"President Truman’s choice to drop the atomic bomb is the most debated decision in the 20th Century. But what if Truman’s actual decision wasn’t what everyone thinks it was?
Eight decades after the bombing of Hiroshima, the conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or use the atom bomb in the hopes of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils.
But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened. Not only did Truman not take part in the decision to use the bomb, but the one major decision that he did make was a very different one — one that he himself did not fully understand until after the atomic bomb was used. And the weight of that decision, and that misunderstanding, became the major reason that atomic bombs have not been used again since World War II.
Based on a close reading of the historical record, The Most Awful Responsibility argues that despite his reputation as an ardent defender of the use of the atomic bomb, Truman was in fact deeply antagonistic to nuclear weapons, associating them primarily with the “murder” and “slaughter” of innocent civilians, believing that they never should be used again, and hoping that they would, in his lifetime, possibly be outlawed. Wellerstein makes a startling case that Truman was possibly the most anti-nuclear American president of the twentieth century, but whose ambitions in this area were strongly constrained by the domestic and international politics of the postwar world.
This book is a must-read for all who want to truly understand not only why the bomb was dropped on Japan, but also why it has not been used since."
"The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive?
Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author's efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power."
