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What has our 32,500 (at its peak) nuclear stockpile brought us? There was a fundamental miscalculation here. Oppenheimer and most of his friends opposed this decision, and they were right. From that standpoint, he concludes the article I've linked to with this observation about the Smithsonian fiasco (emphasis in original): The worst thing about this whole affair, as this peacenik sees it, is that the fuss over events in 1945 eclipsed the dangerous decision of the Truman Administration to build the hydrogen bomb. Professor Newman's political views have no bearing one way or the other on the scrupulousness and independence of his scholarship, but I will mention anyway that he is a longstanding activist in the American anti-war and anti-nuclear movement. He states:"hat is available in the archives shows a disregard for scholarship that is shocking, and it is hard to believe that the leaders of American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians rushed to the defense of these curators. Newman, examined the affair nearly ten years later with the benefit of the Smithsonian's own archives. One of my correspondents, the historian Robert P. That was the cause of the controversy, which caused the exhibit's cancellation. Rather, it was that the exhibit's treatment of President Truman's decision to drop the A-bomb was scandalously ahistorical. The salient feature of the Smithsonian's exhibit, which provoked Gen Tibbets's entirely reasonable remark, was not that it referred to the immense suffering that the A-bombs caused. I take particular exception to the BBC report of Gen Tibbets's death where it states:"In 1995, Gen Tibbets denounced as a 'damn big insult' a planned 50th anniversary exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution that put the bombing in context of the suffering it caused." These considerations do not resolve ethical debate on the A-bomb decision, but they should in my view powerfully inform that debate. The evidence is overwhelming that the reason for that surrender was the shock inflicted by the A-bombs (Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima). One of Japan's highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view an August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. American casualties in a conventional invasion would have run into hundreds of thousands, and would still have been dwarfed by Japanese suffering. And I've had Japanese since tell me that we saved their lives, too, because the invasion would have been nothing but bloodshed. His view never wavered:"It is the principle that we wanted to save lives. He was, on the accounts of those who knew him, a humane man who reflected publicly and thoughtfully on the A-bomb decision, the lives it cost and also the lives it saved. There is much to be said about Gen Tibbets's long life and public service, but one characteristic stands out. (The plane he flew, the Enola Gay, was named after his mother.) You can read a jaundiced account of his career on BBC News Online. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, died today.