Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a cinematic tour-de-force—superbly acted, visually stunning, and dramatically compelling. Adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s acclaimed biography, the film’s portrait of the leader of the Manhattan Project is generally accurate and intellectually serious, tracing the route from the development of modern physics to the dawn of the nuclear era. And by focusing throughout on a single, intense character, the movie makes complex events clear, coherent, and gripping. That very framing, however, guarantees a relatively narrow view of many issues covered, leaving the larger strategic and political context surrounding the nuclear scientists’ efforts largely unaddressed and giving a misleading impression about the role of nuclear weapons during the end of World War II and after. 

When the movie addresses the use of the bomb, for example, one hears an occasional reference to a possible invasion of Japan, the likelihood of surrender, and U.S.-Soviet relations, but less time is spent on all of them together than on Oppenheimer in bed. Following a war from only one country, moreover, inevitably distorts understanding of what was, by definition, a multiplayer game. And the later parts of the movie, about Oppenheimer’s security clearances, say little about the ongoing influence of the bomb on American warmaking.

Clint Eastwood made two movies about the Battle of Iwo Jima, one from the American perspective and one from the Japanese. It would be great if Nolan would do the same, portraying the end of the Pacific War as it looked from Tokyo and Hiroshima as well as Washington and Los Alamos. As for which Japanese character could play the Oppenheimer role, providing a focus for dramatic unity, a good choice would be General Korechika Anami, the Japanese army minister—a hardline militarist whose death hours before his country’s surrender epitomized the passions and paradoxes of one of the most tumultuous months in history.

What Was Happening in Japan

Imperial Japan’s political system featured a semi-divine emperor presiding over an authoritarian government dominated by relatively autonomous military bureaucracies. During the summer of 1945, decisionmaking power was held collectively by a six-man committee including four representatives of the armed forces. And Anami, the most powerful of them, held a veto over all national policy. 

A smart, serious professional who had taken his post that spring when a string of Japanese defeats led to a cabinet reshuffle, Anami knew the war was going badly. But he remained confident his forces could still inflict powerful blows on the enemy and possibly disrupt any invasion of the Japanese home islands. That might buy enough time and space to arrange a compromise peace, he thought, and if it didn’t, well, then at the least the army would go down fighting. As his colleague General Yoshijiro Umezu, the army chief of staff, noted,

The word “surrender” is not in the Japanese military lexicon. In our military education, if you lose your weapons, you fight with your bare hands. When your hands will no longer help, you fight with your feet. When you can no longer use your hands and feet, you bite with your teeth. Finally, when you can no longer fight, you bite off your tongue and commit suicide. That’s what I teach.

The hardline faction in the government was balanced by a more moderate faction, however, led by civilians in the Foreign Ministry and Imperial Court. They increasingly recognized the scale of the impending military catastrophe and hoped to head it off through a negotiated settlement that would preserve the imperial system from foreign reform or domestic revolution. The hardliners controlled the cabinet, however, and the war ground on.

This was the situation confronting Allied policymakers as the Manhattan Project finally started to bear fruit. Despite Germany’s capitulation, regardless of its own losses, Japan refused to concede and continued to put up a furious resistance. The Truman administration threw everything it could at the problem, from bombing to blockade to a planned invasion of the home islands set to start in November, with estimates of American casualties ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands. The White House begged Russia to enter the war in the Pacific, just as Russia had earlier begged the United States and the United Kingdom to open a second front in Europe. And a few in the know hoped the special secret weapons being developed by Oppenheimer and his colleagues might prove to be a game changer. 

In addition to military escalation, some favored trying diplomatic gambits to end the war as well, such as clarifying the kinds of treatment Japan could expect following occupation and allowing it to retain its monarchy. One of those was British premier Winston Churchill, who made the case to Truman in July. As he described the conversation in his memoirs,

I dwelt upon the tremendous cost in American and to a smaller extent in British life if we enforced “unconditional surrender” upon the Japanese. It was for him to consider whether this might not be expressed in some other way, so that we got all the essentials for future peace and security yet left them some show of saving their military honour and some assurance of their national existence, after they had complied with all safeguards necessary for the conqueror. The President replied bluntly that he did not think the Japanese had any military honour after Pearl Harbor. I contented myself with saying that at any rate they had something for which they were ready to face certain death in very large numbers, and this might not be so important to us as it was to them.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin, more cynical than his partners, couldn’t see the problem. Truman should make whatever promises necessary to get the Japanese to stand down, he told special emissary Harry Hopkins, but not feel bound to live up to them afterward. Hopkins summarized Stalin’s advice for the president as, “agree to milder peace terms but once we get into Japan to give them the works.”

In the end, Truman decided to give the Japanese one last chance to concede before either using atomic weapons or invading the home islands, but chose to keep both promises and threats relatively vague. The July 27 Potsdam Declaration thus reiterated calls for Japan’s unconditional surrender while specifying several examples of moderate treatment Japan could expect to receive afterward, including maintaining a government “established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The declaration closed with a threat of “prompt and utter destruction” but did not mention two new elements in the war: the impending Soviet entry and the atomic weapons proven useful in the successful Trinity test at Los Alamos eleven days earlier. When the Japanese government made no response, on August 6 the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

The Road to Surrender

In Oppenheimer, the dropping of the bomb seems to lead directly to the end of the war. In real life, things were more complicated and contingent. The Japanese government was stunned by the attack on Hiroshima but had difficulty assimilating what had actually happened and made no move to concede. On August 8, the Soviets announced they were entering the fray, slicing through Manchuria and dashing any lingering Japanese hopes that Moscow might mediate a compromise settlement. And on August 9, another atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki. 

As reports of these three distinct but near-simultaneous events filtered in, Japan’s leaders realized something big had changed and met to consider their next steps. But despite everything, the cabinet’s Big Six remained deadlocked. The prime minister, the foreign minister, and the navy minister wanted to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration subject to an explicit acknowledgment that the imperial institution would be preserved. But Anami and the army and navy chiefs of staff favored continuing to fight until the Allies accepted three additional conditions to boot: that Japan would be allowed to disarm itself, that there would be no occupation of the home islands, and that there would be no war crimes trials. 

The exasperated, desperate moderates implored the emperor to break the tie, and finally, he agreed. On the evening of August 9, for practically the first time in modern Japanese history, the heretofore ceremonial monarch strongly advocated a particular course of action on national policy, personally asking the cabinet to stop the war. Shocked but reverent, the hardliners bowed to the imperial will, and the Japanese government sent a note to the Americans, through the Swiss, accepting the Potsdam Declaration “with the understanding that the said declaration does not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”

This note was welcomed in Washington, but it created a quandary for American officials because it challenged the notion of unconditional surrender and reopened the internal debate over whether to preserve the emperor’s status. Truman instructed Secretary of State James Byrnes to come up with a reply, and after much discussion the U.S. response, transmitted back through the Swiss on August 11, fudged the issue, saying, “From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.”

This, in turn, created a quandary for the Japanese, producing the same three-three split as before, with the moderates arguing that preservation of the imperial institution could be read into the American note while the hardliners demanded an explicit guarantee. Ultimately, the dispute was resolved on August 14 with a second extraordinary direct intervention by the emperor imploring the hardliners to submit. Unwilling to contradict his lord and master, Anami gave in, and that afternoon, as the emperor began preparing a radio message announcing the surrender, the army minister broke the news to his devastated staff:

Three hours ago the emperor commanded that Japan accept the enemy terms. The army will obey the emperor’s command. He offered to come here and speak to you himself. I replied that that would not be necessary. The army, I said, will, like the rest of the country, obey the emperor’s command … No officer in the army will presume to know, better than the emperor and the government of the country, what is best for the country … The future of Japan is no longer in doubt, but neither will it be an easy future. You officers must realize that death cannot absolve you of your duty. Your duty is to stay alive and do your best to help your country along the path to recovery—even if it means chewing grass and eating earth and sleeping in the fields.

Despite Anami’s orders, some fanatical junior officers refused to accept capitulation and launched a coup to prevent it. The army minister had known about their plot for days, even flirted with leading it, but had ultimately backed away. That night, the plotters made one last approach to get him to join them, but in vain. Around 2 a.m., shots rang out in the imperial palace. Anami, getting drunk with the messenger, remained calm. He predicted that without his participation the coup attempt would fail, and he was right: although the plotters penetrated the palace and killed some guards, they never managed to capture the emperor or destroy the two hidden recordings of his surrender message, set for broadcast at noon. 

At 4 a.m., having guaranteed the emergence of a world he could not bear to live in, Anami violated his own order. He put on a loose white shirt that the emperor had given him as a present years before, drew his short sword from its lacquered sheath, and committed ritual suicide. Eight hours later, gathered around radios across Asia, the Japanese people and armed forces heard their ruler’s voice for the first time. “Despite the best that has been done by everyone,” they were told, “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” As a result, the throne had “resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.” Within three weeks, the war in the Pacific was over.

The Real Bad Guys

Unlike the final acts of most wars, which languish in relative historical obscurity, the Pacific endgame of World War II has received a vast amount of attention. The main historiographical debates have generated more heat than light, however, because most of the work has been hobbled by an excessive focus on the American side of the conflict, an anachronistic obsession with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a simplistic, apolitical conception of what war termination involves.

The debate about whether dropping the bomb was necessary to head off an invasion of the home islands, for example, makes sense only in retrospect, when so many people felt so bad about the bomb’s use and focused on it in isolation from the rest of the conflict. Viewed in prospect, by people knowledgeable about and charged with responsibility for the war effort in general, the question was not about necessity but about expected utility—might it help convince the Japanese to surrender?—and the answer was clearly yes. (This is the unstated backdrop to Truman’s “crybaby” comment about Oppenheimer in the film.)

Given what other terrible miseries were being inflicted and suffered, the bomb did not stand out as much from the background of events then as it does now, and not nearly enough to make it a dramatic exception to the rule of fighting the war with whatever tools were at hand. Postwar guilt over the infliction of mass noncombatant deaths attached itself to the atomic bombings rather than the incendiary bombings less because of any significant moral difference between them than because the latter occurred routinely during the war while the former coincided dramatically with its end. At the time, the bomb and other strategies were understood as complementary and not mutually exclusive—as can be seen from the post-Nagasaki discussions over tactical use, when the American military leadership considered integrating the next available atomic bombs into the invasion planning.

American behavior during the Pacific War was shocking and the human results of its strategies were sickening. But Japanese and Russian behavior was worse, both at the micro and the macro level, toward every category of population—occupied peoples, prisoners of war, and even their own combatants and citizens. Every month in 1945 until the war’s end, for example, Japanese forces caused the deaths of 100,000-250,000 noncombatants across Asia, and the bloodletting was finally stopped by the surrender. 

The possibility that the atomic bombs might induce a Japanese surrender prior to Russian entry into the war was indeed an added attraction for the American leadership in general, and an important consideration for some officials, but Russian policy was far more cold-blooded. Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Manchuria sped up to be sure his forces were in a position to reap the spoils of peace and he kept them fighting for weeks longer in order to seize more territory. Hearing news of Japan’s capitulation, Truman immediately ordered his forces to suspend offensive operations; Soviet forces not only continued their advances but stepped up the pace. And the human cost of these little-studied final Soviet operations dwarfed those of the atomic bombs: following their entry into the war, Stalin’s forces captured about 2.7 million Japanese nationals, of whom 350,000-375,000 ended up dead or permanently missing. 640,000 Japanese prisoners of war seized by the Soviets in August 1945 were sent to slave labor camps in the USSR.

The Emperor Debate

Given what happened after the bombs were dropped, the notion that a demonstration strike would have produced a Japanese surrender seems fanciful. And regarding the much-debated question of whether it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Russian entry that did the trick, there is no way to know for sure, since they happened nearly simultaneously and counterfactuals depend heavily on subjective assumptions about the psychology of a few key individuals under great stress. Either might have produced a comparable result by itself, and other factors might well have intervened to head off an invasion even if neither had occurred. Like a patient with multiple organ failure, Imperial Japan was dying from several causes simultaneously; which one finished the job was largely a matter of chance. In the end, the bomb was used when it became available for use; it was a chance that happened while Japan was still in the war, but Germany wasn’t.

As for the emperor’s decision, finally, what the Americans thought of as a question of the emperor, the Japanese thought of as a question of their kokutai, generally translated as “national polity.” Just what this term meant in practice, however, was never clear—or rather, was contested. 

In its final decade, Imperial Japan could legitimately be viewed from any of several vantage points: as a homogenous society bound together by ethnicity, history, and geography; as a religious or ideological community bound together by particular beliefs; and as a political regime with a particular set of institutions and procedures. The concept of kokutai jumbled all these together into one emotionally resonant whole, symbolized in the person of the semi-divine emperor, representing his people and regime and claiming direct descent over thousands of years from the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami. At issue in the summer of 1945 was not simply how the Pacific War could be ended, but how much this concept could and should be deconstructed and what would happen if it were.

On the American side, this meant pondering how deep the roots of Japan’s aggression lay and hence what kind of reforms would be necessary to eliminate them. On the Japanese side, it meant determining whether kokutai was at root about people, ideas, or institutions. Despite what they occasionally claimed, no Japanese leaders seemed to care about their people qua people; all were ready to sacrifice countless lives of ordinary Japanese to protect their ideological, religious, or political visions. The hardliners in the cabinet, and the fanatics in the military ranks below them, defined kokutai as essentially a mystical conception of autonomous Japanese statehood, with sovereign authority contained in and represented by the emperor. From this perspective, both occupation and democracy were inconsistent with it, and so the only options in 1945 were a true compromise settlement or a full-scale fight to the death. That is why the cabinet hardliners argued for continuing to fight even after the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry, and why their zealous junior colleagues launched a coup attempt to save the emperor from his own decision to surrender. 

The moderates, meanwhile, were prepared to gamble that the Americans would retain the basic outlines of the imperial institution after the war and decided this was the best chance left of preserving a version of kokutai they could live with. Emperor Hirohito himself came to agree with the moderates, influenced in part by increasing worries over the fate of the imperial regalia—the three sacred relics, a mirror, curved jewel, and sword, whose possession legitimized his dynasty and symbolized its divine origin.

During the final week of the war, the moderates finally came to a position the Americans could accept, but the hardliners remained intransigent, and the Japanese government had no mechanism for breaking the deadlock. (Pro tip: never establish a decisionmaking body with an even number of participants.) What the atomic bombs and Soviet entry really did was give the emperor and his advisers an excuse to intervene in support of the moderates’ position. But the expression of that position in the Japanese note of August 10 was problematic because it was couched in the extreme rhetoric of the hardliners, thus almost defeating its purpose. Luckily for all involved, the Byrnes note of August 11 handled the issue delicately enough to set the stage for a second imperial intervention on August 14, which allowed the war to end relatively cleanly.

From Then to Now

The ultimate evolution of postwar Japan proved more successful than anyone in 1945 could have imagined. During the occupation, the Americans decided to retain the imperial structure while forcing major political reforms, paving the way for the emergence of a liberal democratic constitutional monarchy—one that has been peaceful, prosperous, and stable ever since. And as with politics, so too with security. For all the worries about impending Armageddon, including those expressed by the father of the bomb himself, the nuclear era has witnessed not devastating war but the longest great power peace in the history of the modern international system. 

At first, it wasn’t clear how nuclear weapons could be reconciled with normal geopolitics. Breaking the cycle of war seemed impossible. Continuing it seemed unthinkable. Tensions ratcheted up further when the Soviet Union got the bomb in 1949. And then, in June 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Washington and its allies quickly jumped in on Seoul’s side, facing off against Moscow, which along with Beijing was backing Pyongyang. The question of how would war play out in the nuclear age would finally be answered.

For three years, as brutal fighting raged up and down the Korean Peninsula, the two sides gradually felt each other out and tacitly settled on the rules of the road for the new epoch. Neither of the nuclear powers wanted another total war, so both put strict limits on the conflict’s means, ends, and scope. They chose not to use nuclear weapons. They chose not to attack each other’s territory or regime, keeping the fighting to the Koreas. And beyond that, the war was allowed to proceed conventionally, as viciously as the belligerents wanted. These rules weren’t arrived at through negotiations but evolved in practice. Nuclear weapons, for all their power—because of all their power—turned out to be surprisingly powerless. Using them would carry many costs and bring few benefits. It would create more problems than it solved. And so, neither superpower did it. 

A decade later, the Cuban Missile Crisis reinforced the growing taboo against nuclear use and left the parties still more risk averse. Then Vietnam followed the same pattern as Korea. None of the nuclear powers, now including China, used nuclear weapons. None attacked another nuclear power’s territory or regime. And beyond that, anything went. The same rules held in the Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the Soviet and American wars in Afghanistan. They held for conflicts involving nuclear powers elsewhere (apart from some minor skirmishing). And they are holding once again in Ukraine, despite widespread worries to the contrary. 

Oppenheimer ends with a chilling exchange in which the title character muses that he once thought the Manhattan Project might destroy the entire world, then concludes sadly, “I believe we did.” It remains possible that he could be proved right, and complacency would be a mistake. Nearly a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, however, Churchill’s final take seems more prescient: “By a process of sublime irony [we] have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation. … The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.”

Gideon Rose is the Mary & David Boies Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of How Wars End.

Image: Shutterstock.