Why ‘We’ Really Dropped the First A Bombs. Two in Three Days.

“At 8:16 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the world got a glimpse of its own mortality. At that moment, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a fireball that sent waves of searing heat, then a deafening concussion, across the landscape. Three days later, a second bomb hit Nagasaki. … [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower said in 1963 “‘It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’

”… Besides the Manhattan Project’s internal momentum was an external motive. Its leaders had to justify th...