"}One of the main takeaways from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the one that gave me a sense of enlightenment, is that there\u2019s no particular reason why America nuked Japan or why they chose the targets they did. It\u2019s just kind of something that the bureaucracy did, a semi-inevitable excrescence. You can list a number of general aims that fed into the process \u2013 end the war quicker, demonstrate our military-industrial superiority \u2013 and you can name the leaders whose approval was required, but the whole thing was ultimately a causal goulash and the endless debates over Why all miss the point. Makes all the arguments I read of the form \u201cGovernment X Did Thing Y For Reason Z\u201d seem dumb as shit, frankly. If this tightly controlled secret wartime program didn\u2019t move as one, then nothing does. I don\u2019t even believe in the unitary self, so there\u2019s really no reason I should believe in a unitary bureaucracy, but it\u2019s a hard instinct to shake unless you\u2019re observing an organization with your nose right against the figurative glass. There\u2019s probably some cognate to Gell-Mann amnesia about this; no matter how often you realize that a given group isn\u2019t acting for any single purpose, you never apply that understanding to any of the groups you haven\u2019t studied as closely.
Or at least I don\u2019t.