SOURCE: "Did We Need to Drop It?," in The New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995, pp. 10-11.

[An American historian, Beschloss has written extensively on American diplomatic history. In the review below, he remarks on Gar Alperovitz's The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth and Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar's Code-Name Downfall.]

For 20 years after Harry Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped on Japan in August 1945, most American scholars and citizens subscribed to the original, official version of the story: the President had acted to avert a horrendous invasion of Japan that could have cost 200,000 to 500,000 American lives. Then a young political economist named Gar Alperovitz published a book of ferocious revisionism, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965). While acknowledging the paucity of evidence available at the time, he argued that dropping the atomic bomb "was not needed to end the...