Truman did not know of the bomb when he became President, but he soon learned of it from Stimson, and from his friend James F. Byrnes, an adviser of Roosevelt’s. Byrnes, whom Truman was shortly to appoint as Secretary of State, told him that the bomb “might be so powerful as to be potentially capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an unprecedented scale.”28 Byrnes held out the prospect that, as Truman later recalled, “the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”29 Quite what Byrnes had in mind is not clear, but his comments
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