Decision To Drop the Bomb
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Kathleen Lawrence
Period 6
3/16/04
Decision to Drop the Bomb Essay
"Today the guns are silent, the Skies no longer rain death-the seas bear only commerce-men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is at peace- General Macarthur (September 2, 1945)
The years that encompassed the last great World War, chronicles the worst that human nature has to offer. Millions of people lay dead at the hands of fascists and Presidents. Victory was claimed by the United states in the fall of 1945, but it was at such a great price of innocents lives lost on both sides that Allied exuberance over the ended war was an empty one. In the 161 days after Theodore Roosevelt's death, Harry S. Truman had taken office, and made a decision that would eventually kill 200,000 people and over time many others due to radiation poisoning. The Manhattan Project was the code name for one of the manufacturing of the most destructive weapons known to mankind, the Atom bomb. The project was revealed to Truman by his Secretary of War Henry Stimson with this cautionary forward: "In four months, we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.
There is still to this day, an argument over the decision to drop the bomb over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many objected because it would be more lives lost to an already brutally gory war...