ED MORRISSEY ON OPPENHEIMER REVISIONISM: Mythology II: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer.

The film, clearly sympathetic to that perspective, fails to explain why Truman made that choice, other than as a decision based on choosing between dead Americans and dead Japanese. That in itself is enough of a legitimate wartime calculation, but the issue was far more complicated than that, and even more complicated than calculations about the cost of an invasion.

As this debate erupted on social media, Twitter follower Crosspatch recommended a book from 1999 that had the full and declassified scope of material from both Imperial Japan and the US about what exactly happened in 1945. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank deconstructed all of the revisionism, especially the fanciful notion that Japan had already decided to surrender before either of the bombs dropped, or even initially after both of them dropped. Frank demolished all of these arguments nearly a quarter-century ago from records of the imperial government, including that of their diplomatic correspondence.

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