Just as a majority of top officials opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and the punitive postwar plans for Germany, many also objected to the use of the atomic bomb. This chapter spotlights the attempts to prevent its use, mainly by urging a peaceful demonstration of it on a deserted island. Scientists within the Manhattan Project, as well as the undersecretary of the Navy, hoped that Japan’s leaders, witnessing the devastation of the bomb, would be induced to surrender. The chapter explores those efforts and why they failed.

How should the United States end the war with Japan? Secretary of War Stimson agonized over the use of the atomic bomb, knowing it would kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians. But he also recoiled at the thought of an invasion of Japan, which would likely cost many Allied soldiers’ lives. There had to be an alternative. He found a third option in conditional surrender: allowing the Japanese to retain their Emperor. If Japan’s leaders could be assured that the Emperor could remain on his throne safe from prosecution, then perhaps they might be induced to surrender. This chapter tracks the convoluted course by which high officials tried to maneuver President Truman toward conditional surrender and away from the other two costly options.

Chapter 11 takes a closer look at the surprising role of former president Herbert Hoover’s efforts to press for a negotiated settlement with Japan. Collaborating with Stimson, the two elder statesmen sought to influence Truman away from an invasion. They did this in part by attempting to frighten Truman with the prospect of extremely high casualties that might accompany an invasion. The chapter posits that Stimson may have encouraged Hoover to influence Truman because Stimson himself found it difficult to contradict his generals.

The American public is assumed to have overwhelmingly supported the use of atomic bombs on Japan, but this impression comes in part from a Gallup poll conducted just days after the bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The poll found that eighty-five percent of Americans were in favor of the bombs. Only ten percent disapproved, and five percent were unsure. Those figures might suggest a deep current of hatred toward Japan, the depths of which can only be hinted at by polling data. But it must be considered along with another Gallup poll taken in June 1945, barely two months prior to the nuclear strikes. In this survey Americans were asked if they supported the use of poison gas against the Japanese, if doing so would reduce American casualties. Forty percent said yes, but almost fifty percent said no. As horrible as poison gas undeniably is, a nuclear bomb is vastly worse. This suggests that most Americans simply had no concept of what an atom bomb meant. This chapter examines what Americans actually thought about the bomb.

Scholars have recently addressed a literary and cultural tradition of the black Pacific in Langston Hughes’s works. This chapter reads Hughes in ways that engage with the black and nuclear Pacific and offers a discussion of what the chapter terms a black nuclear Pacific and its heuristic literary genealogy that originated in Hughes’s fictional barroom interlocutions in the “Simple” stories. It begins with an analysis of the atomic landscape in the “Simple” stories by placing them within the context of US nuclear history. It then traces the genealogy of the black nuclear Pacific by reading across the archives and published literature by Hughes and other writers: Hajime Kijima, Hughes’s Japanese translator (and fellow poet), who experienced the atom bomb in Hiroshima; and Lorraine Hansberry, who took the title of her play A Raisin in the Sun from Hughes’s 1951 poem “Harlem [2]” that originally ended with the image of atomic explosion.