Michael Pearlman, in Military Review (March 2005):

Show me where someone stood on the nuclear-freeze movement in 1985, and 9 times out of 10, I will show you where they stand on the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Robert P. Newman, professor emeritus of political communication, is a noted exception. He was an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons during the Cold War and a fierce critic of the fierce critics of President Harry S. Truman's use of the atomic bomb. Newman is one of the select people who want to learn about the past to simply learn about the past, not to distort it for political ammunition. In 1995, Newman published Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 1995), a book that devastated the contention that Japan was already prepared to surrender but that Washington had hidden agendas, such as scaring the Soviet Union by flexing its atomic muscle against this third party.

Newman reiterates why Truman was correct--that he had to use the bomb or face perhaps a million American casualties during the invasion and the subsequent ground war to be waged in Japan. The six subsequent chapters are a history of the critique of Truman from its origins in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) in 1945 to its culmination in an exhibit at the Smith-sonian's National Air and Space Museum in 1994 of the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb.

The chief villain in the narrative is the chairman of the USSBS, Paul Nitze, a man Newman seems to loathe from the left or from the right. He says that subsequent to 1945, Nitze inflated the Soviet military threat in an irrational pursuit of nuclear overkill. His summary report in the USSBS was equally fallacious, but this time for holding that Japan would surrender before the prospective American invasion in November, subject or not to the atomic bomb.

Nitze certainly did not hold, as others would, that Truman was striking a blow against the Kremlin. Indeed, Nitze compiled a record criticizing government policy as being too soft on the Soviet Union. While investigating the bombing of Germany, before the bombing of Japan, Nitze concluded that leveling cities was virtually useless as opposed to taking out transportation networks, a tactic that could compel surrender. He applied this European Theater paradigm to the Pacific, where he concluded conventional bombing and a naval blockade was sufficient to win the war. For data, Nitze cited purported testimony from Japanese officials, something Newman has never been able to find in the records and the archives of the USSBS.

Whether Nitze's conclusions stood on fact or what Newman calls "fraud," it had the imprimatur of an official report. It hence became argumentative gold for people who normally would dismiss any government publication as a coverup, prima facia. In the 1960s and 1970s, New Left history cites the USSBS as definitive proof, another case where contemporary "peace movement" politics slanted views on events regarding Hiroshima. The USSBS was to have made up much of the story line in captions for the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum. Because the Smithsonian Institution is semi-government, conservatives in Congress aborted the exhibit. One of Truman's critics wrote, "It was a humiliating spectacle, scholars being forced to recant the truth." Newman replies (although he was no political fan of the conservative bloc): "Scholars who confuse the fraudulent Nitze narrative with truth deserve humiliation."

Newman and company might have won the battle of the Smithsonian, but time does not seem on their side. According to the Gallup Poll, 10 percent of Americans disapproved of Truman's decision in 1945, 35 percent in 1995; young adults were divided 46 percent in favor, 49 percent opposed. One can only hope the citizenry reads Newman to discover the origins and the development of the fallacious thesis many now hold.