著者

コート マイクル 麻田 貞雄 Michael Kort Sadao Asada

出版者

同志社法學會

雑誌

同志社法學 = The Doshisha Hogaku (The Doshisha law review) (ISSN:03877612)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.60, no.6, pp.471-491, 2009-01-31

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This article provides an overview of the scholarly debate concerning bombing of Hiroshima by the United States, focusing mainly on American historians. It traces the rise and eventual decline of the so-called revisionist school of historiography on the subject, which in its various forms challenged the thesis that the atomic bomb was necessary to force a Japanese surrender in 1945 and that the United States used the bomb for that reason. In particular, the article describes how scholarly works published since the early 1990s have demolished the main pillars of the revisionist argument, including the baseless "atomic diplomacy" thesis that the bomb was used to intimidate the Soviet Union and limit its postwar gains in Eastern Europe and Asia.