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Alex Wellerstein, "The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age" (Harper, 2025)
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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was arguably the most controversial decision of the 20th century. The responsibility for that decision has logically fallen on US President Harry S. Truman. But what if Truman's actual decision wasn't what everyone thinks it was? Hello and welcome back to New Books in Diplomatic History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Dr. Andrew Pace, the host of the channel. Our guest today is Alex Wellerstein, an associate professor in the Science and Technology Studies program at the Stevens Institute of Technology and also a visiting researcher at Sciences Po in Paris. He's also the creator of nukemap. I will point out the world's most popular online nuclear weapons effects simulator. Today we're talking about his new book, the Most Awful Responsibility, Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age, which was published in 2025 by Harper. Alex, great to have you on the show.
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A
It's really great to be here. Thanks so much.
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Would you start by telling us a little bit about yourself? How did you become interested in nuclear weapons and what led you to write this book?
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So I identify as a historian of science, not, you know, first and foremost, not necessarily a diplomatic historian, not a political historian. I came to nuclear weapons by way of the history of science, and I wrote my first book on nuclear secrecy in particular, and the ways in which secrecy is both contradictory, or at least has been seen as contradictory with both science and democracy. And there isn't some sort of great reason why I work on nukes other than endlessly interesting topic to research. And it's always a bit of a struggle. And I enjoy the struggle. In terms of this book, I will say I never planned initially to try to write a book on Truman or I don't particularly care about Truman per se as a person. I'm not a natural biographer in any way. And I really did not ever expect, if you'd asked me, I don't know when I started this, would you be writing a book on the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki? What else is there to say? Hasn't this been picked over? And I came to this topic somewhat surprisingly to myself. I was looking at. I initially came to this through two routes. One was I got very interested in looking at this question of presidential executive authority to use nuclear weapons, which is a very controversial policy, and the history of that. And that all leads back to Truman and is not set up for the reasons that most people justify the policy for today. And I thought that was interesting. But really a lot of this book came out of looking very closely at one incident, which is usually sort of a footnote, the Kyoto, the sparing of Kyoto during World War II, and concluding, somewhat to my own surprise, that this was not a footnote, that this was actually a central event of incredible importance. And digging further and further into that, eventually this whole book came out of that. And I thought, well, I better write this book. So I will say I was not somebody who went into this expecting a book to come out of it with a new argument. And yet one came out. And so I thought, well, I better write it up.
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C
Okay. I appreciate that approach, though. As you say, diplomatic historians, military historians, political historians, presidential historians have all combed through these records, have analyzed all of the diplomatic cables and memorandums ad nauseam. But there's a fresh investigation here, which I think is really interesting and revelatory, really. But most books, as you have observed, that talk about the decision to drop the bombs, they really sort of culminate with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's the end of the story. Your book, for the most part, starts. There really starts with Truman finding out that Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt has passed away and that he is now the President of the United States. He now has this awful responsibility which you bring up again and again is the sort of motif of his presidency. But I just wanted to sort of bring us up to speed about the bombing decision, to reflect on these kind of competing narratives about the atomic bombs. There's sort of an orthodox narrative and a revisionist narrative. Right? So one of the conventional stories is that in order to defeat Japan, Truman was faced with the decision of either dropping the atomic bombs or launching a potentially costly invasion. He weighed the pros and cons and chose to drop the bombs as the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, there are revisionists who claim that Truman knew that Japan was defeated, they were ready to surrender, but he used the bombs anyway to intimidate and threaten the Soviets. And so the bombs, instead of being the last shots of World War II, were really the first shots of the Cold War. Your whole book sort of synthesizes this, but also suggests that this is sort of fundamentally wrong, that there's a misunderstanding in these narratives because Truman had a fundamental misunderstanding about the atomic bombs. What did he not understand?
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So those are the two sort of normal narratives. Right. We could call it the Stimson. Maybe the Alperavitz is the revisionist, depending on where you want to attribute authorship. And I do think attributing authorship is important because none of these narratives fall out of the sky. Right. Including the orthodox narrative. That's a very carefully constructed narrative. And I will say that I'm not a huge fan of the revisionist El Perovitz narrative, but El Peravitz does a great job of showing how that narrative got constructed. That's, I think, the strongest point of his book is showing you that the whole decision, morality weighing narrative is a very deliberate after the fact creation to justify this controversial activity which at the time it was being. Any decisions were being made, they did not perceive it as controversial. They didn't need to come up with these justifications. There's a third approach which is, I think, more common amongst diplomatic historians today. What J. Samuel Walker calls the consensus narrative, which is basically picking in the bits from those narratives that seem to work, but backing off the idea that there's some sort of one guiding motivation and rather seeing the bombing as an accumulation of decisions, often decisions, sort of path dependency that were made much earlier on. For example, sometimes technical decisions that end up getting to a place where everybody in the room discussing the use of the bomb is essentially in favor of using it for one of several possible reasons. And again, there's. There's no need to justify it if there's no opposition. Right. And I agree with that to a degree. If I were going to categorize my own book. It's sort of in that vein of it, which is away from the idea that Truman, or really anybody at the top is making some sort of measured decision. Should we use it, should we not? Why should we use it? I mean, this question presupposes that they would have some reason not to want to use it. And if all those people generally wanted to use it. The way I talk about my intervention, if we can use that term, is, you know, one way that General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, talked about Truman's work is he said there was no affirmative decision, which is again, the consensus view, more or less sees it that way. And instead Groves says that Truman's role was one of non interference, that he essentially went along with the plans that were already underway. My question is to ask what did Truman actually know about the plans that were underway? Because I think it's very easy. And I think this is where I differ from a lot of especially diplomatic historians and puts me much more into a historian of science mindset, which historians of science are very epistemological. We are all about what are the conditions of knowledge? What do you know? Knowledge is not a binary state. You can kind of half know something and half not know it. And then eventually it feels like you've always known it, et cetera. And so for me, this involves going through every record we have, privileging contemporaneous records, and not just after the fact, memories and things like this for what Truman believes is going on. What does he know about the atomic bomb? What does he know about the plans to use the atomic bomb? What has he been told? What are his channels of information? And there is. There aren't that many instances in which he talks about the atomic bomb prior to Hiroshima, Nagasaki. He only has a very, we might say, limited channel of information. Almost every conversation he has about this bomb prior to Potsdam is with one person, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, maybe Jimmy Burns, occasionally towards the end of the thing. Right. And Simpson, fortunately for us, kept a diary of all of his conversations, which gives us an even better index of how many times did this come up and in what ways did it come up. And so my argument, if I boil it down to sort of one statement, maybe two statements. One is that Truman's understanding of the plans as they were going was not that good. I don't think he had a great understanding of the bomb, especially prior to the Potsdam conference. And we could break the discussion to that. He got basically one serious briefing about it a Couple weeks after he became President, it was 45 minutes long. You can read the papers that were essentially given to him because they are both out there and declassified now. One from Stimson about the diplomatic impacts of the atomic bomb and what the implications were. One from General Groves on the sort of technical aspects of the Manhattan Project project and what the plans were. And from the accounts we have one, Truman apparently didn't enjoy reading these memos. He thought this was sort of tedious and you know, that's fine. Two, he had essentially no follow up questions or deep probing. And three, the whole briefing took 45 minutes. And I would challenge anyone. We've all taught complex subjects before and students, how much can you teach in 45 minutes? How much depth does your student recall in one 45 minute meeting? And these memos are not terrible, but it's very hard to imagine that Truman read, understood this in April 1945 and kept all of these details fresh in his head. Well, later, what are the implications of this? One is that I don't think Truman, for example, understood that two bombs were about to be used in quick succession. Every orientation he had about the atomic bomb was about the atomic bomb. Single use, first use. I do not think he realized that there were going to be two within a couple days of each other. He did in fact inquire at Potsdam about the schedule and he was given, I think, misleading information. We have the telegram that he was read. Again, thankfully this part is almost hyper documented at times and it required to understand the telegram efficiently. You have to remember things about the bomb development process that I'm not sure that Truman knew. Like for example, that there were two types of weapons.
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C
There's a uranium weapon, there's a plutonium weapon.
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And the schedule he got was only about plutonium weapons. And so that's a very different schedule. It's one at the beginning of August and one in mid August. That's somewhat misleading if you'd have forgotten that there's also a uranium weapon and these are two separate bombs. The bigger takeaway is that the only conversation that he has about targets and the use of the weapon is I think, a very misleading one. And that's related to the Kyoto discussion.
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Yeah, and there was. One of the things that comes across in your book is that Truman, as you say, knew less than we have all given him credit for. But also that Stimson and Groves, I think, were really the driving forces who knew about the development, knew the technology, the targeting plans, and they were filling Truman in here and there. But it almost seems to me like we should be giving them more credit for the decisions that were made in the process that unfolded. And Lester Truman. But there's. Well, and the targeting is an interesting example of this too, because there had been a number of cities that had been proposed as targets for the atomic bomb. Some of those targets were, I would say, more military targets like the Kokura Arsenal. But Kyoto's on that list, Hiroshima's on that list, Yokohama is on that list. And later, sort of weirdly, Nagasaki finds its way onto the list without anybody sort of again making a decision to formally, officially include it. And there were a number of debates among the interim committee that had been formed and the targeting committee to decide what cities would be used for this sort of experimental weapon. And the number one city on the list is Kyoto. And Groves is all in favor of it, but Stimson is not. And some people have continued to forward the rumor that Stimson opposed it because he went on his honeymoon there. He didn't, as you point out, but he still nonetheless was deeply opposed to bombing Kyoto. Why was that? If it was sort of the number one military target, why did Stimson have such a problem with it?
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So the target selection process is one that's one part technical. It's like, what does this weapon do? What are its limitations? And we don't think of atomic bombs as having limitations, of course, but it destroys a certain type of area. It's very good at a certain kind of blast damage. And their accuracy is only so much. And so you need, if you want it to be spectacular and be a real psychological weapon. And they are very explicit that this is the goal of this weapon. It's not some small target. It's not used to destroy some underground bunker. It's, let's shock the Japanese in some way and shock the world for, for some of them, then there's got to, you know, then, then you end up with a city this. They end up with a weapon that is best used against cities. And that's a sort of technical constraint. And then you go to the people who are good at bombing cities, the Army Air Forces, strategic bombing people, and you say, give us a target that's about this size, hasn't been bombed already, has this kind of these, these properties, maybe has some military facilities or something inside of it. And this is what boils down to this target list, right? So there's no even high level discussion here. This is like a very, almost technical, almost apolitical in a sense, if that's a. I mean, I don't know if you could talk about destroying cities, but. But like, it's not a policy question. It's. It's a what meets these constraints question.
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Well, and what cities are even out there available to bomb since Lamay's air forces have been bombing every Japanese city of more than 30,000 people.
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Exactly.
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So there just aren't any targets available.
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And this is a concern, Right. They both want to identify them and then reserve some targets so that they have some to use when they're ready to do it. So this planning is taking place in like, May 1945. And this is when Truman happens to be meeting with Groves and he says, do you have the target list? And Groves initially does not want to show him the target list. This is not Stimson's responsibility. Right. This is a technical, military, strategic kind of decision. And here is this, you know, essentially octogenarian civilian coming in and saying, yeah, and ever. And. And, you know, I'm not trying to be ageist here, but that's the literal comment everybody makes about Simpson in this time is, wow, he's really old. He has been working in this government since, like, Calvin Coolidge, right? Like. Like he is. He knows a lot, but he's very old and he's kind of crotchety and he has a different way of doing things. And I would just point out the Secretary of War at that time is not a very active participant in military decisions. It's not the McNamara Secretary of Defense who's picking out strategies. Stimson's job is basically logistics and sort of legislation and making sure the draft is working correctly and things like this. He is not involved in major policy decisions about how the war should be fought. He is not at any of the previous big three meetings, because why do you need him? He's not the Secretary of State. He's not involved with diplomatic discussions. And in fact, by this point in the war, most of what he's doing by his own account, is Manhattan Project related stuff. He has put all of the other responsibilities onto his Assistant Secretary of War, Patterson, because he's not interested in them and he doesn't have the energy. I mean, his diaries are wonderful because they're things like him doing some, you know, working on some memo about the implications of the atomic bomb. And then he needs to go take a break and get a massage or something like this and then take a nap all day. Right. Cause he's tired. And he would frankly probably have retired if not for the atomic bomb. And he's pretty clear about that at times. Anyway, so he's going into Groves and saying, give me your target list. And Groves, I think, senses that this is not a good idea and does not want to give it to him and tells him he doesn't need to see it. And, and, and Groves had only. They'd only finalize the target list like the day before. Right. It's not like some well set thing. And finally he, and he essentially, I mean, this is Grove's account of it later that he, he, he says, well, we, I don't have the report on hand. It's over in my office. It'll take some time. Simpson says, I'll wait. Fetch it. Let's see this. Let's get this target. And so he finds a target list with it, which at that time is just Kyoto, Niigata and Hiroshima. It's a truncated version. So Kokura is not even on it. Nagasaki is definitely not on it. And in Groves's recollection of this, Stimson immediately says, you're not going to bomb Kyoto. I'm sorry, no immediate veto, instant response. Vehement does not think it's a valid target. Groves thinks it is a valid target. Stimson in fact grabs General Marshall, who's down the hall and gets him to agree, they're not going to bomb it. I don't think Marshall cares. Groves is deeply offended by this apparent like jumping over Groves his head and bothering his superior. And like this is for Groves, a major embarrassing faux pas. But what I take out of this whole interaction. Stimson gives reasons for why he doesn't think they should bomb Kyoto, mostly later. And they range from sort of, it's a cultural center, it's really civilian. There's no military implications. We don't want to alienate the Japanese because maybe they'll go towards the Soviets later. I think these are all after the fact justifications. He's immediately hones in on Kyoto as you're not going to bomb that city and in fact nobody's going to bomb that city. He makes sure that it doesn't get bombed by anybody during the war. And I don't think those justifications, I don't think they hold weight. I don't think that's the actual answer. He doesn't go there for a honeymoon. He had been there a couple times in the twenties. He was well beyond his honeymoon in the twenties. That's how old he is. And there are some theories as to what's really going on. Does he have some sort of sentimental Attachment, I don't know. It doesn't really matter except to point out that this is well beyond some sort of neat rational argument. You can't persuade Stimson away from this. And the military tried to. They, by Groves account, he tries to put Kyoto back on the list about a dozen times. There's an interview that Groves does later where he says, ah, Stimson was so good about that, though, he didn't even mind. I find this unlikely. I find it very unlikely that Stimson is like sort of fanatically attached to the idea of not destroying the city and you're constantly trying to reinsert and essentially negate Stimson's authority, which Groves saw this as interference from Stimson. This is not a military, a civilian decision. This is. This is a military decision and this civilian is trying to preempt it. So anyway, the sum of it is I don't think. I'm not even sure Stimson knew why he didn't want to bomb Kyoto. My preferred explanation, which is just speculative on my part. Stimson, as you probably know, is one of the only people in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations at high levels who is deeply upset by strategic bombing. He doesn't like it in Europe, he doesn't like it in Japan. He tries after Dresden to instigate a sort of review of whether this is actually a Military targets have been targeted and he's told, yeah, it's fine, go away by the Army Air Forces. And privately it's clear that they do not respect him on this and he lets it drop. He goes to Truman a couple times and tries to suggest that this is actually a real problem. He suggests that if they're not careful, they will outdo do the Nazis in terms of their reputation for atrocities. But even then, he never suggests the Truman. He never says, hey, could we stop this? He never frames it as a sort of. I think he doesn't see that as his role as to try and actually stop things. He tries to convince the Air Force they should hold it down a bit. They ignore him. I think the civilian military divide there is really strongly on the military for this stuff at that point point. And so I think Kyoto for Stimson in some ways represents the only thing he can do as a man who does not want to destroy cities. Who knows the weapon he thinks is important to use, the atomic bomb is going to destroy more cities. But I think there's something there about almost like, well, you can't save them all, but you might as well save One. Right. You can save this jewel, which the military, by the way, disagreed on every point of Stimson's and made a point of emphasizing there are military targets in Kyoto. There's all sorts of manufacturing going on there. What are you talking about? It's a major city, of course, especially as they bomb other cities. The military infrastructure is going to move wherever. And of course it's in Kyoto. Kyoto is one of the biggest cities in Japan. So anyway, that's the context of Stimson, which is, again, doesn't matter why, but the fact is that he is almost fanatical, I would say, about keeping Kyoto off the list, which. That's why Kokura gets put on that list in June. It gets reserved and then later, once they finalize Kyoto being off the list. That's why Nagasaki gets put on at literally the last possible moment when they're finalizing the target order, because they need a backup target.
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C
Yeah. And eventually this, the sort of dispute between Groves and Stimson over Kyoto gets Truman involved. Stimson, at least in his. I forget whether it's Stimson's diary or Truman's diary that says, you know, we have agreed that this bomb is not going to be used on Kyoto. And this is. Sounds like in your book, this is the real sort of decision. The big decision that Truman made was taking Kyoto off the target list.
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This is the only decision about the bomb that he really takes part in prior to its use. He hears a little bit about the bomb. He's very excited and interested in the bomb. He's almost ambivalent about the bomb prior to the Trinity test. I don't think he really takes it seriously. I think he's interested in it, but he definitely doesn't act like it's the center of any kind of strategy. The closest he does to seem like he's actually interested in the bomb prior to the Trinity test, he delays the Potsdam conference a little bit because he wants to see what the results of this test are. And that's the only place where you see any kind of indication of maybe this will be important. And so the bomb is tested while he's at Potsdam. He is now excited. He's already in a kind of low moment at Potsdam. He now seems like he has this super weapon. He calls it this terrible bomb, which I think terrible is an interesting word to use. He uses that many times. Who. Um, it's sort of awe, terrifying, but. But maybe useful. Um, and yeah, it's in this context. So they are finalizing the, The. The Target ordering. So this. The. The final target order for the bombs goes out on July 25, and that is Truman has. I. I'm not even sure Truman sees it, but it's. It's a. It's basically a. A military order written by Groves. It's got another general's official issuing information on it, but it's written by Groves, and it's approved by Stimson and it's approved by Marshall. So Truman's not even involved in that very much. But just prior to that, Stimson gets a telegram at Potsdam from one of his representatives in the United States. Guy named George Harrison, not the Beatle, and, you know, a little confusing. And it basically says, you know, the military advisors are interested in maybe putting your pet city, Kyoto, back on the list if the people flying the planes think it's the right thing to do. And Stimson is not happy with this. I mean, again, the military has been pushing this authority question the whole time. Is Simpson's order really there? Kyoto has been reserved, but for what right? And so this is. When Stimson goes to Truman, he knows that they will respect the president if he can get him on board, then Kyoto is saved. And we have two accounts of this meeting. We have Stimson's, because he wrote a diary. He dictates a diary, really, after it. And then we have a journal that Truman wrote at Potsdam. And Truman didn't normally keep a diary, but sometimes he did keep journals. I think his Potsdam diary is notes for basically a report he was giving to Congress afterwards, because a lot of it shows up in that report, the language. And Stimson presents this meeting as, you know, I laid out my reasons for. He doesn't say Kyoto, but for sparing the target and about how it will turn the Japanese against us. And that'll be bad because we need their support after this whole thing is over. And Truman agreed with me, and that's fine. That's a rational sort of reason. Truman's account of the meeting is really different. It says that he and the Secretary of War have decided. So this is a real decision, that the bomb will not be used on either the old Capitol or the new Kyoto or Tokyo, and then instead will be used on a purely military target. That's the language. So that soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. And, you know, he says the Japanese are terrible, but we can't. We can't just drop this in this way. And I think this is significant. I mean, there have been different interpretations of this Line, why is Truman seemed to act like Hiroshima is a purely military target? It is not a purely military target, and it is a city with a base in it, but it's 90% civilian. Right. So why is he saying women and children aren't going to be the victims of this? And there's different ways you can parse the language. Maybe he's saying, you know, is he saying are they the target? But there's collateral damage? I don't know. Is he lying to himself? Is he trying to, like, lie to the historical record? I think the easiest explanation and the simplest one is to just suggest that this actually reflects what he thought the decision was that he had made with Simpson, that he had incorrectly understood that conversation to be about Kyoto the city, and Hiroshima the purely military target or military base. And there is other language from Truman in this period before any damage assessments of Hiroshima would have been put in front of him, which I think reinforce this idea that he was under the mis impression that Hiroshima was not a city, that it was a military base, and that there would not be lots of civilian casualties and that there might be in the future using the bombs against cities, but that he had decided that the first use of the bomb was not going to be that way and that this was the decision. And that's the decision that I think he thought he made, which I. That's a very different version than he would give later, of course, because he always defended it. It's also very different from how we think about it. But I think that he thought that that conversation was about, do you bomb a city or do you not bomb a city? I don't think Stimson would have intentionally misled him, but I think he could have inadvertently given off that impression with the kind of rhetoric that he tended to use about Kyoto. Yeah.
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C
So then with Kyoto off the list, Hiroshima finds its way to the top of the list. The first atomic bomb Is dropped on August 6th, and then another bomb on Nagasaki on the 9th. What were Truman's reactions to those two bombings?
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A
So if you parse it up sort of hourly, almost day by day, because it's a very tight timeframe. Right. So nobody gets any news about the Hiroshima bombing. Nobody in the United States gets any news about the hiroshima bombing until 16 hours after the bombing, which is a considerable amount of time. And in fact, it's still not clear to this day why there was such a delay, because Groves, you know, he was frantic, but there was something wrong in the communication. So that the message took almost the full day before you had confirmation this thing happened. Truman's response to this is that this is the greatest thing in history. He's extremely pleased. There's no information about the damage. That basically all of the information that Truman gets is. Seems like it was about as explosive as the test in New Mexico. That's about the bomb going off. That's not about the target. They don't know about the target, not in a formal way, because it's covered in smoke. The Japanese aren't saying anything about it at all. They haven't, at that point, even really distinguished it. This press release goes out under Truman's name. He doesn't write it again. The press release, if you read it carefully, does not imply Hiroshima is a city. It implies that that is a military target of sorts, that whose use was removed from the enemy.
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C
Calls it an important army base, I think.
- [34:36]
A
And, yeah, and this is stuff that gets even inserted after the fact. I mean, the version that Truman saw before had blanks in it where the target would be. And it promises that cities might be bombed in the future if Japan doesn't surrender. Again, if you are under the misimpression that Hiroshima is not a city, you will not learn that it is a city from this announcement. And Truman seems totally thrilled, totally happy. He's on the USS Augusta, so they're mid Atlantic, so he wants to get home. He says, let's go get home. So he gets back on late August 7, early August 8. On the morning of August 8 is when the first accounts of the damage hit the United States. So this is when the Army Air Forces have been able to take the first pictures. And there's this famous, you know, picture of Hiroshima from the top with the damage area that is done on August 8th and. And sent to the United States. And Truman gets briefed on it by Stimson the morning of August 8th. This is also when the Japanese have now had time to send some experts to the cities by this point, confirm that it's an atomic bomb, take some samples, and they start publishing accounts of how much is destroyed and how awful it is and things like this. So between that time between the bomb being used on the morning of August 8th, I'm not sure this is the crucial period where I don't think Truman really understands what has happened. By August 8th, he must understand. It's very clear. He starts reporting also being stressed and having headaches and feeling bad about, like many things in the world, things are not. He does not seem like it's the greatest thing in history anymore. No Information is given to him about when the next bomb is about to happen. So before Hiroshima, he had been alerted, oh, the next one. Operations en route, you know it's going to happen. Nobody does this. Why not? I don't think the military think they need to. I don't think they think he cares. The strike order that Groves had ordered, that had authored says that it gives a lot of very detailed instructions about the first bomb and then it says you can use more as you have them available. For various weather related reasons, the Hiroshima bombing got pushed back to the 6th, that had been originally planned for the 3rd. They pushed the Nagasaki bomb, the second bombing up because the forecast is for the 10th is bad. So it goes on the morning of August 9th, Japanese time. I don't think Truman had any foreshadowing that this was about to happen again. I don't think he realized there were two bombs almost ready at the same time. They did not ask him or anything. So I just bring this up because often the fact that a second bomb is used is sort of invoked as like, well, he must not have been that disturbed by Hiroshima or he made some decision to use the bombs twice. I don't see any evidence of that. I think that the first bomb got used. The second was nearly automatic afterwards. If Truman had Even known a second bomb was coming on August 8, it probably would have been too late to do much about it because of time zone differences. By the time he was getting briefed on Hiroshima, the second operation was beginning in Japan on the other side. Anyway, the second bomb happens. There's no response publicly about that from Truman at all, which I think is interesting. He gives a speech later that day in which he repeats this idea that, that Hiroshima was this, this military target and that that was significant. The next day, on August 10, he gets word that there's going to be another bomb in a week. And that's when he orders that there will be no more atomic bombing. He tells his cabinet that he has ordered that they stop atomic bombing. And he tells them that the reason is, is he couldn't stand the idea of killing another hundred thousand people. And he couldn't stand the idea of killing, quote, all those kids. So that's part of the. So this is like the first three of the book. The argument is that Truman doesn't understand what's happening. He thinks it's going to be one bomb against military base. It turns out it's a bomb against the city. By the time he's really learning that another bomb is used against the city. And that's the point after then, that he seizes control of this operation and says, no more atomic bombings. So that's the sort of seesaw effect of, you know, if you want to say the wind. What is the impact of him, in my argument, learning he's wrong? It's. He seizes control of the apparatus for the first time now. And so that's his other order, is the order to stop atomic bombing. But he seizes this in a way that he had not before, which is.
- [39:20]
C
A fascinating argument that, you know, that we've always been accustomed to thinking that Truman's decision was to drop the bombs. And you're suggesting that, in fact, his primary role or his most significant decision was the one to actually stop the bombings. And, you know, you share evidence that Truman was disturbed by the destruction. The photographs that Stimson presented in the briefing. And he makes a number of comments after the bombings to suggest that he is distraught, that he is horrified by the destruction to Japanese women and children. In fact, he gives a speech at the Gridiron Dinner in December of 1945 after the war is over, and he has some longhand notes to share what he said in that speech and basically says, this is not a military weapon that we can use against women and children. And you present some really compelling evidence that this is actually how Truman felt about nuclear weapons, that he was opposed to them, he did not believe that they should be used. Again, they were not just larger conventional weapons, that they were, in fact, immoral weapons of mass destruction, and that he hoped they should be outlawed. The sort of next part of your book, though, is really interesting because it gets into this civilian and military conflict over what do we do with nuclear weapons, how do we use them, who should have control and custody over them. And to me, it almost sounds like a larger bureaucratic dispute that was initially going on between Groves and Stimson, between the military officials who wanted control over these bombs and the more civilian officials, including the president, who thought that control should be strictly with the commander in chief. And there's. I won't get into it because there's a lot of detail here, but. But this Atomic Energy Commission is created, and there are a lot of sort of back and forth, this sort of wrestle and tug of war over these nuclear weapons. And you suggest that in the course of this custody dispute, I guess that Truman showed that he was actually what you call a reluctant Cold Warrior, again, which is different than the way that we've normally seen him. You know, he dropped the bombs, he announces the Truman Doctrine. 47. He's firmly committed to containment or I guess. Why do you suggest that? Truman was actually one of the last members of the US Government to accept this Cold War dynamic. What made him a reluctant Cold Warrior? I guess so.
- [42:44]
A
Truman's really interesting and he's really tricky. I mean, some of this language, like the gridiron speech and some of the other ones, if you put it into any other person's mouth, he describes the atomic nuclear weapons as weapons that murder and slaughter civilians. The civilian population murders them by the wholesale women and children. I mean, this is deeply emotional language. It's morally coded language. It's. It's not supportive language. You know, today if you want to have access to nuclear weapons, you have to be psychologically evaluated to. This is the guidance to have a positive attitude towards nuclear weapons. Truman does not have a positive attitude towards nuclear weapons. And he says repeatedly over the course of the rest of his presidency that he does not want to use them again. And he says this in private and in public that. That this is not the goal is to not use them. And relatively late in the game, he still appears to believe based on the conversations he has with other people, which is more or less where I get the most, I think insightful. The most insight into his mental state more than speeches and things like that. Sometimes the speeches he writes himself and I feel like they tell us something. But a lot of the times, of course, speeches are written by speechwriters and for specific purposes and things, which is that he believes. And this is why I say he's very reluctant Cold warrior until the Korean War. My sense is that Truman believes that the Soviet Union and the United States are not locked in some sort of unresolvable dynamic. He thinks Stalin is basically a good guy, which is wrong, but okay, he thinks this. He thinks the people around Stalin are not good guys and they're paranoid and. And he thinks that the Soviets are basically a pain in the neck, but not necessarily, you know, irredeemable. That if they could only understand that the United States does not want what they have and does not wish them really ill will and that we could essentially just divide up the world and it would be fine and we could resolve our differences. We don't have to get along with every country 100%. You know, the Americans and the French, for example, do not get along all of the time on every issue. It doesn't mean their enemies. Right. And this is essentially his belief. Until the summer of 1950, he even One of my favorite Things. This comes out of David Lilienthal's diary in the spring of 1949. So really late in the game. This is after the Truman Doctrine and after the Berlin airlift and all these. We now code these as extremely obviously Cold War things. Truman tells the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by Robert Oppenheimer, that he is really confident that by 1951 they will come to an agreement with the Soviet Union. There will be no sort of real conflict. They will get rid of nuclear weapons and then they can dissolve the weapon making facilities. And he's really enthusiastic about this idea.
- [45:50]
C
Yeah, I couldn't believe that when I read that.
- [45:52]
A
Yeah. And this is only, it turns out a few months before the Soviets test the bomb, not only could you not believe that, they couldn't believe it. I mean, Oppenheimer goes to Lilienthal and Sensorily says, like, do you know something I don't? Why is the President saying these crazy things and Lilienthal doesn't know? Why is he so optimistic? And part of the answer is probably that he just got reelected and didn't expect it. And that's great, but I just use that as an example of like, he is not locked into this what we would think of as the Cold War mindset. It is not this, oh, we are two totally opposed ideologies. He really thinks the Soviets had just sort of misunderstood American intentions. And this also, I think explains a lot of things, like even the Berlin Airlift, which is, yes, it's an act of Cold War, but it's also very deliberately scoped. Right. Truman is sort of like, what's the minimum we could do to make it clear we don't approve, but we're not going to escalate this and then eventually they'll just stop. The Korean War is a turning point for him. He is really depressed by the whole thing. It makes him feel like there's no possibility for peace going forward. I think he feels betrayed. I think it's really at some deep level, not so much about like, the Soviets are trying to take over the world. I'm not sure Truman really believes that's what they're about at this point, but it's definitely a betrayal of, hey, I thought we agreed that war was bad. I thought we agreed that World war was a terrible thing and we should avoid it. And just like wars of plunder are bad and you're going to start another war for just no reason, only five years after the end of World War II. I think he took this personally. I think he felt like all of the discussions at the UN all of the ideals were obviously by the Soviets were fake, whereas I think for Truman they were real, even if they were not easy to implement. So anyway, this is sort of, the book traces out what happens after World War II. There's a sort of period between World War II and the Korean War. That's a big chunk of the book and that is about this military civilian who's in charge of the bomb, who has control over this. And Truman, when he participates in this debate, which is not always, but is significant when he does, he's very firmly on the side of it's civilians. And the President, it is not the military, he's very dubious of military interest in nuclear weapons. And again, this language of moral horror comes up in the sense that they will, you cannot use this, it will kill civilians. The Korean War is the last sort of third of the book and it's about discussions of nuclear weapons during the Korean War and where Truman sees, you know, I think that at this point Truman is extremely demoralized. And this is when he approves of things like NSC68. He is not enthusiastic about any of the, these, these policies, even the make the H bomb. These kinds of things come out of feeling politically boxed in, either domestically or internationally. And I think Truman is pretty unhappy about all of them.
- [48:55]
C
Well, and then in Korea there are, I mean now that there's a war and what to the United States feels like a war by proxy with the Soviet Union, there are a number of temptations to use nuclear weapons. There's a, you know, there are calls to use it against the North Koreans. There are some who want to use it against China. There are even some who want to just, you know, bomb Moscow. And he, he of course resists that, reaffirms the sort of presidential authorization apparatus. But I think there is, I think that's a fascinating part of the story of these opportunities to use the bomb. And he deliberately, you know, expresses revulsion about it and reaffirms that these are not, these are not military weapons. These are not war weapons that can be used in war. This raises a whole bunch of questions about, from the military, about, well, if they're, if we're never going to use them, then what's the point? And some of these disputes play out in the MacArthur struggle where Truman eventually fires MacArthur. But to fast forward to the end of his administration, Truman leaves office. He decides not to run again, even though he could have, does not run in 1952. He's succeeded by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, of course, is now the military general in America. And Truman and Eisenhower seem to have very different positions on nuclear weapons as this transition is taking place. And even on the last day of 52 and the last day in office, Truman says some really interesting things about opposing nuclear weapons. Do you feel like his views after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued to evolve, or was his sort of moral revulsion sort of set in stone and just sort of reinforced over the years of his presidency?
- [51:17]
A
I think, for the most part, my sense is that this moral revulsion becomes the way in which he thinks about nuclear weapons. Those. And I would just point out that that's. Sure, you could imagine people feeling that way about nuclear weapons. It's unusual, especially towards the early 50s, in the 40s, it's not so uncommon. But I mean, among his cabinet and things like this, in the 40s, he has a number of people in the cabinet who feel pretty similar to him. By the 50s, Truman is an outlier, and they know it. They are sort of talking behind his back in various circles about, well, it's really too bad that people have moral revulsion about nuclear weapons. And they use exactly the kind of language Truman uses. I think for Truman, it's pretty constant. There's some variations to it, and it's probably contextual how he feels about it, but it's this. I just highlight that Truman's feelings about nuclear weapons and why they can't be used, they are not rooted in deterrence. Right. It's not rooted in, we can't use them because we'll suffer. And he makes this pretty clear at times. He's actually explicit in saying things like, it's not even that we would suffer from using them personally. It's that that's not what you do. If you're the good guys. You don't destroy populations. It's just not what you do. And of course, we can point out times in which Truman's decisions and what he allowed to happen in the Korean War. And is that different? The key thing is that Truman felt these things were different. Right. Truman clearly sees the bomb in its own sort of special category. And interestingly, I mean, this is. This point you made on the last day of his administration. There's a member of the Atomic Energy Commission who sends him a note about this speech, and he says, hey, I like your speech, but I really don't like this aspect of it because it sounds like Soviet propaganda that these weapons are not usable. And also, he actually says, wouldn't that imply that it was not right to use them in World War II if they are like this. And Truman's reply, he doesn't engage with the World War II thing at all, which I think is interesting. But his reply is, you don't understand how these weapons are. They are worse than anything else. They're worse than biological weapons. They're just the. Sometime I'll tell you more about it. And he never does, as far as I know. And I just think that that's literally the last thing he does in office is say that, essentially dodge this core question which only one person, as far as I can tell, ever asks him to his face. If you think nuclear weapons are immoral, wouldn't that make Hiroshima and Nagasaki immoral? And he dodges that question completely and then reaffirms that no, the atomic bomb is worse than everything else. It's just its own thing, it's its own category story. But I want to emphasize that this is a very particular mindset. It's very idiosyncratic. He had some weird beliefs. I mean, I talk about this in the book, but it seems like he was at some level in denial that the Soviets even had nuclear weapons, even after he had announced several of their tests. He's very overt about this after he leaves office where he says, I don't really think they figured out. And you know, I talk about why he might think this. I don't think there's a good rational answer for it. I think it's some kind of psychological defensive mechanism. The point here isn't that Truman is right or has the right way of thinking about things. The point is that this one person with pretty strong and unusual opinions for his time in milieu has enormous influence on the policy of this period, particularly during this period of the American monopoly. And so the ultimate takeaway of the book is when you think about Truman and his legacy. Don't just think about the bombings of Japan, you can think about those. That has to be part of the legacy. But think about all the stuff that we tend to overlook. And also don't think about this as just, oh, well, then it's the Cold War. That whole thing is evolving. And certainly Truman is one of the last to sign onto that logic, if he ever really signs onto it completely as president. And you should really think of Truman as an extremely anti nuclear president who, you know, because of circumstances and did not act on that to the degree that maybe he would have wanted to in the ideal world. But that is absolutely not necessarily how it had to be. You put Anyone else in that office, you might get really different results.
- [55:55]
C
It's a fascinating conclusion, and I think you make a really important point about Truman being an ordinary man. He's been called an accidental president, but you conclude by, I think, suggesting that that's part of what made him extraordinary. And this is not a great man tome of history, but that his sort of ordinariness was partly what allowed for him to develop the views that he did and to create the constraints on nuclear weapons that we have today.
- [56:36]
A
You know, it's no great man, and it's no worshipful book by any means. It's not a. And while writing this, one of my biggest concerns with anything biographical is, of course, your impulses to sort of turn whoever you're writing about into. It's not a book. That concludes. And Harry Truman was right and we should do everything. And in fact, I sort of conclude in some places, like, maybe we should do the opposite of what he thought in certain ways, because the situation is not 1945. Right. It's a different world, but I think it's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's human. I want to understand him as a human being. I'm not anti Truman. I'm not pro Truman. I do think that Truman's. The people who are pro Truman, I think, make him out to be much more hawkish than he actually was. Like, they like him, I think, for wrong reasons. And I think people who are anti Truman also make him out to be more hawkish than he was. And I think my ultimate conclusion is I think he was trying to be very middle of the road and far less hawkish than was in, you know, sort of an option. I don't think. I'm not saying he did that the best way possible, but I think that's how he saw himself. And I think that's really how a lot of the people around him saw him, which is why he was incredibly unpopular. I mean, his own party. I just want to throw this out there because I hadn't really thought about this before I wrote the book. But in 48, when he has this really tough election, he's running against a Republican. Sure. He's running against a really progressive Democrat, Wallace, and he's running against the segregationist Democr. There's nobody. I mean, he's not liberal enough, and he's not concerned. I mean, he's really unpopular, and it's kind of miraculous that he wins. Like, he is trying to take all of these decisions. The airlift, Korea. These are not satisfying decisions. Right. What should we do in the event of this. Let's just try to fight for the stalemate we had before. Nobody's happy with this, but this is the sort of turns out to be the Cold War state of things, which is we can't win and we can't lose, so we have to do this thing in the middle that nobody's happy with. And Truman is, in some ways, I do think in the end he was a good person for that role because he did not have huge amounts of self confidence in his ability to sort of logic his way around anything. He was very dubious of simple solutions. He didn't really want to commit everything to one thing at the other. And it turned out that sort of muddling uncertainty was, I think, the right thing for those moments. But anyway, he's an interesting character in that respect.
- [59:15]
C
And he famously did not like being president. He frequently criticized the. The job itself. He did not seem to be a happy president. Happy, you know, sort of wielding the. The executive power. But, yeah, in some ways made him make him good for the job.
- [59:34]
A
And I would just. Last thing I'll say nice about him, the way he seems to operate from my, again, interpretation of him is he had these sort of, I would call them almost civic virtues that he believed in. And some of these might be moral in a sense, but not like a biblical. Right. But like, you know, the whole buck stops here thing, that's a civic virtue. Right? The idea that the President needs to take responsibility for everything that happens under their administration, whether they had anything to do with it or not. That's how it goes. Right. And you don't go against that unless it's really dire, like you've got to fire MacArthur or something because it's gone too far. You support him until you don't. This kind of thing, I think that's actually lacking in a lot of later presidents who see things in, say, purely political terms or purely strategic terms or, God forbid, purely personalist terms. And that's the thing that is, if there's anything redeeming about Truman, it's that. And that's at the core of the book, is to say one of those virtues for him is that nuclear weapons are these terrible things that slaughter and murder civilians, and that's why we can't use them. And for that moment when the question of what is this bomb is getting worked out and is definitely not set in stone, I think it's extremely important that the one person who had any chance of ordering these weapons believed them to be unusable for moral reasons. That's profoundly interesting from a historical standpoint and is the part of Truman that I think is really overlooked because we focus on this decision to use the bombs, which I think we've misunderstood.
- [61:17]
C
I think that's a great point to end on. Alex, thanks so much for being with us and hope to talk to you again soon.
- [61:23]
A
Thank you so much.
- [61:24]
C
All right. Bye.
- [61:24]
A
Bye.