ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature of war termination and investigates the lessons learned about it from the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have contributed another legacy of delusion. Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a beguiling, and unshakable, association of ideas: the atomic bomb, victory and the ending of the war. However, the seeming success of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military strategy has concealed the more important political failure from our eyes. The illusion created by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they enabled the United States to maintain its posture of non-negotiation. The chapter addresses under four headings: termination and victory; termination and negotiation; termination and communication; and termination and restraints. In each case, it will be argued that the subsequent course of nuclear strategy has been adversely affected by the learning of the wrong lessons from the war termination which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are widely believed to have induced.
