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By Root 1233 0

’s heir apparent, in favor of Truman only because Roosevelt thought Byrnes was too conservative to win the northern votes that he judged were essential for victory that year. Byrnes briefed Truman on the atomic bomb just a day after Stimson did so—that is, on 13 April—telling the new president that ‘we were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world’, then adding that ‘the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war’. Truman, who feared Byrnes slightly and thought him ‘conniving’, nevertheless found his political experience useful and was unduly impressed with Byrnes’s international expertise. He asked Byrnes to be his secretary of state, effective that summer, and Byrnes accepted.38

Byrnes harbored no apparent doubts about using the bomb. As head of War Mobilization he had known of the project early on, and had told Roosevelt of his worries that the gadget was costing too much with no certainty of return. (Stimson would tell the President, during their last meeting in mid-March 1945 that he considered Byrnes’s anxieties ‘jittery, nervous, and rather silly’.) As we have seen, when Szilard approached Byrnes with his objections to using the bomb at the end of May, Byrnes put him off, echoing the arguments he had previously rehearsed with Truman: the bomb was too expensive not to use, and dropping the bomb could make the Soviets better behaved in Eastern Europe. During meetings of the Interim Committee, Byrnes voiced no concern about dropping the bomb, only returning with emphasis to his belief that the Soviets should not receive information about the bomb lest Stalin insist on a ‘partnership’ the Americans must never offer. More consistently than any other US official, Byrnes came to see the atomic bomb as a vital instrument of wartime and postwar diplomacy toward the Soviet Union. With Truman at Potsdam in July, and having just heard that the bomb had been successfully tested, Byrnes confided to Special Ambassador Joseph Davies that he thought the Russians would ultimately see things the Americans’ way with reference to the thorny issue of German reparations, and that September, with the war won, Byrnes went off to a Foreign Ministers’ Conference in London, according to the troubled Stimson, with ‘the presence of the bomb in his pocket’ to ‘get [him] through’.39

Byrnes thought of the bomb as an unalloyed benefit to the United States. Not so Henry Stimson. The Secretary of War, clearly aging and often incapacitated by fatigue and migraine headaches, nevertheless commanded enormous respect in Washington and beyond in 1945. His experience of government was far greater than that of Truman, and virtually everyone else. It was Stimson who had deflected the enquiries of then-Senator Truman in 1944 when Truman, chair of the Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, had tried to probe a very expensive but secret construction project called Manhattan. Stimson was not as convinced as Byrnes that the Soviets were untrustworthy, and he regarded the atom bomb, as he told the President in late April, as ‘the most terrible weapon ever known in human history’, one that carried with it ‘a certain moral responsibility’. When a scientists’ Target Committee placed the city of Kyoto at the top of its list of objectives for an atomic-bomb crew, Stimson, who had twice visited it, demanded its removal: Kyoto was a cultural and religious center that would become, if destroyed, an example of American cruelty, and, if spared, a symbol of American decency and restraint. No amount of entreaty from Groves would persuade the secretary to put Kyoto in the cross hairs. Stimson also took it on faith that civilians should be spared, ‘as far as possible’, from the weapons of war.40

‘As far as possible’—there was a loophole that admitted morally dubious acts backlit by self-delusion. In gravitas, in the regard with which others held him, in his willingness to allow his decisions about the bomb at least occasionally to trouble him, he was the government’s counterpart to Robert Oppenheimer