Shattering the Myth of the Bomb : Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t have to happen : THE DECISION TO USE THE ATOMIC BOMB, <i> By Guy Alperovitz (Alfred A. Knopf: $32.50; 847 pp.)</i> : HIROSHIMA IN AMERICA, <i> by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Grosset/Putnam: $27.50; 425 pp.)</i>

Twice in history, Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, cities were hit with bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The United States dropped both bombs. We did it, we have been told, to save lives by bringing an unyielding Japan to its knees and ending World War II abruptly.

But what if Gen. Eisenhower, Gen. MacArthur, Adm. Leahy, Gen. Bradley, and Adm. Nimitz--the top American brass in World War II--had all believed Japan would surrender in mid-1945 without our dropping atom bombs, and without an American invasion of Japan?

What if Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, a Cold War hawk, agreed, and so did hawkish press tycoons Henry Luce and David Lawrence, and even Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay (of “Bombs Away With Curtis LeMay” fame when he ran for vice president on the George Wallace ticket)?

What if a commission to study the bombings appointed by President Harry S. Truman and directed by cold warrior Paul Nitze also thought the bombing unnecessary to obtain Japanese surrender?

What if even President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson in the weeks before the bomb was dropped had embraced in writing every significant argument against the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, and ordered that the bomb not be dropped on civilian populations? What if Gen. Marshall, the future secretary of state, and Robert Oppenheimer, who invented the bomb, had said it needn’t be dropped on civilian populations?

What if Truman-friendly historian Herbert Feis, who was given exclusive welcome to the diaries, records and people, concluded that “There can hardly be a well-grounded dissent from the conclusion . . . Japan would have surrendered if the atomic bombs had not been dropped . . . and even if no invasion had been planned?”

If all of the above were true--and these books make a persuasive case that it is--you might think it’s worth considering whether dropping the bomb may have been a mistake. You might want to ponder whether indiscriminately killing and maiming so many Japanese civilians dishonored rather than honored the brave American servicemen who truly won the war in combat.

But until now, we haven’t been allowed such luxury. A few months ago, the mere suggestion that these blue-ribbon experts said what they did--never mind whether it was correct--caused such an uproar that the budget of the Smithsonian Institution was threatened unless it purged an exhibit there and presented the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as indisputably necessary.

Today, on the 50th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima (Nagasaki followed three days later), at least two important books are being published re-examining our record. Very different in their approaches and texture, they are nevertheless complementary and share several conclusions: that the bomb was not dropped for the reasons the U.S. government stated, that history has been whitewashed and that the bombings were so momentous, the ramifications of our misunderstanding are more profound than we imagine.

“Hiroshima in America” by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell should be assigned in history classes and read remedially by everyone in the journalism business--not just for what it says about the bombings, but for what it says about government and the nature of reality. Lifton is a psychiatrist, formerly with the Air Force in Korea and the Yale medical faculty. Mitchell’s previous book, “The Campaign of the Century,” was highly praised and he is presumably the reason “Hiroshima in America” reads so beautifully and effortlessly. Both wrote for “Nuclear Times,” a journal Mitchell edited.

If a great book is one that stirs independent thought and can change minds, “Hiroshima in America” qualifies. I wrote a research paper for my masters degree in history on the decision to drop the bomb; I landed where best-selling Truman biographer David McCullough did, squarely on the President’s side--it was where all the source material had been carefully arranged to lead anyone.

Based on reading and reporting since then, and a PBS documentary I did on nuclear threats after Hiroshima, by the time I opened the Lifton/Mitchell book I had decided that Truman’s decision had been very bad in retrospect--but that given the psychological mood in 1945, given what the American people and leadership had been through since Pearl Harbor, and given the minuscule understanding of nuclear science back then, the decision was blameless. It was the bad decision any good person would make in the circumstances.

I now think that’s wrong. Lifton and Mitchell have encapsulated their history precisely to spend their main effort addressing the issue of psychology, both as it lay on Truman and the other major characters at the end of the long war and as it has affected us since then. My early margin notes in their book reflect my usual knee-jerk disdain for pop psychologizing, and for pretensions by writers that they know what’s in their subjects’ minds. But my defenses crumbled, so great an eye do Lifton and Mitchell have for the ultimately illuminating quote or event that drives to the heart of a personality or an argument.

There is Truman, refusing to agonize over the bomb, gleefully calling it the “greatest thing in history” and proclaiming the Hiroshima news the “happiest” announcement he ever made. There are unforgettable stories, like the driver for Gen. Leslie Groves (who directed the bomb-building project) descending to a test site to prove to reporters that the radiation danger was exaggerated. He then died of an apparently related leukemia, an early victim of his own team’s propaganda. There is Groves himself--who really whipped Truman on--wanting to make the ancient cultural capital of Japan, Kyoto, his primary target. It had no military significance, but its topography made it a great showcase for the bomb. Stimson forced Hiroshima on Groves as a compromise. There is the film footage of Hiroshima shot by a U.S. military photographer who then spent decades as a television producer trying to retrieve his own footage so the American public could see it; it remained locked in secrecy, until the Japanese got a copy in 1978 and showed it there.

In a relatively few pages, Lifton and Mitchell present devastating and persuasive portraits of the major characters. Truman comes off haunted by inadequacy as he stepped into the shoes of Franklin Roosevelt. Dedicated to his country, Truman feared he would fail it if he seemed weak or indecisive.

Though neither of these books directly raises the point, “Hiroshima in America” also swung me around on the importance of heroes in history. Until a few years ago, I had generally concluded that popular tides and technology carried leaders along, and that the power of individuals to steer history was overrated. Long research for a biography I’m writing of Pope John Paul II left me suspecting that perhaps individuals with wisdom and great moral courage really can turn their times around. “Hiroshima in America” convinced me of it, precisely by showing that Truman lacked great vision just when a man of greatness might have contained nuclear terror to a small fraction of what it’s been. What a tragedy that all his earnestness could not carry him beyond cramped horizons.

Equally stunning as the account of the decision to drop the bomb is Lifton and Mitchell’s story of the rewriting of history that followed. Military officers were ordered not to disclose their dissent. Research materials were restricted. Articles were planted here and there by friendly writers to cement the official line on nuclear policy. Lifton and Mitchell show the effects of this both on us as a people and on the men who were so emboldened by having shrouded Hiroshima that they then shrouded the conduct of the Cold War.

Careers were made by men like James Conant and McGeorge Bundy who became Harvard moguls and Cold War presidential advisers after demonstrating that they could toady to the official line on Hiroshima and bulldoze other evidence. (How interesting that advancement at our most prominent university was based on a demonstrated ability to conceal the truth!) Those who tried to lay out the facts were shoved aside, victims of a political correctness far more powerful than the one we now complain of.

Lifton and Mitchell have succumbed to a few excesses in this book, all at the very beginning (where they somewhat hype America’s consciousness of Hiroshima), and the very end (where they project onto Hiroshima a laundry list of technological and psychological ills whose linkage is too speculative to merit unqualified inclusion in such an otherwise carefully reasoned book). These flaws don’t spoil their imposing contribution.

Gar Alperovitz, another scholar who has been studying the A-bomb story for decades, has followed a previous book about it--which he thought too scantily documented--with a comprehensive and definitive history, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” His 847 exceptionally big pages cover essentially a few months. Relentless conventional history, it becomes an important and well-timed footnote to the more imaginative Lifton/Mitchell book.

Where Lifton and Mitchell quote a sentence fragment from a memo, Alperovitz quotes several paragraphs and then the reply to it. If Bess had cabled Harry to pick up a loaf of bread on the way home from Potsdam, Alperovitz’s readers would be able to factor that in. I don’t mean to knock such thoroughness, just label it. The years Alperovitz spent compiling these details were important. His book is surprisingly well-written and easy to read given what it is--but what it is means that he often has to slow down to the plodding pace of the people he’s tracking.

Both books make an important point about the asserted life-saving benefits of the bomb. Truman--who was determined to get “unconditional surrender” from Japan as he had from Germany--rejected advice to offer to let Japan keep its emperor. That seems to have been the sticking point that blocked Japanese leaders who wanted to lay down arms earlier.

Yet Truman agreed to that very condition when Japan surrendered the day after the Nagasaki attack. Alperovitz calculates that 10,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Pacific in the three months Truman took to change his mind about the emperor.

Like the Lifton/Mitchell book, the Alperovitz book belongs on every library shelf, if only to be dropped on the foot of anyone who accuses Lifton and Mitchell of occasional flights of fancy or omitting some context. Between them, they pull back the veil from a 50-year black hole of history.

And yet--why did we use “that awful thing” (Eisenhower’s words) to destroy two cities? Alperovitz, characteristically searching for the intellectual answer, says he can’t find documentation to prove it, but clues suggest we dropped the bomb to obtain added clout in post-war diplomacy. “We simply do not have enough information to make that final judgment,” Alperovitz laments--and if anybody has read it all, it’s probably him.

To Lifton and Mitchell, the answer is murky not just because a smoking-gun memo is missing, but because the human mind is murky. “Hiroshima in America” leaves us with an uneasy sense that Truman and the hand-picked secretary of state he listened to, James Byrnes, never really grasped the meaning of their new toy. “In the end,” Lifton and Mitchell say, “he decided to use atomic weapons on undefended cities because he was drawn to their power, and because he was afraid not to use them.”