Volume 5, Number 8 · November 25, 1965
Doomsday
By Ronald Steel
The Decision to Drop the Bomb
by Len Giovannitti, by Fred Freed
Coward-McCann, 319 pp., $6.00
Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam
by Gar Alperovitz
Simon & Schuster, 242 pp., $7.50
Day of Trinity
by Lansing Lamont
Atheneum, 311 pp., $6.95
Hiroshima Plus 20
prepared by The New York Times, Introduction by John W. Finney
Delacorte, 212 pp., $5.00
Now, twenty years after the scientific triumph that became a political nightmare, we are still trying to come to terms with the decision to use the bomb. Burdened as we are with the terrible legacy of Hiroshima—the shame, the responsibility, and the fear—that decision strikes us as one of the most momentous this nation has ever taken. Yet at the time, when the feverish work at Los Alamos was coming to a conclusion, there was no problem of a decision at all. To General Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project, 'There was never any question in my mind that we would use the bomb when we got it ready and also that we would get it ready just as fast as we could.' It was an opinion reflected at the highest levels of government and later expressed by President Truman himself when he wrote: 'I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.' Not only was there no doubt that it should be used, there was never any discussion of the matter. It was simply assumed. As Churchill has written in words which today seem remarkable in their matter-of-factness, 'The decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb was never an issue.'
Review, 3551 words
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