Why We Dropped The Bomb

An interesting article has this weeks cover of The Weekly Standard,on why Truman decided to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima.A nice bit of WWII history that I highly recommend.

Why Truman Dropped the Bomb

From the August 8, 2005 issue: Sixty years after Hiroshima, we now have the secret intercepts that shaped his decision.

by Richard B. Frank 08/08/2005, Volume 010, Issue 44


The sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima seems to be shaping up as a subdued affair--though not for any lack of significance. A survey of news editors in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, first among the top one hundred stories of the twentieth century. And any thoughtful list of controversies in American history would place it near the top again. It was not always so. In 1945, an overwhelming majority of Americans regarded as a matter of course that the United States had used atomic bombs to end the Pacific war. They further believed that those bombs had actually ended the war and saved countless lives. This set of beliefs is now sometimes labeled by academic historians the "traditionalist" view. One unkindly dubbed it the "patriotic orthodoxy."