"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
It was for this reason that General Eisenhower ran for president on a platform of NO MORE WAR, and won. It was president Eisenhower that warned Americans in his farewell address when he left office in 1960 of a culture of war and the development of an industry that had grown out of WW11 that he coined the phrase, the Military Industrial Complex. In an interview with Newsweek magazine in 1963, he reiterated the fact that it was not necessary to waste the lives of a 1/4 of a million innocent Japanese civilian lives by dropping the atomic bomb because Japan was desperate to surrender anyway, and he didn't want the US to be the first to use that "awful" weapon.