The Embrace of Atomic Bomb Orthodoxy and Revisionism

Abstract

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 chem-