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By Root 1205 0

’. According to Truman, Stalin replied that ‘he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make “good use” of it against the Japanese’. Truman and other US officials thought Stalin’s reply indicated that he did not know what weapon the President was talking about—no more, that is, ‘than the man in the moon’, as Truman said later. They were wrong. Stalin had in June received information, gleaned from Klaus Fuchs at Los Alamos, that a bomb test was scheduled for later in the summer, and the intelligence was later refined. Following the plenary, Stalin called Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, to ask what Soviet intelligence knew about the shot. Beria said there had been no information that a test had taken place, whereupon Stalin flew into a rage and told Beria he had been misinformed. Back at his villa Stalin, cursing ‘in ripe language’ about American machinations, declared that he would not be manipulated and vowed to speed production of a bomb.52

Out of the Potsdam conference came the eponymous declaration that spelled out surrender terms to the Japanese. Stimson, along with Joseph Grew and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, had in June drafted a statement of terms that offered a slight but significant modification of unconditional surrender: that the Japanese might retain ‘a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty’. The ‘Committee of Three’, as the men called themselves, hoped that such a promise might tip the balance in the Japanese Cabinet, allowing its ‘peace faction’ to lead an exit from the war because the emperor, who might now be enlisted in the quest for peace, would escape punishment, removal from office, or humiliation. On 18 July, just after the conference had begun, the Joint Chiefs of Staff offered their support for retaining the Emperor as the only figure on the scene who could persuade the soldiers loyal to him to lay down arms. But Byrnes disliked the new draft of terms. He may have feared that seeming to soften US conditions, however subtly, might encourage Japanese hardliners to continue the fight in the hopes of gaining further concessions. Equally likely, Byrnes’s focus, as ever, rested on domestic politics, and he worried that the loophole made by the modification would enrage an American public bent on bringing to its knees the nation that had perpetrated Pearl Harbor, the Bataan ‘Death March’, and scores of reported atrocities against American (and other) prisoners.

This was Truman’s concern too. It was his view that Franklin Roosevelt had committed the United States to the policy of unconditional surrender, just as FDR had assumed, in authorizing a program to build an atomic bomb, that the bomb should be dropped when it was ready. The new president was willing to offer the Japanese a hint of leniency in the Potsdam Declaration, or what he believed was a hint: the Japanese could establish a government ‘in accordance with the[ir] freely expressed will’, though only in the presence ofUS occupation forces and only after other conditions had been met—among them the elimination of ‘the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest’, and the administration of ‘stern justice’ to all ‘war criminals’, perhaps including the Emperor. When Byrnes removed the imperial retention clause from the draft declaration, Truman tacitly agreed with his secretary of state by accepting the change. The Potsdam Declaration, issued on 26 July by the United States, Great Britain, and China (the Soviets were not asked to sign), thus offered Tokyo no meaningful modification of terms, only the peace of the vanquished, and in harsh language. Japan’s choice was ‘unconditional surrender’ or ‘prompt and utter destruction’.53

So the die was cast. When the Japanese government did not immediately accept the Potsdam Declaration—Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki reportedly said, on 28 July, that Japan would ‘ignore’ it (mokusatsu)—the Americans moved ahead with their plans to drop an atomic bomb on the first target city, Hiroshima. The uranium core of the