Was the US bombing of Nagasaki necessary to end WWII?

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - on Monday August 6, 1945, and Thursday August 9, 1945, respectively - remain the only ones deployed against human beings. But the destructive power of today's weaponry is thousands of times greater.

It's salutary to recall the circumstances in which nuclear weapons were once used, and their ghastly toll.

Sydney resident Craig Collie is better known as a television producer-director than as a writer, and he had a daunting act to follow. This momentous subject has been traversed by three generations of historians, with Richard Rhodes's masterpiece The Making of the Atomic Bomb deservedly winning a Pulitzer prize in 1986.

Nagasaki is not in that class but Collie brings some original research and fresh thinking to the issues. His aim was to explore "what the people of Nagasaki were doing after the first bomb and before they got their own". He tracked down and interviewed six Japanese survivors of the blast; children or young adults in 1945, they are now elderly men and women.

The narrative is multifaceted. Collie describes the experiences of 50 ordinary citizens of Nagasaki - Japan's most Christian city, founded by the Portuguese in the 16th century - as well as a small group of Australian prisoners of war who were interned there. He also tracks events through the eyes of the American airmen who flew the two missions, and the military and political leaders of Japan, Russia and the US.

It's a compelling, frequently astonishing tale, and Collie undermines a lot of conventional wisdom. For a start, he reminds us that the second mission was nearly a fiasco. Whereas all had gone to plan for the crew of Enola Gay (the name of the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima), the crew of its sister plane, Bockscar, encountered a raft of problems.

Their target was supposed to be Kokura, an industrial town 180km to the north. Bad weather, mechanical failure and human error necessitated a change of course in mid-flight, and a one-chance-only pass over Nagasaki.

The bomb - which was live and had cost $US2 billion to make - otherwise would have had to be dropped in the ocean. In the event, Bockscar made the drop and limped home. After an emergency landing at Okinawa it finished only 3m from the end of the runway, with less than a minute's worth of fuel in its tanks.

Collie explores another, rather more disturbing, fact: that US president Harry Truman did not authorise the dropping of either bomb. Truman had assumed the presidency only a few months earlier, following the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

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