52 SOCIAL SCIENTIST national law by indiscriminately attacking and destroying civilians, and they resolved their dilemma within the context of conventional weapons. Neither fanfare nor hesitation accompanied their choice, and in fact the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima was less lethal than massive fire bombing. The war had so brutalized American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945. Given the anticipated power of the atomic bomb, which was far less than that of fire bombing, no one expected small quantities of it to end the war. Only its technique was novel, nothing more. By June 1945 the mass destruction of civilians via strategic bombing did impress Stimson as something of a moral problem but the thought no sooner arose than he forgot it, and in no appreciable manner did it shape American use of conventional or atomic bombs. "I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities^', he noted telling the President on June 6. There was another difficulty posed by mass conventional bombing, that was its very success, a success that made the two modes of human destruction qualitatively identical in fact and in the minds of the American military. "I was a little fearful," Stimson told Truman, "that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength." To this the President "laughed (sic) and said he understood." (G Kolko, The Politics of War, pp 539-540.) 2 e For discussions of the reasons behind the American decision to drop the two atomic bombs which took 140,000 lives instantly, wounded countless others in a peculiarly horrifying way,drove thousands to permanent madness, and takes a toll to this day, see G Co\ko, op. cit., pp 539-43, 561, 567 and 595-597; andJToland, The Rising Sun, Cassell & Co., London 1970, pp 761 et seqq', D Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, William Morrow, New York 1970, discusses the impact of the Hiroshima bomb on Emperor Hirohito^s timing of a surrender he had already planned. 27 Stillman and Pfaff: op. at., pp 8, 13. 2 8 This was one factor entering into the American decision to escalate from "special war" in which their personnel acted merely as advisers to ARVN units, to direct intervention; as Halberstam, among others, reports (The Making of a Quagmire, Bodley Head, London 1965, pp 181-182 et passim) it drove US military advisers frantic with exasperation when ARVN units would "surround" the enemy on only three sides, so to speak, thus leaving a loophole for enemy withdrawal (something logical, of course on two scores: one, it saved lives; and two, it kept open the prospect that with tables turned, the compliment might be returned. It lies, too, behind the manner in which Saigon was finally liberated—the "beautiful vase" was preserved and the "rats^ inside driven out, without sledgehammer being taken to both, which would have been the American way (destroying a city to "save" it). 29 The First World War cost some 30 million lives; the second an estimated 50 million; and the Korean war an estimated 2 million (5 million casualties^, of which four-fifths came after the US had resubjugated South Korea (resulted directly or indirectly from US invasion of the North). As indicated earlier in the text, estimates of the carnage in Indochina are as yet incomplete. But of course these are but spectacular incidents in a history of imperalism continuously characterized by bloodshed, brutality and the impoverishment, degradation and starvation of people. Contemplate for a moment compiling a catalogue in which the itemized entries run all the way through from the earliest violent encounters between the pioneers of an expanding West and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the present—the Portuguese and Spaniards in South America, the British in India and throughout their Empire, the Americans against the indigenous peoples of the subcontinent and against the Filipinos, and so on endlessly until the technological horror of the Vietnam war. 8<) G Kolko, op, cit., pp 594, 595.