What Harry Truman didn't know about the nuclear bomb

"Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power," the American intellectual Henry Adams wrote in 1862, "and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world." The grandson and great-grandson of two American presidents, Adams was writing at the height of the Civil War, concerned about science outpacing morality. Eight decades later, with the U.S. in the throes of another, even more devastating war, three men would reckon with the dilemma that Adams foresaw. Their stories are brilliantly told in Evan Thomas's new book, The Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

A former journalist at Time and Newsweek and author of eleven books, Thomas has chosen three very different individuals to tell the tale of the final days of World War II and the decision to use nuclear weapons for the first time. What emerges is a deeply human story, with men wrestling with decisions upon which potentially millions of lives would be lost — and saved.

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Two of them were in the unenviable position of having to kill thousands in order, Thomas convincingly argues, to save thousands more. And they were conscious that by using nuclear weapons, they were changing warfare, and indeed the world, forever.

Henry Stimson is perhaps the most well-known figure in Thomas's book. Stimson was well into his 70s when President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to be his secretary of war. A protege of Roosevelt's cousin Theodore, Stimson already had half a century of service in the Cabinets of various Republican presidents. Indeed, he had previously served as secretary of war during the Taft administration nearly three decades prior to his 1940 appointment.

A slight man with a reserved personality, Stimson was a figure from another era: a man profoundly Victorian in outlook and upbringing who would oversee the program to develop nuclear weapons. Although his age and declining health led him to sometimes be absent or out of the loop, Stimson provided a moral conscience that the U.S. was fortunate to have. The secretary of war, Thomas observes, "embodied and preached a philosophy that would make the United States, for all its flaws, the world's essential nation: the belief that American foreign policy should be a blend of realism and idealism."

Years later, when a top Stimson aide, John McCloy, was asked how his old boss thought of nuclear weapons, he responded: "On his knees." Stimson's diary entries referred to the weapons as "the dreadful," "the dire," "the terrible," and "the diabolical." He was a man keenly aware of the power and portent of what was being unleashed. Stimson's "existential worry," Thomas notes, "is that man's technical capacity to do evil will outrun man's human capacity to do good."

Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, the head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, would supervise the planes that would eventually drop nuclear bombs on Japan. Stimson may have signed off on delivering the nuclear bombs, but it would be up to men under Spaatz's command to deploy them. Little remembered today, Spaatz epitomized the idea of an unemotional military leader who, Thomas notes, "learned to live with death."

Yet this quiet and unassuming man would agonize over civilian casualties from Allied bombing raids. Indeed, he would be "deeply disturbed" once he was told about the nuclear bomb. Yet, Spaatz never hesitated to do his duty, knowing that it would shorten an already ghastly war and save lives. He would find relief, and sometimes indirect orders, in the late-night games of poker that seemed to have been a favorite for many pilots.

The final figure in Thomas's book, Shigenori Togo, served as Japan's foreign minister as the empire came to its fiery end. Togo would play a pivotal role in persuading Emperor Hirohito, and thus Japan itself, to surrender. A career diplomat with years of service in the West, Togo was unusually blunt. A colleague would describe him as "taciturn, expressionless, and singularly bereft of anything that could be described as personal charm."

Togo "knows that factories, starved of resources, are going idle, and that the island nation of Japan, strangled by the enemy, is running out of food and fuel." In the final months of the war, Japan is in a death spiral, but the ruling military clique is in denial, refusing to surrender and seeking to take the country down with them. Things are so bad that it is expected that Japan will run out of airplane fuel within months. The Japanese are even trying to "coax fuel out of pinecones and cook dinner from acorns."

The Japanese Supreme War Council, dominated by War Minister Korechika Anami and his allies, was banking on a final decisive battle. The council had even guessed precisely where the expected American landing force would arrive, on the beaches of Kyushu. Seven thousand kamikaze plans were ready to fly into landing ships, supported by a thousand suicide bombers in small speedboats, midget submarines, and swimmers who would stick TNT charges to the bottoms of landing craft.

By June 1945, U.S. planners were anticipating that 350,000 Japanese defenders would meet 700,000 American forces. In fact, the Japanese would be fielding 900,000 soldiers — a figure which doesn't include the many civilians who would also be armed. Indeed, some 28 million Japanese civilians were required to join the National Volunteer Corps, where they were trained with weapons ranging from muzzle-loading muskets to pitchforks and bamboo spears.

A bloodbath on an epic scale awaited. Expected American casualty figures start from 500,000 and go up, and even the famously honest and erstwhile Army chief of staff, Gen. George Marshall, lowballed the projected figures so as not to dissuade President Harry Truman.

Togo's story, including his herculean efforts to thwart Japan's militarist establishment with its fervent death wish, deserves to be told. His grandchildren granted Thomas access to some of the diplomat's documents, including excerpts from his diary.

These three men, Thomas notes, "became unlikely partners in averting a cataclysm of death beyond anything the world has ever seen or, one hopes, will ever experience." It was, he makes clear, "a close-run thing."

Indeed, in reading a book about the advent of nuclear warfare and the birth of the Atomic Age, one is struck by the many close calls. War, the saying goes, is a human endeavor. Frighteningly enough, this axiom applies to nuclear war as well.

For example, while en route to its initial destination, the crew of the nuclear-equipped B-29 bomber Bockscar notices that someone has set two switches in the wrong position, leading to a warning light flickering on, indicating that the bomb is fully armed and "raising the risk that it could detonate in flight." Lt. Phil Barnes, the bomber's electronics officer, studied the wiring diagrams and managed to reset the switches.

Bockscar's target city was Kokura, but poor visibility and concerns about running out of fuel led the crew to opt at the last minute for a "secondary" target: Nagasaki. The crew was so concerned that they would have run out of gas that its third pilot, Lt. Fred Olivi, contemplated having to ditch the aircraft in the ocean, but wasn't able to do so with a bomb on board.

Thomas highlights the factors behind choosing which cities to target. Gen. Leslie Groves, the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project, repeatedly tried to add the city of Kyoto to the list. Stimson, who had visited Kyoto and had fallen in love with its architecture, repeatedly vetoed it. Hiroshima was chosen, in part, because it housed the Japanese army headquarters for the forces defending Kyushu, which was the anticipated landing point for a U.S. invasion. Other cities appeared on the targeted list by virtue of their not having been fully destroyed; the "fire-bombing" campaign of U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay had laid waste to huge portions of Japan.

All of this might seem to be a little ad hoc, and indeed it was. President Harry Truman liked to say that the decision to drop the bomb was his alone. But as Thomas notes, "the reality was not so straightforward." What later analysts call the issue of "command and control" of nuclear weapons had yet to be refined.

It was only on July 26, 1945, that Truman would read, for two hours, a report on using the bomb on Hiroshima, which would be bombed less than two weeks later. He wasn't told that the bomb would be placed in the middle of the city. The order for the bombs themselves was approved by Stimson the day before, and "there is no record that President Truman ever saw the actual order." Control would shift to the military, which would use additional nuclear bombs as they became available.

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Truman "had delegated to the military so much authority over the atomic bomb that he wasn't even aware that the second strike was taking place until after it happened." After Nagasaki, and with additional information flooding in about the destruction of Hiroshima, the president ordered that no additional bombs would be dropped without his permission.

Six days before Hiroshima, the American general tasked with a possible invasion of Japan, Douglas MacArthur, was told about the bombs. "This changes warfare," he tells Spaatz. Evan Thomas does a masterful job of telling how a moment that technology changed everything unfolded. With policymakers contemplating the promises and perils of AI and warfare, they would be wise to pick up a copy.

Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst.