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a suggestion that Soviet representatives should be invited to attend the bomb’s testing. Beyond security considerations, America would appear ridiculous in the event of failure. For the same reason he opposed, without dissent from the committee, a formal warning to the Japanese. Oppenheimer himself said that he found it impossible to imagine a demonstration of the bomb—for instance, in the skies off Japan—which would be likely to impress the enemy. Next day, 1 June, the decision was formally recorded: “Mr. Byrnes recommended, and the Committee agreed, that the Secretary of War should be advised that, while recognizing that the final selection of the target was essentially a military decision, the present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible, that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes, and that it be used without prior warning.”

When Stimson reported these conclusions to Truman on 6 June, the secretary of war made two disingenuous and indeed contradictory observations. He had firmly rejected Groves’s proposal to drop the first bomb on the ancient capital Kyoto, hub of Japan’s culture. He was unmoved by the general’s pragmatic argument that Kyoto was “large enough in area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of the bomb. Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect.” Tokyo and several other cities had already been discarded as objectives, on the grounds that they were mostly rubble already. Stimson told Truman that, against air force wishes, he had held out for a precision rather than an area target, because he did not want the atomic bombing to be compared with Hitler’s mass murders. He also expressed fears that LeMay “might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.” Truman laughed, and said that he understood. Here was a vivid illustration of the inability of two intelligent men to confront the implications of what they were about to do. They had been told the potential explosive power of the atomic bomb, yet no more than the scientists did they know its consequential effects, of which radiation sickness was the most significant. In their minds, as in that of Winston Churchill, the new weapon represented simply a massive multiple of the destructive capability of LeMay’s B-29s.

Stimson’s role puzzles posterity. He was the most august veteran in the administration, seventy-eight years old. His political career began in 1905, when he was appointed a U.S. attorney for New York by Theodore Roosevelt. A gentleman at all points, known as “the colonel” from his military service in World War I, he had served as secretary of state under Hoover from 1929 to 1933, and presided over the War Department from 1940 to 1945. Stimson disliked many things about total war, above all aerial bombardment of cities. Robert Oppenheimer noted his strictures: “He didn’t say that air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he thought there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that.” In the months preceding Hiroshima, though Stimson was increasingly tired and ill, no American political leader devoted more thought and attention to the bomb. Oddly, given his distaste for incendiary attack, he never expressed principled opposition to atomic devastation. Indeed, he welcomed Oppenheimer’s weapon as a means of shortening the war. He strove, however, to serve the Japanese with notice to quit before this horror fell upon them.

The secretary of war’s fastidious reservations were quite insufficient to deflect the process now in train. From June onwards, only absolute Japanese submission could have saved Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thereafter, no explicit political decision was made to drop the bomb; rather, a dramatic intervention from Truman would have been needed to stop it. To comprehend the president’s behaviour838, the limitations of the man occupying the office, his July Potsdam diary is helpful. This reveals Truman’s ingenuous private responses to the personalities and events