The Embrace of Atomic Bomb Orthodoxy and Revisionism

Wilson Miscamble, an award-winning diplomatic historian at the University of Notre Dame, would like everyone to stop talking about atomic-bomb revisionism: the idea that the atomic bomb was not primarily used to end the war with Japan but to intimidate the Soviets and make Joseph Stalin more pliant in the emerging postwar order; thus the weapon’s use formed an important seed of the Cold War that blighted the world for the next four decades. This historiographical tradition stems from Gar Alperovitz’ Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965), timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alperovitz used the newly released diaries of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the Truman administration to argue that the Americans engaged in a “strategy of delayed showdown” with the Soviet Union in the endgame of World War II. Miscamble will have none of this, and he structures this slim textbook as an all-out attack on every major thesis launched by Alperovitz. Miscamble’s central argument echoes what is known in atomic-bomb historiography as the “orthodox” position: the atomic bomb(s) ended the war, as intended, and had no connection to postwar (or wartime) efforts at “atomic diplomacy” with respect to the Soviet Union. Recent scholarship has confirmed most of this picture, especially the last point about the failure of the Americans to make any substantial geopolitical hay out of their atomic monopoly. Yet, by patterning his argument on Alperovitz’, Miscamble recapitulates a mirror-image of revisionism. Simply put, the best way to stop the error of linking the atomic bombs’ use in the war with postwar diplomatic history is to stop doing so.

The historiography of nuclear weapons in the 1940s divides into three general subfields of history, each stressing progressively later years of that decade. The first concerns the actual building of the atomic bomb, and it has traditionally been a story of physicists (recent scholarship also includes chemists and engineers), their involvement with the military, and the three-and-a-half–year effort to build a functioning nuclear device. Aside from detailed monographs by historians of science, one can locate this school in the official history by Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume I: 1939/1946 (1962); in Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986); and, more recently, in Andrew J. Rotter’s Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (2008), an international history comparing several nuclear programs in the 1940s. The second cluster, a branch of military history, focuses on the use of the atomic bombs in the final days of the war with Japan; included here are Richard B. Frank’s Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999) and my own Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007). The final set hails from the storied corridors of diplomatic history and follows the thinking of politicians and diplomats about the role nuclear weapons might play in both foreign and domestic policy. Such works comprise the bulk of the historiography, represented by, for example, Martin J. Sherwin’s A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race (1973, 1987); Wilson Miscamble’s own From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (2007) for the early years; and, for the later years, both Gregg Herken’s The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (1980) and Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko’s The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (2008).

Linking these disparate approaches has long proved a challenge, and the orthodoxy/revisionism dispute centers around the causal priority of the military and diplomatic histories. (The technological story is decidedly subordinated in both...