Antiwar.com Blog
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. … The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer
Transcript: Malcolm Gladwell, Author, “The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War” Washington Post Live MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m David Ignatius, a columnist for the Post. Today it s a special pleasure to welcome back to The Washington Post, Malcolm Gladwell. It s not a big part of Malcolm s biography, but back in the 1980s, I tried to hire Malcolm as a writer for the Outlook section of The Post that I was editing. He went to the Post Business section instead, was a star there, left us, went on to The New Yorker and a series of best sellers that s extraordinary.