Behold, he travaileth with iniquity, and hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood. He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.

John Kenneth Galbraith was one of three men picked to head the US government's Strategic Bombing Survey of the effect of Allied air power in WWII. It was this outfit's report on the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that coined the term "ground zero."

In 1984 Galbraith repeated to Studs Terkel the group's conclusion on the strategic "necessity" of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

The bomb did not end the Japanese war. This was something that was carefully studied by our bombing survey. [Indefatigable cold warrior] Paul Nitze headed it in Japan, so there was hardly any bias in this matter. The conclusion of the monograph called Japan's Struggle to End the War was that it was a difference, at most, of two or three weeks. The decision had already been taken to get out of the war, to seek a peace negotiation.

As the Survey's Effects of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki recounted:

The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor.

David Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, which is not at all favorable to Japan, and which was based on then-unprecedented access to official Japanese government documents, confirms the findings of Galbraith & Co. that Japan was set to surrender before the bombs were dropped. And that, as Galbraith put it to Terkel, "[t]he Japanese government, at that time, was heavily bureaucratic[;] the decision took some time to translate into action."

And then there is Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the senior United States military officer on active duty during WWII, who served as Chief of Staff to the Commander In Chief to both presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and who wrote in I Was There:

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

"Bomb" is the wrong word to use for this new weapon. It is not a bomb. It is not an explosive. It is a poisonous thing that kills people by its deadly radioactive reaction, more than by the explosive force it develops.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. Employment of the atomic bomb in war will take us back in cruelty toward noncombatants to the days of Genghis Khan.

We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will develop it in the future and that atomic bombs will some time be used against us.

One of the professors associated with the Manhattan Project told me that he had hoped the bomb wouldn’t work. I wish that he had been right.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCZM1NnbVfE]