Many military officials also believed that the dropping of the bomb was unnecessary for many different reasons. Ralph Bard, under secretary of the navy, said that, “...it definitely seemed to me that the Japanese were becoming weaker and weaker. They were surrounded by the Navy. They couldn't get any imports and they couldn't export anything. Naturally, as time went on and the war developed in our favor it was quite logical to hope and expect that with the proper kind of a warning the Japanese would then be in a position to make peace, which would have made it unnecessary for us to drop the bomb and have had to bring Russia in...". Even Bard could see that the making of peace was well on its way.
Other officials believed that demonstrating the potential effects to the Japanese where it could be observed by civilians from Japan would serve as a more effective warning as opposed to a verbal one."I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used. Primarily it was because it was clear to a number of people, myself among them, that the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate... My proposal to the Secretary was that the weapon should be demonstrated over some area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be dramatic. I remember suggesting that a satisfactory place for such a demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood... I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest... would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will”... Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation...If the United States had taken the advice of Louis Strauss, special assistant to the secretary of the navy, then an actual dropping of a bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not have been necessary because the Japanese would have likely surrendered and many lives would have been saved along with the cities themselves. By dropping a bomb on an uninhabited city, a suitable warning would have been issued without the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Albert Einstein created a theory of relativity which made it known that vast amounts of energy could be released from relatively small amounts of matter. Even though he was not directly involved in the Manhattan Project he openly stated that he regrets signing the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be created. In an hour interview with Linus Pauling, Einstein shared his thoughts on his regret: “I made one great mistake in my life, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification - the danger that the Germans would make them.”
