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Fighting To A Finish: The Politics Of War Termination In The United States And Japan

Leon V. Sigal
Reviewed by By Gregory F. Treverton
Summer 1989
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Leon V. Sigal
Cornell University Press
1988
335 pp.
$39.95

Why did it take so long for the United States and Japan to end a war whose outcome was no longer in doubt by late 1944? Sigal's answer is as thought provoking for the nuclear age as his analysis is detailed and careful: "War termination begins and ends at home . . . rooted in domestic and bureaucratic politics." Detached calculations of national interest were not always controlling, either of choices or of organizations under the pressure of war. Indeed, "war may numb what little sensitivity states normally exhibit outside their borders."

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