The members of the AEC met with Senator Brien McMahon, a Democrat on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who had written the Atomic Energy Act and was generally considered a moderate. McMahon might have been by the standards of the day a domestic liberal, but he was a devout Catholic, with a heavily Catholic constituency, and thus a hard-liner on the subject of Communism. He had become the single most important congressional figure on the issue of atomic weapons, and unlike the scientists, he had no doubts about using them. The bombing of Hiroshima, he had said on the Senate floor, was “the
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