When I went into the Air Force in 1960, as an Reserve Officers' Training Corps lieutenant who had been allowed to finish my history doctorate at Wisconsin, my commanding officer in the base public information office where I was sent (for lack of any other place to put a history PhD) was a major, a senior pilot who had just returned from a tour in Japan. He told me of an exchange he had had with a Japanese woman who had urged him to visit Hiroshima before he left the country. “You Americans did a very bad thing there,” he quoted her. “Come to Pearl Harbor,” he replied. “You Japanese did a very bad thing there.”

Matthew Jones has given us in this book an excellent look at the self-deterring impact of the American use of the atom bomb at the end of World War II. It explores the frustrations and fantasies that came with possession of the bomb, and the ironic burden of having introduced a weapon that immediately became unusable. One could threaten using the bomb, of course, for as long as the monopoly lasted, or building a mega-bomb when the monopoly ended, but military calculations about meaningful victory through mushroom clouds were hard to see. The bomb became not the ultimate weapon, but the ultimate self-deterrent.

The subtitle sets the issue of “Race” as the key thread that runs through the calculations of Washington policymakers throughout the period. The major above justified the dropping of the bomb as proper retaliation for the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. But even in his rejoinder it was something more than simple revenge. As the years went by, those who continued to hold to this position struggled with scenarios that would permit the United States to justify the use of atomic weapons to avoid a drawn-out land war on the Asian continent. The closest they came was in the prospect for so-called tactical nukes, yet something always held them back, and Jones makes the argument that it was fear of setting off a worldwide racial conflict. There were so many ways the nation's enemies could hold up race as an overriding issue – starting with the obvious fact that the bomb had been used only on Asians. For a while, some policymakers believed that the successful development of tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons could get the United States off the hook for the city-destroying A-bomb and its successor, the H-bomb, by showing that nuclear weapons were reasonable war-fighting devices, not the beginning of an untrammeled era of weapons of mass destruction. Then, it was hoped, the Hiroshima example would be an isolated one, and the moral question would gradually go away.

Gordon Dean, who succeeded David Lilienthal as Atomic Energy Commission chairman, was particularly interested in the possibility of using atomic weapons in a militarily effective way: “with each passing day, our design and production progress is steadily adding to the number of situations in which atomic weapons can be tactically employed against military targets.” This might be the best prospect, he argued, for stopping “these endless nibbling aggressions,” without bringing on a global conflagration (107).

Try as they might, however, policymakers could not make any of these scenarios work. Although Jones does not make the argument, moreover, one could suggest that the fear that the Soviet Union, once it built its own bomb, would be willing to push into areas around the American defense perimeter led to a reluctant willingness to take up the supposed challenge in Korea in what proved to be the very sort of land war military planners dreaded. In that sense, the Russian A-bomb test both forced a commitment to expanding the Cold War to Asia, and implied a maddening conclusion that the bomb could not be used as either a strategic or a tactical weapon without unacceptable consequences. Korea thus intensified frustration about the bomb's usefulness. Consideration was given to finding a way to use the bomb during the Korean War, even though what would constitute an effective military strike was a problematic question. Jones points out that one reason beyond such purely military arguments against using the bomb was the headline effectiveness of the Communist campaign to frighten people into believing that the United States, having used the atom bomb against one Asian country, had now unleashed another terrible weapon in Korea: germ warfare. The implications of such a follow-up to Hiroshima, he suggests, played a role in settling the issue of whether the bomb could be used. Indeed, the New York Times responded to the Russian campaign in the United Nations attacking supposed American germ warfare with a warning that these accusations were part of “newer charges, made by the Communists on all fronts now, that the United States is engaged in a systematic war against Asians and other ‘colored races’” (130).

There is also the question one could ask, did American policymakers highlight objections on racial grounds because other reasons might appear wimpy and moralistic? Not wishing to appear weak on “defense” required, certainly, strong arguments that dropping A-bombs in Asia was no way to win the Cold War. Losing Asian support would not be worth a tactical victory on one front in the Cold War. Whether that argument was made in order to deflect political criticism is an unanswerable question; but just as Harry Truman feared a later backlash from Congress when it became known that the United States had developed an atomic bomb and had not used it to save lives – the genesis of the idea that dropping the bomb saved untold thousands of lives, up to a million – so a reverse pressure settled in after the mushroom clouds had dissipated. By pushing the argument forward that they could not use the bomb again on Asians, policymakers protected themselves against accusations of weakness.

However that may be, Jones argues that the weight of evidence now holds that Eisenhower, who, he argues, probably did not voice the objections to Hiroshima that he is often said to have done, probably did use an atomic threat in an effort to bring the Korean War to an end. Whether that threat would have been carried out, of course, is a different question. Typical of the frustration that began with Korea were Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's debates with himself over using the weapon. Talking to a special National Security Council Committee on Atomic Energy in February 1953, at the height of concern about which way the Korean situation was going, he shunted aside moral questions: “In the past, higher civilizations have always maintained their place against lower civilizations by devising more effective weapons.” The United States could not continue, he went on, to “play the Russian game” by tying our hands with a taboo against atomic weapons. On another occasion, he yearned to show “before all of Asia – our clear superiority by giving the Chinese one hell of a licking” (149, 156).

Rationalizing a justification on such grounds pretty much came to an end with the Lucky Dragon affair in 1954, a world famous event when Japanese fishermen sailed too close to an H-bomb test site in the South Pacific. Their boat, the Lucky Dragon, suffered a shower of radioactive ash, with resulting illness and fatalities, and suddenly America's allies were gripped by the first real concern about the dangers of fallout. The new AEC chair, Lewis Strauss, had to be pushed into making a halfway decent response to world opinion by John Foster Dulles, who now took a very different tack on war fears in the wake of the H-bomb tests. Dulles told Strauss that the nation's allies thought that we were getting ready for such a war with the mega-bombs. “We could survive but some of them would be obliterated in a few minutes. It could lead to a policy of neutrality or appeasement” (190). Even so, the allies he was talking about in this conversation with Strauss were not Asian allies but Europeans – the “higher civilizations.” Dulles has long enjoyed the reputation, whatever his faults and rigidity, for having a different, less prejudiced, view of Asians. What Jones has found, however, is a Dulles who shared many of the same prejudices as his predecessor, Dean Acheson. Strauss proved reluctant to condemn the tests, either for the damage to a few sailors, or for assumptions about American hubris in asserting rights to contaminate the ocean over a vast area. It did not help when he did address the issue in a press conference with an admission that scientists really did not know what might happen in future tests. He simply could not grasp the significance of what had taken place, even if, as he fantasized, the Japanese fishermen were actually agents provocateurs.

Between 1945 and 1954, then, the United States had succeeded more than anything else in tying itself into atomic knots. Jones notes as well that Asian observers – some of them, at least – saw the way the United States brandished its atomic weapons as a new form of colonialism, on the grounds that the only people threatened with atomic ravaging were Asians – people of color. In response, United States policymakers directed their attention to racial questions at home, particularly discrimination against blacks. Whether the Lucky Dragon was enough to prevent an atomic intervention at the end of the French struggle in Indochina is doubtful, but certainly it more than balanced hawkish arguments, especially regarding the fate of two island allies, Great Britain and Japan. The Japanese were especially anxious that their country not be used as a launching site for atomic attacks on China. Neutralism in Japan, reported the American ambassador, would vary in proportion to the perceived ability of the United States to defend the country in a world where both Russia and the United States possessed nuclear weapons. In particular, the Lucky Dragon affair disrupted plans for the storage of nuclear weapons components in Japan. American reliance on nuclear weapons, wrote one State Department expert, damaged relations with Tokyo. It was all the more important, then, that American leaders provide assurances that Washington would help facilitate access to Southeast Asian markets for Japan. Once again, any idea for achieving a tactical victory in Indochina with atomic weapons would only damage the greater goal of assuring Japanese participation in the American-led “free-world” economy. Here is an interesting new twist on the genesis of the “domino theory,” particularly when paired with a speech Dulles gave in Los Angeles, in which he damped down any thought of provoking a war with China.

A complete backdown on the idea of using tactical nukes was evident in a Policy Planning Staff memorandum of late April 1954, which posited,

In the next decade, with the Vietnam crisis reappearing now as a challenge to the Saigon regime installed by Washington, the question of the use of weapons also resurfaced. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1962 even argued that while the bomb was ruled out in Europe because of Russia's arsenal, in Asia China had no counterforce. “And it seems to me this is enough of a difference to warrant at least consideration of a different strategy” (413). It was not McNamara's famed coolness and logic that crushed such ideas, but the impossibility of developing a “different strategy” absent a Japanese agreement to allow the home islands to be used as a launching pad. Two-thirds of American atomic capability was located in Japan. The Japanese were “fanatical,” noted one policymaker, “for understandable reasons” (414). The possibility that China would soon have the bomb did prompt thoughts about action to prevent Beijing from joining the nuclear club. Jones asserts that Kennedy pressed for a partial nuclear test-ban treaty with Russia, in the face of conservative opposition at home, at least in part because he believed that an agreement with Russia offered an opportunity to join forces with Moscow to destroy the Chinese nuclear project. But after a flurry of the-sky-is-falling rhetoric, the idea faded away.

So it all went back to Hiroshima and its political fallout. The much-criticized escalation strategy in Vietnam became the only possible alternative to a “different strategy,” at least as policymakers famously dubbed the “best and brightest” by David Halberstam saw their options. The results cascaded down on their heads as the war went on year after year. The Chinese had very few bombs in that decade, but they were enough of a deterrent, it can be argued, given the Japanese reaction to any move that threatened even one more Hiroshima. But even without the Chinese bomb in the equation, I would argue, the use of atomic weapons in Vietnam still would have depended on convincing the world that there was a sufficient reason to employ such a weapon. In January 1946, African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that while Americans were the first to have the bomb, the monopoly would not last, and when “colored” people mastered the weapon, it would be the people who lived in cities, with skyscrapers and factories, who would be at risk “before desperate men in forest and on the steppe, with nothing to lose but their chains” (461). So far only the first part of his prediction has been realized, with China, India and Pakistan having nuclear weapons, but even the threat that weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists or an outlaw regime has led to profound consequences for the world's first atomic power. And, yet again, even without Du Bois's prophetic jeremiad, the atomic bomb has turned out to be a self-deterring achievement. And maybe we should be glad about that. In any event, Matthew Jones is to be congratulated for illuminating so much of the story of how we got into such a predicament.

To say that the advent of nuclear weapons heightened global insecurity and the potential costs of Cold War conflict is a truism. But to argue, as Matthew Jones does so convincingly in After Hiroshima, that possession of a nuclear strike force often diminished, rather than increased, US foreign policy options in Asia is something important and new. As Jones puts it,

A constant refrain and, it seems, an inescapable dilemma for US strategists from the Truman era to the Johnson presidency was that the deterrent value of nuclear bombs and, later, missile technology was utterly compromised by the racial slur attached to them. For the fact was – and is – that atomic weaponry has only ever been used against Asians. This all too obvious point figured time and again, both in public attitudes to the bomb across South and East Asia and in the inter- and intra-governmental discussions of the permissibility of “first-use” nuclear strikes against Communist China and its regional allies. Another discomfiting fact was that the accusation of inherent racial prejudice in US nuclear strategizing was not without foundation. It was, after all, essentially true that successive US administrations planned to compensate for deficiencies in manpower against the “yellow hordes” of Mao's China by exploiting America's advantages in nuclear weaponry. The weight of Asian humanity would, in the very last resort, still be no match for the scientific prowess and military dominance of a nuclear-armed United States.

This is not, however, to suggest that Washington policymakers spoke with one voice in nuclear matters, whether in Asia or elsewhere. Far from it: Jones makes plain that jurisdictional rivalries, mutual incomprehension and genuine anxiety about the naivety of some colleagues and the aggressiveness of others punctuated discussions between the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs on the one hand, the State Department and US diplomats in Asia on the other. Bureaucratic squabbling was bitterest during the Eisenhower “New Look” era when the strategy of “massive retaliation” championed by Joint Chiefs' chairman Arthur Radford, among others, came to prominence. For the hawks in Ike's administration massive retaliation presented a reductive solution to the complex problem of how to achieve economies in defence spending whilst remaining vigilant against the resurgence of “hot war” in East Asia after the frustrations of the Korean War. But the strategy was never uniformly agreed upon within the White House, the Pentagon, the state Department or elsewhere. Underlying these often acrimonious exchanges over US nuclear options lurked something stranger and darker. This was the prevalent assumption that “tactical” nuclear weapons, those of relatively low yield, could be used much like other conventional armaments, not as weapons of mass destruction but as decisive elements in the arsenal of field commanders. After Hiroshima brims with hair-raising surveys, policy appreciations and NSC advice indicating that “the bomb” was just that – a bomb much like any other, and not the devastating, fallout-generating killer of thousands that the (by 1950s standards, “low-yield”) Japanese explosions actually proved it to be. Put simply, much of the force in Jones's study derives from its cool-headed exposure of sometimes hot-headed, other times wildly dismissive, policy appreciations about the consequences of an atomic strike against an Asian communist foe.

Seen in this light, it is the Asians themselves, the Indian government and its non-aligned partners especially, who emerge as the voices of reason in an increasingly Alice-in-Wonderland dystopia of nuclear strategy that predicated the defence of America's Asian allies on the nuclear destruction of their near neighbours. As the scope of Jones's interests suggests, traditional diplomatic history this is not. For one thing, Jones recognizes the importance of the many non-state actors – civil-society groups, lobbyists, and media commentators – whose hostile opinions about the pursuit of American strategic interest in Asia mapped onto the changing contours of US foreign policy in the region. For another thing, he is sensitive to the impact of other, more intangible factors. Prominent among these is what Mary Dudziak labelled the issues of “Cold War civil rights” – the evidence of racial discrimination inside America and the blatant double standards in US pronouncements regarding democracy and equal opportunity – that so limited Washington's capacity to woo the emerging nations and new regimes of East, South and Southeast Asia.

For all that, the fact remains that America's post-war Presidents and their White House staffers never succumbed to the nuclear evangelism espoused by Radford's Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pentagon hard-liners and their principal allies in the field: the generals and admirals who commanded US forces in the Pacific theatre. After Hiroshima, then, provides a valuable reminder of the signal importance of presidential oversight. The checks and balances characteristic of most, if not all, US strategic decision-making kept the United States from teetering too close to the nuclear brink more than once. Yet teeter it sometimes did. It was the curse of American policy in East and Southeast Asia to have chosen friends of doubtful quality, typically “strongman” figures heading authoritarian regimes valued for their staunch anti-communism above all else. But it was a blessing that the White House never wholly endorsed the logic of nuclear “first use” in Asia. Herein lay the ultimate irony. As, first, Eisenhower and, then, more fully, Kennedy turned away from massive retaliation and first-strike planning towards the alternative of “flexible responses” to communist aggression in Asia, so the probability increased of American involvement in another major ground war in mainland Asia. The corollary, in other words, to rejecting the use of nuclear weapons to defend South Vietnam was to deploy greater numbers of soldiers and conventional air strikes to do so instead. Jones thus provides us with a clear-sighted view of the strategic presumptions that underpinned the disastrous policy choices made as America began its long descent into the abyss of Vietnam. After Hiroshima, it seems, lay the carpet bombing of Rolling Thunder.

Matthew Jones's superb After Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965 joins a number of important books that have underscored the significance of race as a factor in American foreign relations, especially in Asia. These works have called attention to the blatant racism of the military campaigns of World War II, the awareness and influence of black Americans in the international arena, and the interaction of domestic racial discrimination and American credibility in the Cold War. John W. Dower's monumental War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War underscored the racism found on both sides in the brutal warfare on land and sea. Christopher Thorne touched on the subject in Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan and discussed it more fully in an influential lecture published as Racial Aspects of the Far Eastern War. Other scholars have cast the racial elements of the war in Asia and the Pacific within a broader context: Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire; Marc Gallichio, The African-American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945; Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1937–1957. In their important books – Cold War Civil Rights and The Cold War and the Color Line – Mary L. Dudziak and Thomas Borstelmann respectively analyzed the international prominence of racial discrimination which made imperative the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s.Footnote ¹

Jones examines what in many ways was a more subtle, but no less important, connection between race and foreign policy. From the moment that the United States engaged in atomic warfare against Japan in August 1945, race became part of the bomb's history. For the next twenty years as the United States sought to define the role of nuclear weapons in its national security policy in Asia, it confronted the racial sensitivities of peoples in the developing world. Could the United States possibly justify using nuclear weapons again against Asians? Repeatedly that consideration restrained American officials. The racial issue was the most emotional aspect of a general suspicion of American bellicosity held by the newly independent Asian nations, especially those which followed the path of non-alignment in the Cold War. It was the American ally, Japan, which had the greatest influence on American nuclear strategy – an outgrowth not only of the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also of the Lucky Dragon incident of 1954 and misgivings about the tone and implementation of a containment policy with which Japan fundamentally agreed. Among other factors, Japan's criticisms helped to force abandonment of the strategy of “massive retaliation.”

After Hiroshima is thus a thorough and thoughtful analysis of an important topic. It is based on impressive research in American and British documents and an extensive body of secondary literature. Among many engaging points in Jones's book, three captured this reviewer's attention: (1) Eisenhower's policy in the context of differing interpretations of his presidency; (2) American adaptation to non-alignment, especially in India; (3) the impact of China's development of an atomic bomb on US policy in Southeast Asia.

First, while the international ramifications of the possible use of atomic weapons first became evident when President Harry S. Truman offhandedly threatened to employ them during the Korean War, it was the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower that placed nuclear deterrence as the centerpiece of a redefined national security policy. The bulk of Jones's book is devoted to the Eisenhower administration's nuclear strategy in Asia. Jones can be characterized as a “half Eisenhower revisionist.” Like the revisionists, Jones presents a President who was in control, not only setting policy objectives but controlling (most of the time) strong-willed subordinates like Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Unlike the revisionists who see Eisenhower skillfully navigating the challenges of the Cold War (and avoiding military intervention in the process), Jones finds a rather mixed record of accomplishment.

Jones's treatment of the first offshore islands crisis with the Chinese People's Republic in 1954–55 provides a counterpoint to revisionist claims of a brilliant Eisenhower strategy. Contending that Americans misinterpreted the Chinese shelling of the islands as a threat to the Nationalist Government on Taiwan, Jones sees Eisenhower's response – the threat to employ nuclear weapons, the mutual security agreement with Chiang Kai-shek's government, and the Congressional passage of the so-called Formosa Resolution giving the President discretionary authority to use American military power – as an overreaction. On the other side, revisionists, led by Robert Divine, have praised the

Divine's point is the stipulation in Eisenhower's message to Congress stating that defense of Taiwan would extend to the offshore islands of Jinmen and Mazu “only in situations which are recognizable as part of, or definite preliminaries to, an attack against the main position of Formosa and the Pescadores.”Footnote ³ This ambiguity made the situation more dangerous than Jones seems to allow. How could such a distinction be made? Eisenhower recognized this. In letters to British prime minister Winston Churchill and NATO commander General Alfred Gruenther, Eisenhower acknowledged the difficulty of determining whether an attack on Jinmen or Mazu had a “limited” or a “preliminary” objective.Footnote ⁴ In their study Deterrence in American Foreign Policy, Alexander George and Richard Smoke wrote,

Even Divine acknowledged that “in his attempts to placate [Chiang Kai-shek] and the China bloc in Congress, [Eisenhower] had come dangerously close to committing the United States to defend the offshore islands against any Chinese attack.”Footnote ⁶ So in the end, Eisenhower “won” only because the Chinese did not attack Jinmen or Mazu; “plain dumb luck,” as Dean Acheson characterized American success in the Cuban missile crisis.

Second, Jones's emphasis on the nuclear issue and the prevalent American insensitivity to Asian peoples minimizes the other side of the story. Despite its blunders, the United States moved toward accommodation with the non-aligned nations. Jones correctly acknowledges that after Soviet leaders began courting developing countries in 1955, the United States became more attentive to non-aligned nations. The extent of that accommodation, which in some ways began during the Truman administration, was especially impressive in the case of India, the most prominent non-aligned nation. America soon came to see India as the “essential democracy” – a test of whether democratic societies could endure in the developing world and whether they could meet the challenge of economic development. The American foreign-policy elite came to see India's success as vital to American security; to developing peoples, India would provide a democratic model as an alternative to the appeal of Chinese Communists. In their meetings in Washington and New Delhi in 1956 and 1959 respectively, Eisenhower and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru saw a common interest (the Indians by this time having become wary of China), resulting in large-scale American economic and technical assistance programs, which culminated during the administration of John F. Kennedy. Misunderstandings and disagreements over nuclear, racial, and other issues continued, to be sure, but they did not preclude the development of a strong bilateral relationship.Footnote ⁷

Third, Jones's connection between China's development of an atomic bomb and US policy in Vietnam in 1964–65 suggests an important, but neglected, dimension to understanding America's road to war. Jones details how American policymakers monitored China's emerging nuclear capability leading to the October 1964 test and contemplated the question whether it would embolden China to intimidate its neighbors, the reaction of other Asian countries to one of their own entering the hitherto “white man's nuclear club,” and the question whether Japan and India – the latter a victim of Chinese aggression in their brief border war in 1962 – would be tempted to follow suit. There was agreement that the United States needed to reassure its allies that it would not be intimidated by China's nuclear capability, which, Jones argues, had direct bearing on the American response to the deteriorating political–military situation in South Vietnam. The voluminous literature on US policy from 1961 to 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson effectively Americanized the war, however, rarely mentions Chinese nuclear capacity as a factor in the determination to uphold American “credibility” and to contain the advance of communism.Footnote ⁸ While there is much attention in US documents to the Chinese threat in Southeast Asia, only rarely is there mention of the nuclear dimension. So how much was US policy influenced by the development of China's bomb? This is impossible to measure. In one sense, the movement toward greater commitment in defense of the beleaguered South Vietnamese government had, by 1961, taken on a life of its own, so that the overall objectives and the fundamental “threats” tended to become “givens” rather than topics of debate or elaboration. So in that case, the Chinese bomb might be seen as an irrelevant factor. Yet in another way it can be seen as an underlying, if unstated, assumption. For, as Jones maintains, US officials were anticipating China's joining the nuclear club and so it can be argued that from at least 1961 onward their calculations of China's threat implicitly included recognition of an impending nuclear capability which became a reality just as America was making critical decisions in Vietnam. It is noteworthy that the extent to which America's intervention in Vietnam was intended to demonstrate to friends and foes that it would not be intimidated by China's bomb mirrored in many ways the Chinese decision to fight in Korea to demonstrate that it could resist the arch-capitalist imperialist United States. Credibility – measured in these instances as a willingness to take risks to stand up to a powerful adversary – was on the line for Americans in 1965 just as it had been for the Chinese in 1950.

After Hiroshima is an important book. It deepens our understanding of American national security policy during an important period and the ways that it interacted with the expectations and apprehensions of Asian nations.