Truman’s Horrible Mistake to Use the Atomic Bomb Essay

The war was coming to a victorious conclusion for the Allies. Germany had fallen, and it was only a matter of time until Japan would fall as well. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was at the forefront of the American war effort, and saw atomic weaponry as a way out of the most monumental war ever. As discussed in Cabell Phillips’ book, The Truman Presidency: The History of a Triumphant Succession, Stimson was once quoted as saying that the atomic bomb has â€Å"more effect on human affairs than the theory of Copernicus and the Law of Gravity† (55). Stimson, a defendant of dropping the bomb on Japan, felt that the world would never be the same. If the world would change after using atomic weapons, could it possibly have changed for†¦show more content†¦Necessity is the mother of invention. Michael Blow wrote in his book, The History of the Atomic Bomb, that the United States was building an atomic weapon for the main purpose of beating the Germans to the creation of the bomb (95-96). After uranium was used to create atomic fission in Berlin in 1939, Albert Einstein and other scientists wrote a letter to Roosevelt, talking him into government funding for atomic research in America (Foner and Garraty, â€Å"Manhattan† n. pag.). In a bit of irony, American leaders believed that the Germans, in the race to create the ultimate weapon, were beating them. In actuality, however, they never got far in their research, and America defeated them by a sizeable amount (Blow 96). In the United States, research for the â€Å"Manhattan Project,† the code name for the secret project to use atomic energy to create a bomb, expanded all around the country. This included universities such as Columbia, Princeton, California, and Chicago. While the research had been independent and government funded up until the middle of 1942, the army took over guidance of the project at that point. The possibility of an atomic bomb had become too re alistic to keep the research in the private sector (Foner and Garraty, â€Å"Manhattan†). In the later years leading up to the bombing, a committee was created to assess the decision of whether to use the bomb. This group, known as the Interim Committee, had two objectives - to control atomic energy,Show MoreRelatedAtomic Bombs And Its Effects On Japan1369 Words   |  6 PagesCan you imagine how many atomic bombs that have killed many Japanese during, World War II in Japan? On August 6, 1945, a new weapon with a significant explosive power known as the atomic bombs just has been dropped on Japan. The dropping of this weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki there were 262,020 civilians were killed. The United States to chose the atomic bomb in order for Japan to surrender and end the war quickly. 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