I agree with you in that decisions like this are always the outcome of multiple forces pushing different ways. But I would lean more to thinking it would have been very difficult for Trueman to have not ordered the use of the bombs.
It would have been electoral suicide because of the extra US casualties.
It would probably have led to the partition of Japan as well as Korea, leading to problems for the US in the post-war world. Although the Iron Curtain didn't descend till a few years later, by 1945, the USSR was already being very possessive about countries in Eastern Europe. Trueman was more aware of the dangers posed by the USSR that Roosevelt had been.
Just because a country had been defeated, it doesn't mean the government will surrender. Nazi Germany was effectively defeated with Bagration and the breakout from Normandy in 1944 but their government fought on to the bitter end. (In a way, the V1 and V2 missile programs did benefit Germany because they drained off resources which would otherwise have prolonged the war and allowed the use of the atom bomb on Berlin.)
And rushing to finish a war to minimise the influence of one party on the peace negotiations did have a precedent. It was what the French and British did at the end of WW1 to prevent the US from dominating the peace process. (But that didn't turn out very well.)
I think things like this would have been in Trueman's mind when he made the descision.
> it would have been very difficult for Trueman to have not ordered the use of the bombs.
He didn't really though, did he?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both on the "to be bombed" list since at least a month before Truman became President, well before he even learned of the existence of the ultra secret atomic bomb program.
The March 1945 Tokyo bombing marked the beginning of a total war aerial bombardment campaign that included civilian residences that might include factory workers.
That campaign had a target list of 100+ cities, 72 of which were destroyed prior to the bombing of Hiroshima.
Truman more or less did no more than agree that the new secret weapons, the Little Boy and Fat Man designs, be tested on targets already slated to be bombed.
He had little choice, not because of an electorate that knew nothing of the secret weapons and wouldn't know if they were not used, but because of the near unstoppable force of the greatest R&D weapons expenditure in the world to that point .. viewed by many in the know as entirely wasted unless used in war against the Japanese now that the Germans had surrendered before they could be used there.
The "extra US casualties" are entirely hypothetical, existing only on the assumption that there would be ground invasion of the mainland which was hypothetical given the program started before Truman became POTUS to flatten Japan to eliminate any resources of resistance and to continue to do so until the country surrendered.
> He had little choice, not because of an electorate that knew nothing of the secret weapons and wouldn't know if they were not used, but because of the near unstoppable force of the greatest R&D weapons expenditure in the world to that point .. viewed by many in the know as entirely wasted unless used in war against the Japanese now that the Germans had surrendered before they could be used there.
He allowed the first two bombings to occur as President, as was intially planned when he was still VP. He knew they would occur and was okay with it.
He could have stopped them. This evidenced by the fact that there were also plans for bombs 3+ but he ordered that any further bombings were to be under his explicit (as opposed to implicit) orders.
To think that somehow the Manhattan Project was "unstopped" is ludicrous. Every order Truman gave was followed, and if want want to argue it was "unstoppable" you would have to produce some kind of evidence that people were willing to disobey Truman's orders. (And object to or think is a bad idea is not the same as disobey.)
It would have been electoral suicide because of the extra US casualties.
It would probably have led to the partition of Japan as well as Korea, leading to problems for the US in the post-war world. Although the Iron Curtain didn't descend till a few years later, by 1945, the USSR was already being very possessive about countries in Eastern Europe. Trueman was more aware of the dangers posed by the USSR that Roosevelt had been.
Just because a country had been defeated, it doesn't mean the government will surrender. Nazi Germany was effectively defeated with Bagration and the breakout from Normandy in 1944 but their government fought on to the bitter end. (In a way, the V1 and V2 missile programs did benefit Germany because they drained off resources which would otherwise have prolonged the war and allowed the use of the atom bomb on Berlin.)
And rushing to finish a war to minimise the influence of one party on the peace negotiations did have a precedent. It was what the French and British did at the end of WW1 to prevent the US from dominating the peace process. (But that didn't turn out very well.)
I think things like this would have been in Trueman's mind when he made the descision.