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should be used. The modifier ‘most’ is essential here, since, as we will see, there were those (not Eisenhower) who urged at the time that the bombs not be dropped, that an alternative be found to end the war that did not involve using nuclear weapons against undefended cities. These arguments were either ignored or considered and rejected. The context in which they were made was that of total war against an enemy widely regarded as ruthless and disinclined to surrender unless utterly defeated. Franklin Roosevelt had insisted early in 1943 that Germany, Italy, and Japan surrender without condition; not only the capacity of the Axis nations to make war but their ideological tendency to do so must be expunged. Harry Truman accepted the demand for unconditional surrender as part of his predecessor’s legacy. Defeat alone was insufficient; the enemy must be destroyed. Atomic bombs would facilitate his destruction.

1. The progress of the war against Germany

The Manhattan Project began because of fears that Nazi Germany would move rapidly to build an atomic bomb, and that a bomb in Nazi keeping would mean catastrophe for the civilized world. When President Roosevelt had agreed, on 9 October 1941, to move ahead with developing an atomic bomb, Germany and its allies had established control over much of Europe, had substantial forces in North Africa that appeared to threaten also the Middle East, had waged war from the air against Great Britain (with serious psychological though without decisive strategic results), and, the preceding June, had broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and invaded the Soviet Union, with frightening success to that point. The United States and Germany were not yet at war, but their relations were icy and their ships were firing at each other in the North Atlantic, as American vessels carried supplies and munitions to Britain and the Soviet Union and provided cover against German submarines for their own ships and others. War came, by German declaration, two months later. Through 1942, as the Americans improved the coordination and tightened the secrecy of their bomb effort, as Ernest Lawrence began producing minute amounts of uranium 235 in his Berkeley Calutrons and Enrico Fermi built his atomic pile in a University of Chicago squash court under the aegis of Arthur Compton’s energized Met Lab, and as Leslie Groves went from colonel to general as he took vociferous command of what was now the Manhattan Project, the German grip on power started gradually to loosen. The Battle of Britain went the way of the Royal Air Force; the invasion of the Soviet Union sputtered, then stalled. The German atomic bomb project was frustrated by decentralization, scientific missteps, and lack of sympathy at the political top, though the Allies did not know this. In the summer of 1942 the first American bombs struck targets in occupied Europe. The Battle of the Atlantic turned in the Allies’ favor. In November, while workers in Chicago skidded on residue from Fermi’s graphite and Groves and Robert Oppenheimer sealed their functional courtship by agreeing to build the bomb at Los Alamos, American and British troops were landing in North Africa (Operation Torch) to begin the destruction of the Nazi empire from the outside in. Winston Churchill called the strategy ‘closing the ring’.

As the scientists moved to Los Alamos in the spring of 1943 and construction progressed at the massive plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford, German military reverses multiplied. The invasion of North Africa bore fruit that May, when Allied forces defeated the German Afrika Corps and took a quarter of a million prisoners. The tide turned in the Atlantic that spring too, as the Americans and Canadians built supply ships more quickly than German U-boats could sink them and improvements in Allied sub detection and defense took hold. In April the Germans lost fifteen subs to Allied attack; in May the figure was forty, and their commander, Karl Donitz, was forced to pull them back. The Allies, who had lost over 1,800 ships to the Germans in 1942,