As this age goes on, if we have the time, we will choose according to the society we conceive for ourselves the scientists, politicians, generals and spies whom we want for our story. It will have Hiroshima and Nagasaki in it, of course; it will have the Berlin wall, Korea and the Cuban missile crisis. It will have Harry S. Truman. He came into the presidency with the death of Roosevelt in April 1945. The U.S. dropped its bombs in August, just four months later. We will argue among ourselves whether Truman made the crucial decisions or simply let the years of war planning and military momentum work out to their logical conclusion. We will argue about his need to come out from under the shadow of a predecessor of whose greatness there was no question in his mind. We will have to compute the most likely number of lives of American soldiers he saved by avoiding an invasion of the Japanese homeland. We will have to decide how much the desire to cow the Russians figured in his decision. We will eventually determine whether the bomb had to be dropped at all, and if there was the need for an invasion, given the wreckage of the Japanese war machine and the signals sent by Japan that it was receptive to negotiating a surrender. And if we decide the Hiroshima bomb had to be dropped, we will need to know why the Nagasaki bomb had to be dropped as well.
Examining the beginnings of the cold war, we will have to consider the character of Secretary of State James Byrnes, a South Carolinian and Truman appointee who insisted on making the bomb our postwar foreign policy and dismissed with fierce Southern contempt the international nuclear arms control advocates David Lilienthal and Dean Acheson. We will have to try to remember David Lilienthal and Dean Acheson.
If the atom bomb was fathered by Hitler, the hydrogen bomb belongs in part to Stalin–only in part because the arms face was as much a creation of our cold war containment foreign policy as it was a result of Soviet actions. At one point soon after the end of World War 11, we were flaunting our atomic stockpile when in fact we had no assembled bombs and the work at Los Alamos had ground to a halt; and the Russians on their end were making ominous warlike references to their immense land armies when in fact they were an exhausted people with 20 million dead, a ruined economy and an infrastructure largely unrepaired from the German invasion.