The Most Controversial Decision
The Most Controversial Decision
This book explores the American use of atomic bombs, and the role these weapons played in the defeat of the Japanese Empire in World War II. It focuses on President Harry S. Truman's decision making regarding this most controversial of all his decisions. The book relies on notable archival research, and the best and most recent scholarship on the subject to fashion an incisive overview that is fair and forceful in its judgments. This study addresses a subject that has been much debated among historians, and it confronts head-on the highly disputed claim that the Truman administration practiced “atomic diplomacy.” The book goes beyond its central historical analysis to ask whether it was morally right for the United States to use these terrible weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also provides a balanced evaluation of the relationship between atomic weapons and the origins of the Cold War.
- Compelling subject covering Harry S. Truman's most controversial decision
- Concise, engagingly written and powerfully argued
- Forces historians and others to re-examine their conclusions on this much-debated topic
Reviews & endorsements
"Father Miscamble is a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and thus is at home with the theological and moral aspects surrounding the decision to unleash the world's first atomic bombs. He is also familiar with the political and military exigencies of the decision. He takes the reader carefully through the genesis of the bomb-building Manhattan Project, as planned by Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt originally for the bomb's use against Nazi Germany, and through the calculations of the key Allied decision makers, including Gen. George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, and Adm. William Leahy, the head of the Joint Chiefs." -Wall Street Journal
"This book, by the priest and cold war historian Wilson D. Miscamble, is a volume in the Cambridge Essential Histories series, which is (according to its statement of purpose) 'devoted to introducing critical events, periods or individuals in history … through thesis-driven, concise volumes.' Concise The Most Controversial Decision certainly is: it packs into its 150 pages discussions that other scholars have spent careers grappling with." -Barry Gewen, The New Republic
"In writing this book, Father Miscamble has done us a great service." -The Rev. Michael P. Orsi, The Washington Times
"Notre Dame profe ssor Wilson Miscamble has previously written about the blindly unforeseen handoff of the American government from Roosevelt to Truman on April 12, 1945, during the endgame of World War II. He now brings his wise and wide-ranging knowledge of the complicated decisions left for the American president at that time to one specific major decision: whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japan." -Jay Pasachoff, The Key Reporter
"Recommended." -Choice
Product details
April 2011Hardback
9780521514194
190 pages
229 × 155 × 18 mm
0.45kg
17 b/w illus. 1 map
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: the most controversial decision
- 2. Franklin Roosevelt, the Manhattan project, and the development of the atomic bomb
- 3. Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and atomic briefings
- 4. James F. Byrnes, the atomic bomb, and the Pacific war
- 5. The Potsdam conference, the trinity test, and 'atomic diplomacy'
- 6. Hiroshima, the Japanese, and the Soviets
- 7. The Japanese surrender
- 8. Necessary, but was it right?
- 9. Byrnes, the Soviets, and the American atomic monopoly
- 10. The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War.
