ABSTRACT
Political scientists and policymakers explore the politics of war termination more generally-or to learn lessons about nuclear diplomacy that may apply to future decisions. A decision, by US, to use atomic bombs to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a plausible application of the rules of realism. From an act utilitarian position, questions about the decision to use atomic bombs on Japanese cities concern not only consequences as they were conceived beforehand but also the decision-making process the American leaders employed. But no one thought to make each atomic bomb in the series a separate political decision until after the second holocaust in Nagasaki. Because leaders did not carefully lay out their alternatives, they risked making a decision that did not even maximize their own happiness. The difficulty that national leaders in wartime have in applying utilitarian thinking shows, at minimum, that the injunction to weigh alternatives carefully is indeed a hard teaching.
