Christiane: Hiroshima, the side of the G7 summit is the most powerful reminder of the total catastrophe of nuclear weapons, which are often bounded about as a legitimate battlefield weapon.

In his new book, Evan Thomas concludes the United States had no other option them to drop the atomic bombs on Japan.

It is controversial as he tells Walter Isaacson.

>> Welcome back to the show.

Your book comes out this week and it's about the decisions that led to the dropping of the Adam bomb in Hiroshima.

It sort of a reminder about why we shouldn't put statesmen in that position.

Tell me about the G7 meeting in Hiroshima and what it means to you.

>> I hope it's a reminder to the statesmen there that they never want to back themselves into the corner we were in in August of 1945, when really, there was no choice but to use these terrible weapons.

I know there's been a lot of argument over the years, but in my book I made a compelling case that they would not surrender.

To end this terrible, terrible war we had to use, not one, but two nuclear weapons and that was a terrible thing for the world and for the people who had to use them.

Never recovered from it.

I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the agonies they went through as they face this moral and political dilemma about when they use these things and when it's a good choice.

>> your book's theme is moral ambiguity.

We live in an age of twitter when nothing is morally ambiguous.

People leap to one side of the other and we see it even in foreign policy, even when China.

Are you worried we are marching down a path where we are putting people into a position that it's more likely the bomb would be used again?

>> yes, we live in this world of moral righteousness.

When people have twitter debates or debates on the Internet or anywhere, I'm right, you're wrong.

Not only are you wrong, you are morally inferior to me or my group.

And that's a bad culture we are in.

You can see it play out on the world stage.

Putin is a crazy moralist.

It's a twisted Russian morality, but I'm moral, and the other side is evil, and he's backing himself into a corner where he may have to act on that to save his own crazy notions of his own morality.

Even more dangerous is the corner we are getting into a CHINA.

China is building missile fields as we speak.

We thought we were out of the nuclear age.

The Chinese are building fields and we will be back into a scary standoff with another nuclear armed power.

I hope that we take lessons from the past about why it's not simple, it's not I'm right, you're wrong, but the statesmen have to work together to avoid getting to the brink.

>> We aren't even having nuclear arms talks with the Chinese and the Russians have pulled out of most of the nuclear arms agreements that we talked about.

Is that an example of the fact that everybody has gotten onto a righteous high horse that they are not able to do the normal things that people expected after Hiroshima, preventing this bomb from being used again.

>> the rhetoric is high horse.

If you read what Putin says were with the Chinese says, it's all add your prompt.

It's way out there in denouncing us as being wicked and evil.

You hope they may be talking that way but behind the scenes there are diplomats who are having realistic discussions with them.

There's a little sign, Ambassador Nick Burns was recently in China and there is an opening here for the world.

And that is in Ukraine.

If the Chinese could only persuade Russians to stand down, and if the United States, by the same token, could help Ukraine stand down, we could find a diplomatic ending to a war in which people are otherwise backing themselves into a situation where Putin could use a nuke.

There's a little glimmer of hope to me that statesmen could be -- and find a way out.

It doesn't help if you are posturing about how you are moral.

>> you say it's possible Vladimir Putin could use a nuclear weapon.

What do you think could drive him to that and what could he be doing?

>> if he feels he's losing and he could be deposed himself, and he has no other choice but to use a nuke, I think it's a horrific choice and I think the Chinese would try to talk him out of it, but it's possible, his rhetoric is crazy and he likes to rattle the nuclear weapon.

Rattle the nuclear SABR.

They do it all the time.

And they are always making references to say, the United States, you did it first.

You did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not us, so he's trying to morally back foot us.

So, in the real world, and I hope Putin reads my book because in the real world these decisions are difficult, they are not ideological.

We did use those weapons but we use them only after we realized that there was no other choice.

There's a movie coming out called Oppenheimer and there's a scene, which they probably will have in the movie, where after we drop the bomb, the scientist who helped create the Autumn bomb -- Adam bomb comes into President Harry Truman's oval office and says, I have blood on my hands and Truman kicks him out and says, I don't want to see that crybaby ever again.

Truman was posturing a little bit when he was doing that, but the is, you have to make terrible decisions and live with them.

My book is about people who had to live with terrible decisions.

>> with Biden going to Hiroshima in the Oppenheimer movie coming out, we are all reminded of these things again in one thing that Oppenheimer said as he was agonizing after the bomb was used, is possibly the use of the bomb would make sure we never used it again, tell me about that line of thinking.

>> Oppenheimer's own scientists were appalled by what they were about to do and Oppenheimer calmed them down by saying, if we use this thing, it will be so horrific that we will never do it again.

War will be over.

For a long time it looked like he was wrong about that, we had a huge arms race, but actually there was a taboo.

The people who use those weapons were shocked by it.

I wrote a book about President Eisenhower and he was determined never to use those weapons again.

I fear that with a passage of a half a century, more 70 years now, people forget how terrible they are, they are terrible.

The average ICBM nuclear warhead is 100 times more powerful than the atom bomb that fell on Hiroshima, 100 times or 200 times.

Hiroshima is taken out of midtown Manhattan.

In H-bomb is all five boroughs.

It's the whole thing.

The nuclear taboo work for a very long time, partly because statesmen did avoid pressing the button and there was arms control.

We need to get back into a world in which we are talking to each other about arms control and how incredibly dangerous these things are.

But I fear we forget.

>> You say people's memories are fading, is this going to be a spur to say, let's make sure we get back into arms control and other discussions?

>> the whole reason statesmen meet is that have off the record conversations so they are just yelling at each other through their spokesman.

I hope they talk about it because it has immediate relevance.

Ukraine has to be resolved before Putin fires off one of these things and then write over the horizon the fate of Taiwan is bringing the United States and China into a nuclear standoff.

If we fight China over Taiwan, there's a very good chance we will use missiles against the Chinese mainland and China will want to use missiles against our mainland.

This is not a nice 19 central C battle, this is an intercontinental battle.

That runs the risk of using nuclear weapons.

We've been there in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we need to live -- relive that history to remember how terrible it was, what a close thing it was.

That's another thing people don't realize.

We almost used a third bomb.

In my book I read about Harry Truman told the British ambassador they were running out of time and they would use a third bomb on Tokyo.

People don't realize that.

That's how close it was.

There was a coup d'état attempt in the Imperial Palace on the last night to try to disrupt the surrender.

People forget about that, but that's how close it came to us using a third weapon and they were planning for a sixth, seventh.

They were planning to drop bombs all along.

We don't want to be in that position.

>> your book has great insight reporting about major players.

Colonel Stimson, who was secretary of but mainly inside the Japanese Imperial court.

Tell me what you learned there.

>> the Japanese were determined to die.

After we had dropped to atom bombs on them there's a meeting in the supreme war Council, the guys who run Japan, and the Minister of war says, one and it be wonderful to die like cherry blossoms, the whole nation.

There's a deadlock.

They can't decide.

Finally the Emperor, partly because he's afraid there's an atom bomb about to drop on him, he puts an end to it.

It takes another five days, there is a coup attempts.

Cultures can go mad and the Japanese culture, at that time, did go mad.

Fortunately there were human beings involved and I read about it, Japanese Foreign Minister, nobody has ever heard of him, he was sentenced as a war criminal to 20 years, but he saved millions of lives because he was a human being.

He read German philosophers and he was a humanist and he saw that we had to surrender -- they, the Japanese had to surrender and he persuaded the Emperor.

He says, I agree with the Foreign Minister and he ends it.

But it took that kind of human courage, humanistic courage from somebody who read history, who was the Japanese Foreign Minister but he's anti-Nazi and he wanted to bring back the Germany of the 19th century.

Fortunately, there were just enough people like that in the Japanese government to end the war otherwise it would've gone on and on and millions would've died.

>> the other great interesting character in your book is hammering -- Henry Stimson, who is humanist and a realist to trying to balance realism and idealism.

Tell me about his conflicts.

>> that is American foreign policy in a nutshell.

We are not imperialists, we believe in democracy and human rights, but to make that work you have to use power.

You have to be a realist and an idealist.

He was the godfather of American foreign policy all through the Cold War.

That combination of trying to do the right thing and spread democracy, but at the same time realizing you had to exercise power and not back away from hard challenges.

Henry Kissinger understood that, but the guy who started that was a guy name Henry Stimson and he was 77 years old.

This is in my book, on the day he shows Truman the photographs of the destruction of Hiroshima, he has a heart attack.

A month later, when he tries to get arms control going, he has another heart attack.

He can't sleep.

This is not something he's, Bout, this is tearing him up inside because there is a conflict between realism and idealism.

It's hard to do both.

>> what role did self-denial and misinformation play in the decisions leading up to the dropping of the bomb.

>> we like to think when people make a tough decision they have a full and considered debate, that's not the way it really works.

There's a lot of denial and people not wanting to know.

On the night that Harry Truman gave the decision to drop the atom bomb he wrote in his diary, I have instructed the Secretary of War to choose a purely military targets so that we kill soldiers and not women and children.

Nonsense.

The bomb was aimed at the heart of your Shema but Truman didn't want to believe what he was about to do.

It's human.

People just have a hard time facing what they are doing, but he did it.

He did give the order.

He may have had some denial in his diary, but he made the tough decision.

>> was he right?

>> yes.

>> your book takes on what was called the revisionist school of history, which among other things said we were wrong to drop the atom bomb.

We could've won the bore without dropping the bomb, we did it to scare pressure off and we had artillery or -- all teary or motive.

Explained to me why the revision was wrong?

>> the people who drop the bomb didn't want to drop it, but it assumes Japanese would be willing to defend -- Surrender.

The facts are otherwise.

I know there's some reading Japanese diaries in the record, and I spent a lot of time sucking to the grandsons of my heroes.

>> and they give you some of the dialogue.

>> is just obvious from the contemporaneous record, not later, but what was happening at the time that the Japanese were not going to surrender.

It took to bombs and very nearly took a third.

>> one of the things that history does as we revise it, is that it does remind us, at least it should remind us of the moral ambiguities.

That we can't be sure about everything.

To what extent is your book intended in a way to talk about the importance of understanding moral ambiguity.

>> 100%?

If we go back and read history, the history of writing, history you've written, is full of moral ambiguity.

It's really black-and-white.

Look at Lincoln.

What was he doing?

He did a very difficult thing and freeing the slaves.

For not moral ambiguity to free the slaves, but everything surrounding it was incredibly complex and 5149 decision close calls.

That's the real world.

Our country made a virtue of this in the foreign policy.

We were nearly purely realists nor will we purely idealistic and lovey-dovey about human rights.

It can't be just one of the just one or the other, that's why Henry cannot sleep at night.

I'm sure Joe Biden doesn't sleep very well.

Maybe we don't want them to sleep well, we want them to stay up.

These are hard questions.

Let's be honest about what they are going through.

>> Evan Thomas, thank you for joining us again.