“Summit Time, and the Giving is Easy”

have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Perhaps the most striking fact established by research since the end of the war is that the main purpose in using the atomic bombs on Japan was not military at all, but diplomatic, and that the real target was not Japan but Russia. This was suggested by Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter in an article in the Saturday Review of Literature, June 15, 1946, and was more explicitly confirmed by the British atomic physicist, P. M. S. Blackett. The eminent American publicist and industrialist, the late Robert R. Young, also directly charged that this was the case in his trenchant article in the Saturday Review of Literature, March 8, 1947, but many regarded this allegation as fantastic. Yet it has been supported by subsequent events and revelations, some of them official. As Professor Current points out, even Stimson’s Memoirs hinted that: “Russia and not Japan was the real target of the atom bomb.” The bomb, so state the Memoirs, would “give democratic diplomacy a badly needed ‘equalizer’ as against the postwar power of the Communist colossus.” Historical study since the Memoirs appeared has confirmed this interpretation. Stalin took this view, and many date the origins of the Cold War from the time he received news of the bombing shortly after the Potsdam Conference.

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Allan H. Ryskind

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have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Perhaps the most striking fact established by research since the end of the war is that the main purpose in using the atomic bombs on Japan was not military at all, but diplomatic, and that the real target was not Japan but Russia. This was suggested by Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter in an article in the Saturday Review of Literature, June 15, 1946, and was more explicitly confirmed by the British atomic physicist, P. M. S. Blackett. The eminent American publicist and industrialist, the late Robert R. Young, also directly charged that this was the case in his trenchant article in the Saturday Review of Literature, March 8, 1947, but many regarded this allegation as fantastic. Yet it has been supported by subsequent events and revelations, some of them official. As Professor Current points out, even Stimson’s Memoirs hinted that: “Russia and not Japan was the real target of the atom bomb.” The bomb, so state the Memoirs, would “give democratic diplomacy a badly needed ‘equalizer’ as against the postwar power of the Communist colossus.” Historical study since the Memoirs appeared has confirmed this interpretation. Stalin took this view, and many date the origins of the Cold War from the time he received news of the bombing shortly after the Potsdam Conference.