Status Updates From Hiroshima in America

"we have, as a people, insisted upon the ethical justification of our use of revolutionary new weapons that killed hundreds of thousands of people... If we invert our moral imagination in connection with the most dangerous of all matter, does that not set a powerfully distorted standard for addressing all other moral issues?"

This quote.

"Although the Smithsonian is governed by an independent board of regents, about 85% of its operating budget comes from Congress - and conservatives had already complained about 'political correctness' in a number of recent exhibits." (~50 yrs postwar)

Pg 277: "About 8 mil people tour the Air and Space Museum every year. Occasionally more than 100k arrive on a single day. It is the most visited museum in the world."

"despite his own broad forays, through his reading, into vast realms of human experience, he (Truman) could become fiercely opposed to intellectual exploration - and intellectuals in general - as threats to the simple clarity he craved. He needed to fight off complexity as a way of maintaining his sense of strength and coherence."

This is fascinating. It's been a while since I learned about this topic. This book explores in depth the internal struggles Truman faced, given the enormous responsibility he inherited from FDR.

And not-so-fun-fact, out of the 100k+ casualties from the bombing of Nagasaki, only about 250 of them were Japanese military personnel.

Truman added that "I don't believe in speculating on the mental feeling and as far as the bomb is concerned I ordered it for a military reason." Such mental speculation, that is, interferes with the self's claim of absolute clarity and moral necessity.

"claim of killing to save lives 'was precisely the argument Hitler used in bombing Poland. Once the primary consideration is the winning of war without regard to the justice of war, then all men are reduced to vermin and all appeals to justice are voided.'"

"with a nightmare for nearly a year, the average citizen is not only too glad to grasp at the flimsiest means that would enable him to regain his peace of mind."

This is fascinating.
Lots of primary source quotations

I 'get' William Lawrence's fascination ('boyish enthusiasm' was the phrase used) with the atomic bomb but... to liken it to 'destiny' and compare it to the creation story phrase 'let there be light?' Wow... even for someone who isn't a scientist, but an imaginative writer, that's callous. Even if he didn't know what horror it fully offered, that's shameful.

"General Groves left nothing to chance. Before Hiroshima, he had prepared an order prohibiting U.S. commanders in the field from commenting on the atomic attacks without clearance from the War Department. 'We didn't want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been won without the bomb," Groves later explained. Indeed, MacArthur and many of the other commanders believed the bomb was not needed to end the war."