The legal decision by the United States to remove the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bomb was a strategic move that was intended to speed up the end of the war. The bombings were strategic threats by the United States on the Kingdom of Japan during the Second World War. President Harry Truman’s final decision was one of the most divisive and contentious questions in the twentieth century as he had to ask himself whether it was necessary to use an unspeakable destructive force device.
Prior to President Truman’s administration, Franklin Roosevelt approved the construction of a nuclear bomb for an Army Corps of Engineers team and was headed by Major General Leslie R. Groves (Dinkins, 125). This was referred to as the “Manhattan Project” and kept as a top secret. Following six months of intensive firebombing of Japanese towns, on 6 August 1945, ‘Little Boy’ was released in the city of Hiroshima. The “Big Man,” the second atom bomb, was dropped over Nagasaki (Hoyt, 45).
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and to do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the bomb,” said Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project (Polenburg 2002, 41). The atomic … Read more
Herbert Feis served as the Special Consultant to three Secretaries of War. This book was his finale to a series on the governmental viewed history of World War II, one of these receiving the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Feis gives personal accounts in a strictly factual description leaving out no information that the president and high … Read more
