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Was The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 Morally Justified
Literature review on books used within the essay.
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In analysing the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a range of primary sources were usedover a period of months, not all of which were ultimately included in the finished project.
This literature review will look firstly at the governmental and diplomatic sources used, then
at John Heresy’s report on Hiroshima, to explain why these were used and offer analysis of
them, as well as comment on sources that were not used.
Governmental and Diplomatic Sources
The majority of primary sources used were those available online at the National Security
Archive. This website has been created by journalists and scholars for a variety of purposes,
including to archive declassified documents. The National Security Archive claim to be ‘the
world's largest nongovernmental collection’ of official US diplomatic and political
documents. (Burr, 2007-2014). The seventy-seven primary sources collected here include
Top Secret documents, declassified in the 1990s, from military meetings, diaries and private
letters of leading politicians, and intercepted and translated diplomatic documents from
Japanese sources, classified under the code name ‘Magic Files’. Of these documents,
minutes of meetings and the Japanese correspondences were the most useful to my research
and gave me confidence in presenting my own ideas and placing my own interpretations in
conversation with those of other scholars. The sources are reliable, in some cases they are
simply scans of original typed documents and in other cases they are transcriptions of original
meetings. The website is trustworthy, as it has been compiled by journalists and scholars
interested in fact checking other reports and fighting American Government secrecy. As it is
a .edu website, the page can be seen as educational rather than commercial, and so can be
relied upon. The editor of the documents is named as William Burr, but no specific details are
given about his background or affiliation, so it is possible that he is biased or has an agenda
in the selection of which documents to include or exclude. It is not clear who translated the
Japanese documents, so it is possible that there may be some bias in word choice. On the
whole the website is extremely useful, it is free from spelling and grammatical errors - though
of course written in US not UK English and all of the information was put online to inform
and to allow access to formerly classified information. There is only a short introduction
which sets out some of the controversies over the use of the atomic bombs, but it does not
‘attempt to answer these questions or use primary sources to stake out positions on any of
them’ (Burr 2007-2014, n.p)
The sources themselves were all written at the time and record the words of leaders in
America and Japan. Minutes of meetings may have been edited, and would; not record all
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