The debate on the decision to drop atomic bombs has been carried on repeatedly and in very lively fashion here, most notably at the time of the 50th anniversary (when the moderators actually had to call a halt) and again about two and a half years ago. For at least 45 years, I would suggest, the debate has done more to illuminate the current state of the historical profession than to uncover significant new facts. Thus, the Alperovitz thesis originally gained ground because of the general academic revulsion against Cold War policies as a result of the Vietnam War, and even survived the rather trenchant criticism of Alperovitz's scholarship in his book on the New Left and the Cold War. Campbell Craig's review of Sean Malloy's book, it seems to me, exemplifies a new trend.

Increasingly the approach to the past taken in works like these takes the present as a template against which to measure the past, asking, essentially, why Truman, Stimson and company did not see the question of using the atomic bomb the way 21st-century historians would have. This is reflected, first, in a clear assumption that these men were (or should have been) very eager not only to win the war, but to win it with minimum destruction and civilian loss of life. While I certainly agree that the disregard for civilian casualties shown by all sides in the Second World War is terrifying, it was a fact, and it does not make historical sense, it seems to me, to assume that decision-makers thought or should have thought about these things the way that we do.

From this it is but a short step to distorting the evidence as to what they did think. For years I have used Secretary Stimson's famous conversation with General Groves about targeting for the atomic bomb (reported in detail by Groves) as a teaching tool. In that conversation Stimson ruled out Kyoto as a target on historical and political grounds, but there is nothing in that conversation (or in anything else that I know of) suggesting that Stimson was against dropping it on any city. Malloy, according to Craig, has contrary evidence; I wish it had been spelled out and will be interested to see it.

I was amazed, however, by another implication of Campbell Craig's review of Malloy. Without having Malloy's book I can't tell where this came from, but the clear implication of his review is that Stimson's advocacy of international control of atomic energy went nowhere. Can it be that Craig is unaware of the Acheson-Lilienthal plan and the Baruch proposal in the UN?

Craig also wrote,"At Potsdam in July, Stimson related to Truman the news of the successful Trinity test and went along with the decision to exclude the Soviet Union from the Potsdam Declaration." How on earth could the Soviet Union have been included in the Potsdam declaration when it was not yet even in the war? It has already been pointed out that Richard Frank in Downfall showed very clearly how unready the Japanese were to surrender at the time of the Potsdam declaration.

Lastly, I was struck by this remark of Craig's:"Moreover, historians have never been able to find definitive,"smoking-gun" documents that demonstrate precisely why Truman went ahead with the bombing. Our understanding of the decision, therefore, relies more on circumstantial evidence and deductive reasoning than do many other pivotal historical episodes." In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that Truman accepted his advisers' recommendations in order to end the war as quickly as possible. The"smoking gun" documents that haven't been found are the ones that would have confirmed alternative explanations.

I have found out for myself more than once that the topics of greatest interest tend also to be the ones on which peoples' minds tend to become most impervious to evidence. The question of dropping the atomic bomb is one--an odd tribute, perhaps, to the enormity of the weapon.