this unless youagree to unconditional surrender.
And Togo says, no,we're not doing that and why?
Because the war council doesn'twanna do unconditional surrender,
what do they want?
They know they've lost the war, it's notlike the Japanese think they're gonna win.
They know that they've lost,their fleet has been sunk.
(20:44):
But what they want is to forcean invasion that will be so
bloody that the Americans finally say,enough,
no mas, andgive them what they really want.
What do they really want?
No American occupation andno war crimes trials.
(21:04):
Because remember, who's gonna behung in the war crimes trials but
the Japanese military leaders?
So the guys making the decision,no, the noose is around their neck.
So they want no war crimes trials andthey wanna keep the Emperor and
they want all those three things.
And they think that it's not crazy,it's not really irrational.
They think if they can make usbleed enough, they'll get that.
(21:26):
So that's why they wannaforce an invasion.
The atom bombs change the equationbecause they can beat and
they can have a bloody invasion.
But if we just keep dropping atombombs on them, that's not an invasion.
That's just the fairly quickdeath of all of Japan.
So there's a squabble,how many bombs do we have?
(21:46):
Do we have more than one?
Well, actually, it turns out we do,cuz we drop a second bomb.
But even after the second bomb,there's a scene.
The war council's meeting, andword comes to them, Hiroshima.
Not just Hiroshima, but now,second bomb, a Hiroshima style bomb,
has just taken out Nagasaki.
(22:07):
And what is the war minister?
The most powerful man in the room,Anami, General Anami.
He's the war minister, what does he say?
He says, wouldn't it be beautiful ifthe whole nation was to die like a flower?
This is the way they talked.
Now he's blustering for his subordinates,
(22:27):
who he doesn't wanna getkilled by them either.
So some of this is bluster butthe point, they're tied.
The war council is not voting to surrendereven after the second bomb, it's divided.
It's a three to three deadlock.
In order to get anything done in Japan,you have to have a consensus.
So the war council is deadlocked,so it's gonna just drag on.
Fortunately, Emperor, that night,finally comes around and says, no,
(22:52):
I agree with Togo.
I agree with a foreign minister,we're gonna surrender, are we done?
No, because the message thatgoes to Washington says, okay,
we surrender, butthe Emperor has to be sovereign.
Well, the message gets to Truman andStimson and Byrnes,
the secretary of state, andthey go, whoa, wait a second.
(23:15):
You can't have a sovereign, you can'tpreserve the Japanese imperial system,
that's gotta go.
So we sent a message back saying, okay,well, great, you accept your surrender,
but the Emperor is not gonna be sovereign.
It's gonna be subject tothe supreme allied commander.
They don't want the Emperorreporting to God, he's a deity.
They want him reportingto Douglas MacArthur.
(23:36):
Well, they're back at square onebecause the Japanese can't accept that.
They can't accept the Emperorlosing their sovereignty.
So this rattles on forfour or five more days.
Meanwhile, a coup attempt is launched, and
the war minister half goes along with it.
It's unclear what his motivations are,and I think he's deeply ambivalent.
(23:58):
I spoke earlier about moral ambivalence,which is a big theme of my book.
Anami, I think, is ambivalent.
He doesn't wanna cross the Emperor,but on the other hand,
he doesn't want to surrender.
So he kind of half encouragesthis nutty coup attempt.
But it's not that nutty, because whileAnami commits suicide, Harakiri, he takes
his sword and plunges it in his stomach,right, because what else is he gonna do?
(24:21):
These crazy colonels kill the head ofthe imperial guard and they forge orders,
giving them control of the palace.
And the night before the Emperor'sscheduled surrender speech,
there are soldiers running throughthe imperial palace trying to find
the recording of his speech,of the emperor's speech.
So they can break it, sothat there won't be a speech.
(24:43):
We`re back, if that happens,we're back in, who knows?
Civil war, military,government, who knows?
It's just complete chaos.
Fortunately, the soldierscannot find the recording.
It's hidden in a room reserved forthe ladies in waiting to the empress.
You can't make this stuff up,it's a movie.
(25:04):
And the chief plotter at that pointis a young colonel, he goes out and
he shoots himself.
And finally they surrender.
And the Emperor gives his famous address,saying,
war is not going as well as anticipated.
They've been nuked in two days,I mean, twice in ten days,
so it's a very close run thing.
And my book, I think,captures the drama of this.
>> Michael Auslin (25:25):
One thing that you talk about that, honestly,
I'd like to think I had forgotten it,meaning I did know it at some point,
but I honestly am not sure I did.
We've always been told we only hadtwo bombs, we used the two bombs.
If the Japanese hadn't surrendered,we were out of Schlitz.
We had nothing more to use toforce them into a surrender.
(25:47):
And yet you talk about a third bomb,so when I first read that,
I thought, I got him, the mistake.
There's no way, I know this period.
And you go through and you talk aboutthe preparations that were going on.
General Groves, who was the operationalhead of the Manhattan project,
(26:07):
preparing a third bomb that theythought would be ready within the fall.
And the target forthat most likely would have been Tokyo.
And you go through some of those debates.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
Cuz I think, to me, that was actually new.
>> Evan Thomas (26:23):
Yeah, again, remember, I'm a journalist here.
I'm not making new academic discoveries,and I don't wanna claim to.
So other scholars have unearthedthe record that shows there
was a third bomb that wouldhave been ready by August 20th,
actually, pretty soon,not just the fall, but August 20th.
(26:46):
And initially Truman gets Truman is soshocked,
he gives control to the militaryover dropping the bomb.
The order goes out, initially sayingbombs is made ready for targets.
But then when Truman sees the photographsof what Hiroshima looks like,
he takes civilian control back,no, no, no, no more bombs.
(27:07):
He doesn't even know aboutthe Nagasaki bomb that goes off,
he doesn't know the timingof it that goes off.
Now he's got civilian control again,the president's control.
He says, no more bombs.
So they stop the transmission of,the sending of the third bomb is actually
halted for a couple of days, and thenthey're getting ready to resume it again,
because the Japanese are not surrendering.
(27:28):
So they would have had a third bomb readyfor delivery on about August 20, where?
Well, my character, General Spots and
his buddies at Atinian wannapick the next target, Tokyo.
Now that sounds a little grimmer than itis because they don't mean to drop it on
(27:48):
the palace.
After all,somebody's gotta surrender here.
They're not trying to kill the Emperor,they wanna drop it on a burned out area.
There's a lot of burned out Tokyo,maybe 20 square miles, maybe even more.
So the thinking is do itas a kinda a demonstration.
So what they call the scare radius,the flash and the boom is big enough, loud
(28:11):
enough so the Emperor and his governmentcan see how terrible a third bomb.
So now we got three, andthat that would force him into surrender.
And Truman, we know this froma document from the british archives.
On the day before the Japanese surrender,the official surrender,
(28:32):
Truman is meeting with Britishdiplomats and interestingly,
the Duke of Windsor, who's in Washington.
And he says, according to the Britishdocument, he says, sadly,
he says, we're gonna have todrop a third atom bomb on Tokyo.
And that is five hours before they getword the Japanese has finally surrendered,
(28:57):
this time for real, sothat bomb never gets dropped.
But it's even worse than thatbecause there's also a record that
General Marshall, the saintedGeneral Marshall, the army chief of staff,
is thinking,the Japanese are not surrendering here.
We're gonna have to invade after all.
Marshall's thinking abouttactical nuclear bombs,
(29:20):
using nine nuclear bombson the beaches of Kyushu.
It's sort of hard to believe, I thinkwe would have had about seven ready by
the day of the invasion, November 1st,but maybe would have had a couple more.
In any case, he's asking fornine atom bombs.
He asked, how is this gonna work?
And they say, well,the invading forces should lay back for
(29:44):
48 hours before we go over.
They didn't understand radiationas well as they should have.
I think there was somewillful denial on this,
there's some very goodscholarship on this.
Sean Malloy, who's very good on this,is sowing kind of a willful denial,
(30:04):
not just by the military,but by Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer is not ascurious about radiation and
the effects of radiation as he might be,why?
Cuz I think he wants to drop this bomb,he wants to do this demonstration and
show the world this is not in the movie.
They don't really get into this,but there's a lot of evidence,
(30:25):
and again, there's a scholar namedSean Malloy who's gotten into this,
that they should have known moreabout radiation than they did.
And Groves, the head of the Manhattanproject, he covers it all up.
But Oppenheimer's in cahoots,not just Oppenheimer, but
President Conant of Harvard is not ascurious about the effects of radiation as
he might have been.
(30:46):
I'm pretty sure that's because theydidn't want to have a big discussion
about poison.
Poison gas had been provedawful in World War I,
it had not been used in World War II.
The people making the bomb did not wannaget into a big discussion about radiation
cuz it's like poison gas, and sothey kind of skipped past the risk.
(31:07):
They knew the risks, butthey minimized them.
And then when they were confronted withradiation poisoning in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, they were kind of in denial fora while.
>> Michael Auslin (31:18):
It's actually fascinating, and again,
something that I myself,I'm not that familiar with.
To play devil's advocate for a second onanother issue, though, you saying that.
Interestingly, almost couldbe used to give credence to
the argument that we werethinking about these bombs for
(31:41):
an incipient Cold War,meaning there was an international
agreement after World War Inever to use poison gas again.
And the argument is Hitler adheredto it in World War II because he was
a victim of poison gas.
>> Evan Thomas (31:58):
Right. >> Michael Auslin
gas attack in World War I.
So even he bizarrely, even forHitler, poison gas was too much,
at least on the battlefield,obviously not against civilians and
Jews in the concentration camps.
So if the same dynamic had takenplace of radiation poisoning,
it's a horrible thing.
We're gonna ban the use of the bomb but
(32:18):
why wouldn't you wannaban the use of the bomb?
Only if you see its utility in post war,a post war environment.
There's a division, I think, on this.
The person who's thinkingthe most about the atom bomb and
Russia is Secretary Jimmy Byrnes.
He wants to use it as a diplomatic weapon,like a pistol in your pocket,
(32:41):
to intimidate the Russians.
And I think he does think that way, andI think Truman does a little bit as well.
Stimson is more ambivalent, in his diary,he says, this is our master card.
But he changes his mind.
He initially thinks,we can use this to threaten the Russians,
maybe to make the Russians liberalize.
(33:02):
But then he decides, after we've droppeda couple of these bombs, he just says, no,
we need to bring the Russians intothe tent, share the secret with them and
have some arms control.
He gives the first ever arms controlspeech to the Aussie bowl club in,
I think it's early September, 1945, rightaround the time of the Japanese surrender.
He makes a plan to sharethe bomb with Truman.
(33:25):
He shows it to him in September and Trumanrejects it, and the arms race is on.
Why does Truman reject it?
It's not all that unreasonable in thesense that the idea that Stalin is gonna
allow inspectors intoRussia is far fetched.
The Russians are building their own bomb,I don't think they're gonna share with us.
(33:47):
I'm torn by this.
I'd like to think if only the UnitedStates had proposed to the Russians arms
control right away, nuclear freeze,basically international control,
the whole world would have been better.
I'd like to think that.
But at the same time,not that I'm a Russian expert,
I have a hard time seeing Stalinagreeing to this sort of freeze and
(34:10):
agreeing to allow western inspectors in.
It's just so un-Russian to do that,
especially since they had stolenthe secret of the bomb and
were building their own,which they had within four years by 1940.
>> Michael Auslin (34:21):
And we hadn't told them at all about the bomb preparations
officially during.
So they already felt,well, we can't trust them.
They're not gonna share with us.
>> Evan Thomas (34:28):
How do they trusted us anyways, neither side trusted the other.
I think realistically, I don't thinkarms control could have happened.
I say that with regret, and I find thisa difficult subject to know for sure.
This is all historical counterfactuals,and those are always hard, but I don't
think we could have trusted the Russiansand they wouldn't have trusted us.
>> Michael Auslin (34:51):
One thing I wanted to go back to just very briefly,
because we overlook it, andyet it's an indication of just
how revolutionary andtransformative the atomic bomb was.
You mentioned, of course,that Truman initially said to the Army,
as soon as you get them use them.
And the Army Air Forces and then hesaw the devastation of Hiroshima and
(35:14):
took control.
Now, we take that for granted today, but Ithink it's worth remembering that never in
American history had an American presidenttaken personal meaning in his position.
Civilian control of a weapon.
Of course, he was commander in chief,sends the army and the Navy, but
he actually took control of thisweapon and without much of a fight.
(35:37):
I mean, whether that's because ofthe strength of the constitution or
because everyone understoodhow unique this was.
I just think it's worth rememberingthat if it had gone differently,
we could have had the militaryin charge of the weapon.
>> Evan Thomas (35:48):
Yeah, no, Truman himself is somewhat ambivalent about it.
He later talked about howit was my decision and
I never lost a minute's sleep about it.
But I think the evidence is thathe did lose some sleep about it.
And one bit of evidence is that, just,as you say, he took control of it,
having given the military control,he took it back and he kept control.
(36:10):
The Atomic Energy commissionkept control of those bombs.
They didn't give him back to the military,I believe until Korea, is that right?
I think the AEC had control ofthose bombs until the Korean War.
They didn't transfer the actualphysical control of the weapons
back to the military until the Korean War.
And even then, the chief executivekept control over the decision.
>> Michael Auslin (36:35):
Over the usage, that's right.
Right, andyou have the famous anecdotes of
Douglas MacArthur stating,this changes war forever.
Bernard Brody, the naval theorist whobecomes really our first atomic theorist,
who says, up until now,
(36:55):
the whole point of building weaponshas been to prepare to fight wars.
Now we have to prepare not to fight wars.
That's the whole point of the military,
because we have the nuclear weapon,that this really was transformative.
And since we're getting towardsthe end of the interview,
I'd actually like to begin transitioning,if we could, towards the present.
(37:20):
Your book brings to lifea period of history that many,
there are still people who remember.
They remember the firstreports of the bomb.
They certainly remember the earlydays of the atomic age, and
those people are getting fewer and fewer.
But we also, since the end ofthe Cold War, have largely,
at least in this country, sort of putthe nuclear question back in the bottle.
(37:43):
The genie back in the bottle.
Doctor Strangelove has folded up the tent,but
that's not how the worldhas acted in many ways.
>> Evan Thomas (37:49):
Unfortunately, I mean, I'm certainly of that generation.
>> Michael Auslin (37:52):
We're back in a nuclear world.
>> Evan Thomas (37:53):
I hate it.
I mean, I grew up with duck andcover drills and all that, and I was so
grieved in 1989, 1990, 1991,when the genie went back in the bottle.
Well, it's out again, andit's kind of unstable.
Scary way,
because the Russians have talked abouttactical use of tactical nuclear.
Putin is using tactical nuclear weaponsin Ukraine, let's hope he doesn't do it.
(38:16):
It's terrible military weapon.
But I'm actually more worried aboutthe Pacific theater because the war
game scenario there that I think isall too plausible is some kind of
naval engagement happens over Taiwan orjust over freedom of the seas.
But anyways,we get into a sea fight with China, and
(38:37):
the problem, and you probably know moreabout this than I do, but I believe
that China has land based missilesthat they would use to sink our ships.
>> Michael Auslin (38:47):
Yes.
>> Evan Thomas (38:48):
And so they are shooting at us from their land base, so
what do we do?
We take out their landbased missile sites.
Now the United States of Americais attacking Chinese mainland, so
what's the next step?
Well, it wouldn't be crazy to usea tactical nuclear weapon against
the American fleet.
For the Chinese to use a tactical nuclearweapon against the American fleet.
(39:12):
Now we are into what they euphemisticallycall limited nuclear war.
I have my doubts about whether youcan fight a limited nuclear war.
I have these doubts just cuzit seems crazy to me, but
also because Dwight Eisenhower,I wrote a book about Dwight Eisenhower,
who never really, in the 50s, peoplestarted talking about limited nuclear war.
(39:36):
And the think tanks at Rand andHerman Kahn and all that and game theory.
And I remember Eisenhowernever really bought that.
He thought if you start these wars,you're all in, and he would bluff.
I wrote a book called Ike's Bluff aboutEisenhower's bluff with nuclear weapons
cuz he was an all in guy.
Either you fight with these all away ordon't.
(39:59):
I mean, or don't even tempt fate,
do not get into an engagement thatcan escalate into a nuclear war.
I have this fear now about the Pacificthat we could get into a military
engagement that would tempt fate bytempting the Chinese to use a tactical
weapon against our fleet.
And then who knows, forone thing, you've got cyber.
(40:20):
So while all this is going on,they're knocking out satellites.
What's to stop the Chinese from turningthe lights out in the United States?
People have not come to grips with thesescenarios that are scary as all hell.
It's not some nice little 19thcentury naval battle of ships shooting
at each other that we're getting into.
(40:41):
We're shooting at main lands andcyber attacks on the United States, for
one thing, the economy goes to hellright away cuz stock market collapses.
I mean a war with China is gonna be
a really ugly, scary thing.
I'm not saying doomsday,although you can get to doomsday, but
(41:03):
these scenarios are very-.
>> Michael Auslin (41:05):
These scenarios are very frightening, for sure.
And you raise and questions that backthen they really had no idea about.
So for example, you don't have to set offa tactical nuclear weapon against our
forces, but you could set off an EMP,an electromagnetic pulse,
with a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere.
Now how do we respond to that?
And if we don't respond,does that embolden them?
(41:27):
There's other scenarios, by the way.
You brought up the question of usattacking their land-based missiles to
protect not just our ships, butour bases in the region, in Japan,
on Guam, perhaps South Korea.
There are scenarios where the mostassured way of doing that is by launching
our own missiles, not just from planes,but ballistic missiles.
(41:48):
Where if you're the Chinese and you seea ballistic missile coming in, do you wait
to make sure it's conventional and notnuclear before you decide to launch yours?
So you're exactly right I thinkto raise this question of
the uncertainties in the Pacific,perhaps proximately it's
more worrisome in Ukraine right now,but over the long run.
(42:10):
And these are, as you point out,scenarios that we simply haven't had
fully thought through, I mean hopefullythere are some people doing it.
But what's so interesting then, to go backto the book as we begin to finish up,
is of course that was a nuclear monopoly,
an atomic monopoly thatthe United States had for four years.
(42:31):
And so when you talk about Stimson,and Truman, and Oppenheimer,
and Groves, and Byrnes, and all of them.
That was the royal flushof all royal flushes,
you don't get anything better,and yet it was ephemeral.
>> Evan Thomas (42:47):
Yeah, yeah, people forget.
I mean there was no risk ofescalation in 1945 cuz we were
the only people who had the bomb.
Now, nine countries have bombs,and our immediate foes,
Russia and China, they got bombs.
Iran could have a bomb soon.
I mean you're in an escalatoryworld which didn't exist in 1945,
(43:08):
it does now andit behooves us to think about that.
In fact, I'm a little surprised thatwe're not thinking about it more,
that this is not more a publicquestion that is debated in either
the think tank world,which you're familiar with.
Or maybe it is,maybe I'm not well enough educated.
(43:28):
And I do know there is some talk aboutthis in the scholarly journals, but
I'm surprised there'snot more talk about it.
>> Michael Auslin (43:37):
Well, I think that's exactly right.
There are people that talk about it, but
it's the same thing that happened toRussian studies after the Cold War.
We sort of closed up shopon the nuclear question,
assuming we didn't have to worry about it,and
we didn't train a new generationof nuclear thinkers for 30 years.
There were some,of course there were some, but
not like how we did during the Cold War.
(43:59):
Nor did we do it in a way thatthe nuclear question was intimately
related to every strategicquestion we discussed because we
understood that ultimatelyit could come into play.
And after 1989, 1991, we just figured wellwe didn't have to think about that, and
you're right.
So I think it's a loss of muscle memory,
(44:20):
it's a loss of institutional intellectualcapacity, which we have to build up.
And while there are some attempts at that,and we talk about war games and
the like, I think that a lot of it isdone with a sort of post 1992 mindset.
Not a post 45 mindset where youvery quickly had a pure competitor,
(44:40):
the Soviet Union,that could deliver missiles or
could deliver bombs and then had missiles.
But I think we sort of take it with the,well,
we've got such overwhelming power that wedon't have to really worry about this.
So I think in a lot of ways it isworth going back to the book and
the angst questions, the moralambiguity that you raise as starting
(45:02):
points to talk about,how do we ensure that this never happens?
They were dealing with it, as you pointout, because in essence it had to happen,
they needed to use it.
But we need to think about howyou never need to use it, but
with the same sets of questions.
So to leave us then,is there anything from the book,
Evan, that you would say isthe most important lesson?
(45:25):
If there's one that you can draw out forus today,
is there one, or is it just it's so
overwhelming that you sort of haveto take it in its own totality?
>> Evan Thomas (45:38):
There's no great moral bottom line here.
There's a wish that our leaderswill be serious about this and
think about it in a more serious way.
Politics is a joke right now,it's pathetic and
it's almost amusing, butit's kinda darkly amusing.
(46:01):
And we need, this kinda sounds ridiculous,but we need more serious leaders.
That's sort of pathetic to say that, but
we need more serious leaderswho are thinking this way.
Now having said that,
I think at the presidential leaderlevel they may not be so serious.
That's not fair, actually,Trump is a joke.
(46:23):
But Biden has been aroundthe track a few times,
I shouldn't be so critical of him.
But our general political discourse today,
our public discourse,is laughably naive and
focuses on things that are notthe things that are gonna kill us.
(46:49):
We need to be more focused onthe questions that we're talking about.
>> Michael Auslin (46:54):
Well if anything,
that brings into even starker relief thecharacter of someone like Henry Stimson,
the core, the central figure in your book.
>> Evan Thomas (47:03):
Yeah, I hope we have some good, I mean I hope our presidents,
this is obvious, buthave some serious people.
I think Jake Sullivan's a serious person,I don't mean to say they're not.
And I think Trump,
even in Trump's presidency he hadsome decent people advising him.
I'm not sure in a secondTrump presidency if he would,
I'm not sure who those people are.
(47:24):
In the first Trump presidencyhe did have some serious and
good people, butlet's hope if Trump wins he does it again.
It's hard to even imagine,to tell you the truth.
>> Michael Auslin (47:37):
Well that's why I think the value of going back and looking at
that's what history does for us, right,as you have done through 11 books,
shown people, mostly men giventhe periods that you're dealing with.
But people who dealt very carefully, andsoberly, and seriously with questions,
(47:59):
and honestly none perhaps asgrave as that of the atomic bomb.
So I think that's a goodpoint to wrap it up.
And again, the book is Road to Surrender,the author Evan Thomas.
Most of you have read at least one,if not more, of his books,
I urge you to get this one as well.
(48:19):
And Evan, it has been a great pleasurehaving you on The Pacific Century.
>> Evan Thomas (48:23):
Thanks, Michael, I really enjoyed it.
>> Michael Auslin (48:25):
So for The Pacific Century, I'm Michael Auslin.
It's been, as always, great to have youwith us, and we will see you next time.
>> Female Speaker (48:41):
This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution,
where we generate andpromote ideas advancing freedom.
For more information about our work,to hear more of our podcasts, or
view our video content,please visit hoover.org.
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