Could the Cold War Have Been Avoided?

Debates about President Truman's decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan have in the eighty-one years since centered around the question of whether the lives of Americans spared were worth the human sacrifice on the ground. General Eisenhower was a contemporaneous opponent to dropping the bombs, believing that peace with Russia would have been possible had the bombs not been dropped. This paper formalizes Eisenhower's point with a signaling game in which the peaceful U.S. type can credibly reveal its intentions precisely because not dropping the bombs costs American lives, thereby avoiding the Cold War and the near-catastrophes it involved.