730 Chapter 27 War and Peace, 1941–1945
such was the tenacity of the Japanese soldiers that it
seemed possible that it would take another year of
fighting and perhaps a million more American casu-
alties to subdue the home Japanese islands.
Building the Atom Bomb
At this point came the most controversial decision of
the entire war, and it was made by a newcomer on the
world scene. In November 1944 Roosevelt had been
elected to a fourth term, easily defeating Thomas E.
Dewey. Instead of renominating Henry A. Wallace for
vice president, whom conservatives considered too
radical, the Democratic convention had nominated
Senator Harry S Truman of Missouri, a reliable party
man well-liked by professional politicians. Then, in
April 1945, President Roosevelt died of a cerebral
hemorrhage. Thus it was Truman, a man painfully con-
scious of his limitations yet equally aware of the power
and responsibility of his office, who had to decide what
to do when, in July 1945, American scientists placed in
his hands a new and awful weapon, the atomic bomb.
After Roosevelt had responded to Albert Einstein’s
warning in 1939, government-sponsored atomic
research had proceeded rapidly, especially after the
establishment of the so-called Manhattan Project in May
- The manufacture of the element plutonium at
Hanford, Washington, and of uranium 235 at Oak
Ridge, Tennessee, continued, along with the design and
construction of a transportable atomic bomb at Los
Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J. Robert
Oppenheimer. Almost $2 billion was spent before a suc-
cessful bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, in the New
Mexican desert, on July 16, 1945. As that first mush-
room cloud formed over the desert, Oppenheimer
recalled the prophetic words of the Bhagavad Gita: “I
am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”
Should a bomb with the destructive force of
20,000 tons of TNT be employed against Japan? By
striking a major city, its dreadful power could be
demonstrated convincingly, yet doing so would bring
death to tens of thousands of Japanese civilians.
Many of the scientists who had made the bomb now
argued against its use. Others suggested alerting the
Japanese and then staging a demonstration explosion
at sea, but that idea was discarded because of concern
that the bomb might fail to explode.
Truman was torn between his awareness that the
bomb was “the most terrible thing ever discovered”
and his hope that using it “would bring the war to an
end.” The bomb might cause a revolution in Japan,
might lead the emperor to intervene, might even per-
suade the military to give up. Considering the thou-
sands of Americans who would surely die in any
conventional invasion of Japan and, on a less humane
level, influenced by a desire to end the Pacific war
before the Soviet Union could intervene effectively
and thus claim a role in the peacemaking, the presi-
dent chose to go ahead. The moral soundness of
Truman’s decision has been debated ever since. (See
Debating the Past, “Should A-Bombs Have Been
Dropped on Japan?”, p. 731.) On August 6 the
Superfortress Enola Gaydropped an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, killing about 78,000 persons (including
twenty American prisoners of war) and injuring nearly
100,000 more out of a population of 344,000. Over
96 percent of the buildings in the city were destroyed
or damaged. Three days later, while the stunned
Japanese still hesitated, a second atomic bomb, the
only other one that had so far been assembled, blasted
Nagasaki. This second drop was less defensible
morally, but it had the desired result. On August 15
Japan surrendered.
Thus ended the greatest war in history. Its cost
was beyond calculation. No accurate count could be
made even of the dead; we know only that the total
was in the neighborhood of 20 million. As in World
War I, American casualties—291,000 battle deaths
and 671,000 wounded—were smaller than those of
the other major belligerents. About 7.5 million
Soviets died in battle, 3.5 million Germans, 1.2 mil-
lion Japanese, and 2.2 million Chinese; Britain and
France, despite much smaller populations, suffered
losses almost as large as did the United States. And far
more than in World War I, American resources,
human and matérial, had made victory possible.
No one could account the war a benefit to human-
ity, but in the late summer of 1945 the future looked
bright. Fascism was dead. The successful wartime diplo-
matic dealings of Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Soviet
dictator, Joseph Stalin, encouraged many to hope that
the communists were ready to cooperate in rebuilding
Europe. In the United States isolationism had disap-
peared; the message of Wendell Willkie’s best-selling
One World, written after a globe-circling tour made by
the 1940 Republican presidential candidate at the
behest of President Roosevelt in 1942, appeared to
have been absorbed by the majority of the people.
Out of the death and destruction had come tech-
nological developments that seemed to herald a better
world as well as a peaceful one. Enormous advances in
the design of airplanes and the development of radar
(which some authorities think was more important
than any weapons system in winning the war) were
about to revolutionize travel and the transportation of
goods. Improvements in surgery and other medical
advances gave promise of saving millions of lives, and
the development of penicillin and other antibiotics,
which had greatly reduced the death rate among
troops, would perhaps banish all infectious diseases.
Above all, there was the power of the atom. The
force that seared Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be