Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (review)

As historian Michael Gordin's book contends, "shock and awe" in a military campaign is not a recent development. The inaugural use of the atomic bomb against the city of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, was meant to shock the Japanese Emperor into surrender, and instill in the citizens of Japan a sense of awe so powerful as to mitigate the ignominy of defeat. The use of a second bomb only three days later, against Nagasaki, sent the not-significant message that the Hiroshima bombing was no unique occurrence, and that the United States prospectively had many more bombs with which to carry out the "rain of ruin" threatened in the Potsdam ultimatum. In fact, a third bomb would soon be at the ready, but the impression of an American atomic quiver full of arrows was palpably false. Fully two years after Japan's surrender, the U.S. nuclear arsenal consisted of a mere baker's dozen of bombs; none, evidently, could have been made ready for use in less than a fortnight.

But Gordin's thesis is that the shock as well as the awe of the atomic raids were perceived only in retrospect; and that in both the lead up to and the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings, neither U.S. war planners nor the Japanese government appreciated the truly revolutionary nature of the new weapon. Accordingly, Five Days in August is a corrective to what might be called foreshortened history: the tendency to view past events through the prism of their modern-day effects. As Gordin observes, correctly, "the attribution of transcendent powers to the nuclear weapon have shaped both the culture and the geopolitics of our present world…" Yet, he argues, that was not the case at the time.

In the summer of 1945, the U.S. military was anticipating that many atomic bombs—some of them used tactically, in support of amphibious landings on the beaches of Japan—might be necessary to force the Emperor's surrender; whereas the Japanese, for their part, were probably more shocked by Russia's unexpected entry into the Pacific war than by the atomic bombings.

Gordin is to be admired for tackling a subject that has already been the subject of numerous books, this reviewer's included, and for a thorough and thoroughly professional use of primary and secondary sources in his work. In particular, the author's chapter on Tinian, the mid-Pacific island that was the staging area for both atomic raids, is an important contribution to the operational side of the story behind the use of the bombs, which has been generally overlooked by historians.

But, if new, there remains the question of what is true in Gordin's account. Much of the author's argument relies upon the notion that the atomic bomb was not really considered anything "special" by military planners prior to its use. While it is true that planners underestimated the effects of both so-called prompt radiation and fallout from the bomb—as one scientist observed, after the war, the guiding assumption beforehand had been that "any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first"—the persuasiveness of Gordin's account depends on what one considers "special." From the author's own evidence, it seems that some considered the bomb special, and some did not.

The same thing might be said about the initial, and initially equivocal, reaction in the United States to the atomic bombings. Whereas a Fortune magazine poll of December 1945 showed that nearly 70% of respondents thought the atomic bomb was "a good thing"—and almost a quarter felt the U.S. "should have quickly used many more of them before Japan had a chance to surrender"—there were also an impressive number of church leaders, religious groups, and even political pundits...