Transcript

EP34 Atomic Accountability

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 23 min · 14,844 words · 109 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP34 Atomic Accountability", an episode of Dan Carlin published November 29, 2025 (1 h 23 min, about 14,844 words). It mentions 14 people, works and ideas, including Harry S. Truman, Joshua Stimson, Harry Truman, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Harry S. Truman, Harry Truman, Alex Wellerstein, Adam Tus
  2. – 20:00: Harry S. Truman, Harry Truman, Hiroshima, Nagasaki
  3. – 30:00: Harry S. Truman, Joshua Stimson, Harry Truman
  4. – 40:00: Joshua Stimson, Harry S. Truman
  5. – 50:00: Joshua Stimson, Harry S. Truman, General Leslie Groves, Hiroshima
  6. – 1:00:00: Harry S. Truman, Nagasaki, Joshua Stimson, Hiroshima
  7. – 1:10:00: Harry S. Truman, Cuban Missile Crisis
  8. – 1:20:00: Harry S. Truman, Harry Truman, Alex Wellerstein, Atomic Age
  9. – 1:23:16: Harry S. Truman

Notable quotes from "EP34 Atomic Accountability"

  • Adam Tus's the wages of destruction did that. I remember I mean I spent the next three years I think in a days continually thinking about how now this new overlay of my perspective changes.
    about Adam Tus · at
  • And this led him down a rabbit hole to find out just how wrong our ideas about saying things Well, Harry Truman ordered the nuclear bombs, the atomic bombs they would have…
    about Harry S. Truman · at
  • Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age by Professor Alex Wellerstein. And he joins us right now.
    about Atomic Age · at
  • Nuclear weapons thought that I would write a book on Hiro Tuma and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. it felt like ground that's really gone over many times by many other people. And so…
    about Hiroshima · at
  • War passes legislation, right? It's a different job at that time. And so Stimson, the Secretary of War, trying to carve out, well, actually, this is not that kind of question.…
    about Joshua Stimson · at
  • Nowadays when we look back on it and think about them not dropping it. what you know didn't didn't Groves the head of the program the military engineer say something like that…
    about General Leslie Groves · at
  • Time we ever came to nuclear war famously. I mean maybe not but famously the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy's problems with what he called the brass hats and everything. And…
    about Cuban Missile Crisis · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Harry S. Truman — Person · 77 mentions · first at
  • Joshua Stimson — Person · 23 mentions · first at
  • Harry Truman — Person · 13 mentions · first at
    And this led him down a rabbit hole to find out just how wrong our ideas about saying things Well, Harry Truman ordered the nuclear bombs, the atomic bombs they would have…
  • General Leslie Groves — Person · 5 mentions · first at
  • Alex Wellerstein — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    And this guy is, his name is Alex Wellerstein and he's a professor in the science and technology studies program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. he's a guy who works mainly in the history of nuclear.
  • Adam Tus — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

  • Stevens Institute of Technology — Company · 1 mention · first at
    His name is Alex Wellerstein and he's a professor in the science and technology studies program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. he's a guy who works mainly in the…

Concepts & topics

Places & events

  • Hiroshima — Place · 9 mentions · first at
  • Nagasaki — Place · 7 mentions · first at
    Nuclear weapons thought that I would write a book on Hiro Tuma and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. it felt like ground that's really gone over many times by many other people. And so…
  • Kyoto — Place · 6 mentions

Full transcript with timestamps

It's hardcore history. Today's show is an example of one I'd really like to be doing more often, interviewing authors on interesting um historical related books that they've written. But I read the books and it's so hard when you're already reading so much for the main show all the time to squeeze in more than one book at a time. maybe for example on some other subject for a hardcore history dendum show. So, I'm sort of constrained by that and I want to explain not apologize but explain why once again we kind of have a subject that we've dealt with multiple times before uh nuclear weapons and also because the only times nuclear weapons have ever been used against people uh was at the end of the second world war in Japan obviously uh that dovetales into that story and we've talked about that recently so at the risk of sounding like we be have become the nuclear war and uh Second World War in the Pacific

channel. Um, we will include other things, I promise. But I make no apologies about how much emphasis we place on these stories connected to nuclear weapons because we don't think enough about that. I mean, I don't even think that's arguable. Anybody who spends any time at all looking into this realizes, oh my gosh, you know, we should be talking about this much much much much more than we do. So, I make no um apologies for that. The author um that we're having on today though wrote the sort of book that I put everything down for and grabbed right away because it has the potential to completely change um the way you thought about everything about something you thought a lot about. I've thought a lot about the end of the Second World War.

I've thought a lot about the use of nuclear weapons as I know many of you have too. So when somebody writes something that makes you uh think about it in a new way, that's rare about something you know that some of us have been into for 50 plus years. Adam Tus's the wages of destruction did that. I remember I mean I spent the next three years I think in a days continually thinking about how now this new overlay of my perspective changes all these other things in the past that I thought about this subject. This book kind of does that too. So when, by the way, a book like that is written, you're going to have to, you know, be a pretty trustworthy person to write it, uh, in your field, and you're going to have to site a lot of things and have a lot of notes and be prepared for a lot of people to say, "Now, wait a minute, but what about this?"

And this guy is, his name is Alex Wellerstein and he's a professor in the science and technology studies program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Uh he's a guy who works mainly in the history of nuclear weapons. So this is sort of his bag and he has a very interesting uh story of how he came to this knowledge uh and that's that he was sort of looking for some real you know hardcore information. You know he wanted to find out about orders for using the atomic bombs in the second world war. And this led him down a rabbit hole to find out just how wrong our ideas about saying things like, "Well, Harry Truman ordered the nuclear bombs, the atomic bombs they would have called them back then, to be used in this city at this date and all this sort of stuff." Now, anyone who's really gotten into the weeds on this already knows how things were sort of scheduled out and they were planning for almost an assembly line use

of these atomic weapons. You know, as they came off the assembly line where we were going to fly the parts here, assemble them here, and then drop them this many days after they were assem. I mean, they had those in the works. You kind of have to. That's how industrialized total war works, folks. It's it's a factory operation even with atomic weaponry. But partially because of the way control of nuclear weapons has evolved over time, we sort of think about the way they would operate today in terms of the president issuing orders and all that sort of stuff. We think about that as being enforced from the very first second they were discovered. And of course, that's not the case. And it was made much more complex by the fact that the guy who ordered the program started and who would have had some idea and maybe had some time to think about how he might organize and deal with something like this. He dies in 44 at

the last minute. The President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt leaving in not just a vice president, but a guy who'd only recently become the vice president. you know, FDR dropped people here and there when they didn't serve his needs or, you know, he he'd be better off without him or whatever you want to say. And so Harry Truman's the new guy on the block. He doesn't even have any contact with FD. FDR didn't even, you know, it keeps him at arms length. By this time, FDR had been president, of course, longer than any president in US history. Uh, he sort of just owned the job and, uh, sharing even a little bit of it with Harry Truman didn't seem to be on the agenda. Or maybe he just figured he'd get to it down the road, not knowing there wasn't a road.

And then all of a sudden, Harry Truman's the president. And there's that great line by uh Franklin Delanor Roosevelt's wife um Eleanor and after she tells Truman that the president has died and that you're the president now, and he stammers out something to the effect of, "I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do for you? And she says something like, um, is there anything we can do for you? You're the guy in the hot seat now. And it's at this point that the fire hose of information begins to engulf Harry Truman because think about all the catching up he has to do. He wouldn't have had to do so much either if FDR had brought him in at all and sort of, you know, said to him, "Listen, uh, here's my heart rate. This is what my blood pressure's been. I'm not going to be around a lot longer." Um, so you need to know a few important things like we've been developing this atomic bomb which he didn't tell him and which you know

there's this fateful meeting very early on in the presidency um where FDR's people have to sort of bring Truman in on the idea of this bomb and make a guy born in the 1800s, you know, understand what we're talking about here. Now, in fairness, in the First World War, Truman was an artillery guy. So maybe there's some of that understanding of, okay, think about a bomb. Now think of a really, really, really, really, really big bomb. But if we're going to have some empathy for somebody in history, cuz you know, the person who drops atomic bombs is obviously a vilified person because think about it. I mean, there's the deaths of they still argue about how many people if we said 200,000, you know, both cities combined, that's probably not terrible of a number.

The point is, imagine being the person who ordered that. How do you sleep at night? Well, that's why these two-dimensional views of human beings give us a cardboard cutout version of them. And when you three-dimensionalize it, you realize there's more to this story. And this is something that Professor Wellerstein brings to the four here. And I used the word in the interview at one point. I said hoodwinkedked. and he corrected me. Uh I I was saying that it was almost as though Harry Truman was hoodwinkedked into using these bombs in a way that he didn't want to use them.

But it looks more like a misunderstanding or or something that just got lost in translation. The bottom line though is spoiler alert, it doesn't sound like Harry Truman knew he was dropping bombs on cities with women and children. And it helps explain why there's always been this dichotomy between Truman saying, "We're not going to use this on women and children," and then the bomb being dropped on women and children. So, it's a fascinating story. We'll get into it in a second, but it's exactly the kind of work that makes, you know, if you're if you're interested in something like the Second World War or the history of nuclear weapons or even the history of humankind trying to learn how to live with the power, the everinccreasing power of their weaponry.

Um, this stuff is fascinating and seeing how a guy like Harry Truman might have had to make the most awful decision any human's ever had to make, find out he didn't make the decision he thought he was making, feel like he was going to take the responsibility for it and suck it up, and then behind the scenes make sure nothing like that ever happened to another person, you know, who occupied the same office he did ever again. It's a fascinating story. It's absolutely worth your read. The book is called The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age by Professor Alex Wellerstein. And he joins us right now.

So, we can just dive right into it. And I thought maybe the way to do it would be for me to quote the very first quote in your introduction. uh from President Harry Truman because I think it sets the stage for the import of what we're talking about here. And you wrote uh quoting Truman uh and he said, quote, "The atomic bomb is the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that is so terribly destructive. Destructive beyond anything else that we have ever made, the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings. You've got to understand that this isn't a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people. It affects the civilian population and murders them by the wholesale. That happens when it is used.

It is a terrible weapon. Its use was the most terrible decision a man ever had to make. The most terrible decision that any man in the history of the world had to make. It was a terrible decision to make. End quote. And then the entire book sort of goes from there, but it doesn't go in the direction that any book I've ever read on the subject went. You kind of discovered something that maybe we didn't know, and that's that Harry Truman may not have been as informed in what he was doing here as we had normally assumed. What can you start telling me about that?

Well, I I will just start by just highlighting for everyone that the the first quote is several quotes that I very quickly cop to taking completely out of context. So, you know, not usually how you start a book uh as a historian, but but I think that that uh language is really important to understanding what Truman is about. I mean, it's this emotional language. It's this repetitive language over the course of his career. Um, and and as I say in the beginning, if you heard that quote attributed to anybody else, you would 100% not think that they thought the atomic bomb was that good of a thing. So to have that be attributed to Truman, I think is uh telling you something. Um, yeah, I I want to just cop to the fact that I never in a million years when I started working on the history of nuclear weapons thought that I would write a book on Hiro Tuma and and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uh, it felt like

ground that's really gone over uh many many times by many other people. And so, what are the odds that you're going to have some new take on it that's worth listening to? But uh yeah over the years I came to believe uh as you say that that that there was something sort of missing in in uh not just the popular account but also even the scholarly accounts. Well, you sort of answer some of the longunning questions about this dichotomy between Truman's willingness to not just uh cop to the fact that he made this decision, but to justify it also when in private uh the things that he was writing and saying were much more of the way some of the most uh anti-nuclear type folks on the planet would have hoped somebody with this power would have talked and written. uh he he comes off as a very sort of different figure than the one I grew up reading about and and more both human and conflicted and like he said in that

quote that you uh created from multiple uh quotes that he said he comes off as the most human of people tasks with the most inhuman sorts of decisions. So this is the guy who had the the famous the buck stops here phrase on his desk. So, he's going to not put the decision off on anyone else. But explain to me maybe the difference between our normal conception of what Harry Truman was supposed to be doing with the atomic bomb and what according to your research might have actually been going on behind the scenes.

So, there there are sort of two ways in which people usually hear about the atomic bomb decision and Truman's role. The first is what you might think of as the orthodox or official story, which is Harry Truman weighs the the ups and the downs of using an atomic bomb uh very carefully and you know uses it in order to prevent the the the casualties that would come from an invasion, right? It's and that this was this heavy-hearted thing, but he does it because it ultimately save lives. So that's that's the sort of version that in fact people in involved with the decision including Truman himself in his memoirs put out there into the world. The other version which is uh sometimes called like a revisionist version is one that basically says actually there were people in the Truman administration including Truman who did not think the atomic bomb was needed for ending World War II and they used it instead to sort

of scare the Soviets. Um and uh there's several books and films that sort of put that version out there. Um what my take is is is one like a lot of scholars I've rejected both of those versions. I mean both of those have their benefits. There's some evidence for some aspects of them and they both uh fail in certain ways uh to live up to what we find in the historical record when we look really closely. Uh for one thing they both overrationalize the whole process. They make it seem like people actually were deliberating over whether they should use the bomb or not, which was essentially not deliberated. Um, what I do in this book is I suggest I I take this deoverationalizing maybe push it even further and I try to look at exactly what Truman himself knew at any point um about the atomic bombs uh and also what he was actually involved with in decision-making. And the funny thing is, historians have

known for a while, scholars, that Truman didn't decide to use the bomb. That there was no deliberation of that sort. He was not asked. He did not order. Uh this was done by other people and he was uh uh sort of kept in the loop on this, but he basically didn't interfere on plans that were already going forward. Uh my argument is he actually thought that he knew more than he did about what was happening. Um if we look at what he knew and what he wrote and how he talked about it, it it looks an awful lot like Truman was not aware of some really key elements. in particular, the only discussion he actually took part in, where he sort of weighed in on a policy proposal about the atomic bomb before it was used was on the question of where the bomb should be dropped. Uh specifically, this question of whether Kyoto should be on the target list or not. Uh and uh after he has this discussion and agrees

with the secretary of war that they should not bomb Kyoto he essentially uh seems to believe that the decision that he made was not to bomb a city that he did not understand that Hiroshima was a city and not as he put it purely a military target or a military base. Um, and so that's sort of the crux of the book is is is this is the sort of original sin of Truman and the bomb is is one way you can think about it.

Well, and we should say the reason the Kyoto thing was debated at all was this is a historic city, very important to Japanese heritage, all that sort of stuff, which shows that our people were actually considering that sort of stuff from time to time. But this is what's so unusual about your book and was so amazing for me to read and that is so new. There have been a lot of good books on atomic history as strange as that sounds as you know that have come out popular histories in the last 10 or 15 years who you know you would think as you said that we had sort of drilled this well dry but your your comments that that Truman really thought he was doing something else. First of all it answers so many questions about the dichotomy between what he was saying and what actually happened. if he himself believed what he was saying and was sort of hoodwinkedked or he misunderstood.

May maybe a way to look at this is the difference between what might have happened had we not been in wartime and there hadn't been a sort of an assembly line uh approach to sort of new weapons are coming off the uh uh factory line and we should just throw them into the conflict. I mean, how much of that did Truman just sort of walk into when he inherited the job? A sort of an already operating machine?

He walked into quite a lot. I mean, he was by his own account completely out of his depth. U Roosevelt did not tell him much of anything. Um, I think even more than than that though, some of these issues were not really being coordinated in what we might think of as a normal bureaucratic way. I don't know what normal means today in government, but you would imagine that, you know, for example, the firebombing of firebombing of Japan, the framework with which we often approach that is to say, well, why did the US government want to do this? what was its rationalization? What did the presidents think, etc., as far as I can tell, the president's no president ever wrote or said anything about firebombing at all. And then the program was started uh by Curtis Lame himself uh in Japan. Um without even asking his superior officers, it was much more decentralized. And then once it happened, it doesn't seem like there

was a lot of clarity on whose uh uh authority does this need to be under anyway? Is this an operational question like where I put my troops or is this a political question like a you know a moral question? And I'm very interested in in that kind of thing, not just in the context of the atomic bomb, but because it informs these discussions that will come up about the atomic bomb really heavily. The bomb gets turned into this thing that is different from other weapons and that is not necessarily obvious. Uh and it's a sort of historical process and Truman plays a big role in this. Even the coyoto discussion is part of that. The military basically doesn't want to recognize the Secretary of War as being somebody who can override an operational choice like where you drop the bomb because that's going to depend on the weather and and your your analysts and other things that are not what the Secretary of War at

that time does. That the Secretary of War passes legislation, right? It's a different job at that time. And so Stimson, the Secretary of War, trying to carve out, well, actually, this is not that kind of question. And even going to Truman to get backing on this because it's not clear the military will listen to him. This is a sort of part of this debate about whether the atomic bomb is something that is just a regular another weapon off the assembly line or not. So I don't think for example that Truman necessarily thinks the atomic bomb is another weapon off the assembly line.

But uh that's also why I think he would have been amendable to the suggestion that their first use of it not be on a city uh and should be you know done in some way that uh which which was not unique even to Truman to to to have that opinion but done in some way that would make it look like they understood that this was uh a a a new sort of direction in human history. I got a really interesting sort of feeling from um your approach here on Truman that I hadn't gotten with him before. A sort of a a human being put in a kind of a tragic position where he was going to, you know, with the whole the whole the buck stops here idea. Even though maybe he didn't feel maybe maybe he felt a little hoodwinkedked by the way this was handled, he wasn't going to say anything about it. He was not going to throw anyone under the bus. he was going to take all the responsibility for it while at the same time using the fact that

he'd gone through this and that it had happened to him to craft the way nuclear weapons were going to be used in the future. So no other president found himself sort of hamstrung or or in the same position. Um that to me is a fascinating sort of a a human crux in the history of weapons development where you know you find just a re almost like a regular guy in the White House having to figure out how we're now going to turn our entire human way of behaving war making everything we've done since prehistoric times and figure out how to adjust that and know that you can't put it in the hands of the military people alone because he' already gone through that and look what happened to him.

You've turned um Truman into one of the more interesting figures I've ever run into historically. I

I will say I I found Truman pretty boring before I started Me too. Me too. Yeah. He's you know in the Truman literature there's kind of been when he when he was when he was out of office he was tremendously unpopular. Um he left tremendously unpopular and was thought of as like sort of a failed president. And then there was this sort of Truman revivalism in like the 1970s that cast him as sort of like the first cold warrior. And boy, wasn't he in a bad spot, but he did all the right things. And then you have a sort of anti-Trumman backlash, which is actually like, yes, he's a cold warrior, but a bad one. He's responsible for the whole Cold War. He's just a, you know, he's conniving. and and the Truman I ended up finding in the sources uh was not really any of those, but he is, as you say, this this sort of almost every man figure. I mean, there's there's this there's this Time magazine article. He he's made Time magazine's

person of the year in December 1945. And in their whole article about him, it's the most amazing article. You can find it online. They basically are saying how unworthy he is to be the man of the year and how he's just this guy who is like bumbled in because Roosevelt died and because of, you know, Democratic party horse racing, he happens to be the guy who's the vice president when when the actual president dies. And so because of that, he happens to be the one with the atomic bomb in the end of World War II. And they they sort of make fun of how boring and normal he is, especially compared to someone like Roosevelt. They even make fun of his name that he's the true man. Like it's this like like it's almost like a historical joke. And in a way that's like kind of unfair and in a way it's completely correct. Like he is a very human relatable figure in many ways. And you know one wonders what it would be

like if Roosevelt had lived, right? Roosevelt was not a relatable figure. He is a crafty upper class, you know, real political warrior all, you know,

secretive secretive, all interested in being buddy buddy with foreign powers and, you know, figuring all that out. Um, you you you have somebody later like Eisenhower who's much more a military guy and puts more faith in that and has much more ideological uh conceptions about the Cold War and things like that. and and Truman is just not. And it's one of the things I found fascinating. Like for example, and this was surprising to me. I Truman isn't really a cold warrior until about 1950. He is the most sympathetic of possible, you know, realistic voices you could imagine having in the White House from 1945 to about 1950. in that he thinks the the Soviets are jerks, but he mostly thinks that Stalin's a good guy and that it's the people around Stalin who are the bad guys. And he thinks that once they get the sort of distrust and paranoia out of their system, they'll see that the United States is basically on their side, the

United States is basically the good guys, and that they don't have overlapping interests. that they he would be happy to sort of carve up the world between the Soviet Union and everybody else and say fine as long as you stay in your area we'll stay in our area it's great and it's not until the Korean War that he starts getting really bitter about that sort of thing and and starts believing that this you know reconciliation that he believes you know even in 1949 he tells people around him that he thinks that they're going to basically be done with the Cold War in two years and they'll probably be able to ban all nuclear weapons by the mean as well which nobody but Truman thinks which is also the amazing thing. It's he has these very idiosyncratic views which are not shared by a lot of the people around him but nonetheless he's the president and so these idiosyncratic views have a lot of impact.

Well and I keep trying to remind myself these guys and not just Truman but you pointed out the age of a guy like uh Harry Stimson who's born right after the Civil War. These are people from the 1800s trying to grasp the physicists who are splitting the atom. It reminds me of legislators in uh the Congress today trying to handle artificial intelligence. I mean uh we're expecting these people to make rules rules which by the way we still you know that that form the germ of everything we still do with these kinds of weapons today. And yet you know they lived in the era of horsedrawn carriages when they were young kids growing up. How much does something like that impact man's ability, you know, when you're thrown into something like Harry Truman is to roll with the punches here technologically when you just don't have any I mean you you talk about one meeting where they basically have to explain to him about things like exotic

things like plutonium and uranium and and the atom and everything else. Can you talk a little about trying to make, you know, worldcrafting civilizational protecting legislation when you're a guy from the 1800s? What I find amazing about some of these meetings with Truman is you'll have this memo or this diary account where they explain all the things they tried to get across to him. And so in this early meeting in April of 1945, they they basically try to give him the entire history and science of the Manhattan Project, which I can tell you from teaching on this subject is is a lot, right? It it's hard for me to cover that material in like three hours, right? if I wanted to really do it the degree that I feel that a modern person would understand these things and you then you look at the times on on when people left the meeting because all of this is recorded of course and it's like well

that entire meeting was done in 25 minutes and you think well that cannot have been either these people can speak at five times the rate that you or I can and understand or there was a lot of sort of gesturing and sort of not getting very deep into this because there just isn't enough time to get a real in-depth understanding. Um, one thing with Truman, and and this is the way that I think most presidents deal with this, very few presidents, there's maybe one or two exceptions, um, really have gotten into the weeds on nuclear weapons policy, uh, because they don't have the knowledge to do it. I think it makes them uncomfortable. Um, and they're willing to sort of hand that off to experts and say, "Okay, you tell me. Boil it down to one choice or another choice." And Truman mostly does that. There are some places where he 100% hands over what's going to happen to his expert adviserss um who might be technical

people, they might be diplomats, it depends on the topic, the military, etc. And then there are places in which he um uh you know wants there to be sort of a choice that he will make. And then there are some places where he lays down the law in the absence of people telling him that that's the way he ought to do it. Those latter ones are for me the most interesting places because he's not operating from some sort of deep technical knowledge. He just doesn't have it. Right? He this guy barely has an idea of what an atom is, right? is certainly you know what goes into operating this kind of uh the you know the nuclear infrastructure which is gigantic um but what he does have is this sort of base these sort of very simple and I don't deride them by calling them simple but the sort of basic opinions and they are on things like what is the military likely to do what is congress likely to do what are

other countries likely to do? What's the right thing for a state to be doing? What should the United States be doing and what should it not be doing? And and this is on the bomb where he really has these occasionally very strong positions on like they're basically moral positions, which is like it's not you you should not be planning to commit a genocide. Like he didn't ever word it that way. That's not the language he would use. But this is essentially how he feels about World War II. like we shouldn't do it. Like even if it's in your advantage, you shouldn't do it because that's not the right thing to do. That's not what the good guys do. We are the good guys. And in a way that that's in such opposition to like how a think tanker type of that of that era approaches it, right? It's not this like

Herman Khan guy or somebody, right? It's not deeply analytical. It's it's much more again every man in a way. Well, so that I find that helpful though, like maybe you don't want a Herman Khan as your president at a moment like that. Maybe you need a deeply human uh person who's looking at this from from a perspective of an everyman. I mean, for the part that never made sense to me, and you bring it up in your book, too, but maybe it makes the whole atomic bombing thing not as not as such a leap of gruesomeness as it would be if somebody dropped one today, is the firebombing that's already going on in Japan. Right.

You mentioned that uh uh Stimson had talked about not wanting to be seen like the United States was some, you know, atrocity committer on on the levels of the Nazis. But but the amount of stuff we were already doing there before we used atomic weapons makes atomic weapons seem like a, you know, a turning up of the dial from an 8 to a 10 rather than from a zero to a 10. how much of the fact that this all happens in wartime as opposed to maybe seeing the bomb developed in 47 in peace time uh and maybe we don't even use it today. One of the quotes I read in your book, not to change the subject because it isn't, but you said something I'd never heard before where it's a wonderful counterfactual where General George Marshall had even suggested you say that perhaps the bomb not even should be used in the Second World War at all and that we should keep it a permanent secret. I feel like that gives us an idea of some

of the strangeness of the era. Can we talk about how maybe the fact that this is a hot war going on and the fact that we're already firebombing Japan and that's tragic and horrific enough. How does that play into the nuclear weapons question?

It's it's the firebombing is this interesting aspect because of course today we talk about the firebombing a lot and it wasn't secret like that they were bragging about it. Curtis Lame was giving press conferences talking about how much they've destroyed and things like this, but it wasn't um at no point did any reporter ask either Roosevelt or Truman what they thought about the firep uh which is sort of hard to imagine today, right? If you were engaged in this, um it just wasn't a point of discussion and even in the military it does not seem to have been a point of discussion. the only person who routin who occasionally tried to look into it was Stimson and they basically told him they it was fine and I don't know if Simpson accepted that. Um he may have just been busy. He may have also again not felt like he was in a political position where he could challenge what these people were doing. Um, but I think

we often look at that and say essentially, well, because they were firebombing, they didn't have moral qualms about destroying cities. And I'm not sure that's true. I think that they could both be firebombing and people could have moral qualms about cities. Marshall, who you brought up, is really interesting because he's a chief of staff. He's he's he's ostensibly the the highest military person with any authority. and people don't generally go to him and ask him what he thinks about this kind of stuff. And occasionally they do ask him and record his responses and his opinions aren't what you'd expect. I mean, as you said, he he at one point he suggests maybe they just shouldn't use the atomic bomb. He also uh suggests that they shouldn't use it on uh cities that that that it's it's not a good idea. At the same time, he also says we could use chemical weapons against troops, but we wouldn't use them

against cities, which is not the general way in which we tend to divide these things up, right? Um, and yet when he received push back for these, he just said, "Okay, whatever." Right? I mean, he basically let other it was clear that was not the direction people were going in. Um, I think with, you know, I don't know how aware Truman was of the firebombing. Uh, again, it's in the newspapers. He must have been aware of it to some degree. Stimson did go to him and and suggest that they were going to get the reputation of outdoing the Nazis and atrocities. Um, at the same time, his opinion was never asked. Nobody ever went to him and said, "Should we keep doing this?" Yes or no. Even Stimson, who was essentially trying to lobby for restraint, never said, "Could you stop doing this?" He instead simply said, "You know, here are some issues. Here are some qualms." Anyway, moving on.

Right. And I think that's very interesting. My suspicion, and this is just from being a human being, we don't have records that that tell us this. Uh, you know, if you ask somebody to do something and they say no, that's a bigger defeat than simply putting the idea out there and hoping they might do something about it. And I don't think that Stimson necessarily felt that it was his place to ask the president to stop doing something. That that's maybe not the role he's supposed to have. If the president wants to stop it, the president can stop it. Um, I think that certainly if it was peace time, it would be a bit different. We we see a little bit of that with the Hbomb development, which Truman ultimately essentially approves, but with a very for very domestic political reasons and with a very heavy heart and with the sort of explicit uh uh sentiment that he does not plan to use these things, that they just need to

maybe build these things, which is a way to lessen the moral hazard arguably. Well, and let's remember, you know, we were talking about like why can't some of these people in positions of power think more about this and think more about, you know, sparing people and what not, but maybe we're forgetting, you know, how the average American was feeling at that time. You quote a poll by Fortune magazine taken in December 1945, which of course is after the war was over uh by a few months, asking how people felt about quote our use of the atomic bomb.

And here's what you write. Um, it indicated that only 4.5% of those surveyed believe the atomic bombs ought not to have been used at all and only 13.8% believed that they ought to have had their power demonstrated in a way that did not kill anyone first. For example, dropping one first in some unpopulated region. Uh, a solid majority of 53.5% endorsed the use of the bombs on cities just as they were used. and a striking 22.7% you write wished that there had been more time to have quickly used many more of them before Japan had a chance to surrender. So let's not in cold blood forget that these people were still talking about Pearl Harbor uh gold uh uh star families. I mean all this sort of stuff was still fresh in the minds. So, had Truman or uh Stimson or Marshall or any of those guys been proposing uh something softer, they would have actually been outside the norm of public opinion for that time period, wouldn't

they? I think it's hard to know how much public opinion follows what happens and seem to have worked, right? if they had done something and it's

right it it so this is and I'm and I'm not I I I agree that so Stimson for example is really interesting in this respect because he one he kept a diary which is really helpful right he wrote down every little thought he had which super helpful thank you secretary of war Henry Stimson um but like he was really concerned with um you know how do you set up the conditions for getting the kinds of things that he thinks will be useful. And so, for example, he really is not a fan of the anti-Japanese um sort of the really extreme version of that because in his mind that's going to get in the way of ending the war. So, he was a big proponent of what if we basically clarify to the Japanese emperor that we won't harm their position and they can still run the country and we're not going to change their government if they don't want to. um once they've demilitarized um in part because he really felt that

that was what was going to be needed to get the Japanese on board with surrender. Um and that got turned down by Truman uh both for for complicated reasons but also under the influence of of Burns uh in part because of Pearl Harbor, right? Like like that's not a sentiment that he doesn't want to give the Japanese any concessions of any form. Um, but it's interesting that somebody like not just Stimpson, Winston Churchill thought this. I mean, these are views that look much more consiliatory, but if you believe that that's going to be a major stumbling block for the Japanese, which Simpson did, and Stimson had been to Japan and and thought of himself as a sort of uh Japan expert. And you know, one of the things that Simpson hated was that there was a view that the Japanese were these fanatical basically death cult people, which you know, some of them were. And but Stimson would be quick to point out

that like not all the Japanese and not all the Japanese in power and there's going to be a significant chunk of the ones in power who are pretty rational. And so if you treat them all like they're going to fight to the last man, then that's what you're going to get. You're going to get fighting to the last man. If you can find a way to let the ones who are more reasonable have a way out and and give them power, then that's going to get you the end of the war. And then ultimately, you know, what people want is to win the war.

So, I think he, you know, if you can get that, people will probably be happy no matter what you do or at least be conflicted because you know how people are. So, I I think it's tricky. Uh uh I do think that public opinion was part of some of these deliber deliberations. I don't think it was why they dropped the bomb. Uh I don't think it really had a big impact on the decisions they made in that respect just because they already had other reasons for wanting to make those decisions.

Yeah. You list I was going to say you list four reasons only two of which I are the ones normally pointed out there of reasons why they wanted to drop the bomb. Um and you know the the the message to the Soviets uh demonstration of the weapon you know a whole bunch of but there's as you pointed out there are so many little things that went into it. It's strange to think of the possibility nowadays when we look back on it and think about them not dropping it. what you know didn't didn't Groves uh the head of the program the military engineer say something like that they would be justified uh given all of the uh uh resources that had been put into that in a zero some kind of game if they didn't use it the American people could hang them from every lamp post or something like that. Um, but but what's interesting to get back to what you've put out here that no one else has put out is is the idea that Truman may have

thought he was doing something he really wasn't and then afterwards he took responsibility for it anyway and then behind the scenes tried to see that it never happened again. How does a president get hoodwinkedked? So I you know Hoodwink implies like deliberate deception and I don't think it was that like I don't think Stimson Well let me back up. So the whole context of this is this Kyoto question which uh you know people sometimes know a little bit about there's some myths about this uh you know he wasn't on his honeymoon there you know this kind of stuff. Uh but for whatever reason, Stimson uh when when Stimson hears the the list of atomic targets, this is in May 1945, uh Keyoto is not only on the list, but it's it's what the military wants to use the bomb on the most. And he immediately and almost instinctually objects to this. And I don't know exactly why he did. I mean, there's there's rationalizations one can give.

It's a place of culture. It's mostly civilian. It's the old capital. that the Japanese will be sad if we do that and then they won't be our friends in the post-war. And Stimson himself has a bunch of rationalizations that he uses over time to defend this. But it's pretty clear that uh to me that that that this is almost uh an emotional response that he just he he knows Kyoto, he doesn't want Kyoto on the list. Uh that there's something else going on there. the military uh in this case, General Groves is is not interested in really taking Kyoto off the list and really resents this. I mean, Groves later says that he's happy that Stimson does this, but the the words that Groves uses even decades later, he regards this as the only instance in which Stimson interfered with military planning and military objectives. I mean, interfered is such a great word, right? Um anyway, Stimpson all the way up through Potam, Groves has

been going back to Stimson and saying, "What if we put Kyoto back on the list and Groves himself says that they met, you know, dozen times after that initial meeting and every time Groves tried to put Kyoto back on the list and he says that Simpson, you know, took this in good humor. I I I find this very unlikely that Stimson actually appreciated this at all. And um finally the last bit was right as they're finalizing the target list. Uh uh this is now being done over teletype, you know, quite remote. While Simpson's at Potts, he gets a a teletype from Groves and from his people there who's says, "Hey, could we could we put Kyoto back on the list just as a backup just in case the weather conditions just in case there's a good reason?" and he he immediately goes to Truman because it's clear that Groves is not willing to back down on this and is not accepting tr you know Stimson's emphatic rejection that

Kyoto should be on the list as authorit authoritative. So he goes to Truman and basically gets Truman to agree that Kyoto shouldn't be on the list and then he can write back Groves and said, "I've had it confirmed at the highest level. Kyoto's off the list." Great. Done. That takes Kyoto off the list. that makes Hiroshima number one. That actually is what adds Nagasaki to the list as a backup target. There's a whole lot that goes from that. [snorts] The interesting thing is that meeting. So we have Truman's account of what that was about and we have Simpson's account. Uh uh Stim these are accounts from the time uh Simpson's diary and Truman kept a journal at Potam and Stimson's diary you know makes it sound like he laid out a very rational case for basically Kyoto is this historic city and it's a civilian city and it's not a real military target and if we bomb it then the Japanese will never be our friends

in the post-war and it'll get in way of our long-term goals. Truman's writing on what this discussion was, and this is again at Potm is that he and the Secretary of War decided that the first use of the bomb should be used against a military target. Um that women and children should not be the target, but sailors and soldiers, and uh that that this is why they're doing this, and that he's pretty happy with this. And this is sort of the the context for how you could be so confused on this. What does [snorts] Stimson say to Truman at the meeting? I don't know. We we have no direct record or or objective record.

But my suspicion just based on other ways that Stimson justified keeping Kyoto off the list. One is that Simpson will say sort of whatever it takes to keep Kyoto from getting bombed. two, Stimson's whole argument uh is is that there's this sort of division between a place like Hiroshima and a place like Kyoto. That Kyoto doesn't really have military industry in it or headquarters or anything like that. And Hiroshima has a bunch of military factories and army, you know, points of interest and things like this, which is true to a degree.

The military even then and even and afterwards would point out like actually Kyoto has military facilities as well. Um actually Hiroshima is city as well right like the line between them is not as firm as Simson would have probably drawn it but Simpson is trying to force an outcome and I think it's very plausible that Truman misunderstood the nature of this discussion that it's about two cities and instead thought it's about should we bomb a big city or should we bomb a big military base and then came away thinking and again this is from Truman's journal that they had chosen a quote purely military target. And this purely military language crops up in a few other things that he works on uh up until they they have the first pictures of Hiroshima and it's clearly a city. Um and uh and and so that's the the way it in my mind that this happens. It's not so much that Stimson sets out to confuse

Truman, but Stimson sets out with a different goal, which is to save Kyoto. And I don't think Truman realizes that he's misunderstood this conversation. And I think the consequence of that is that he doesn't and also Truman is busy at this time to be sure. Um, but he doesn't ask for followup. He doesn't ask for, you know, he doesn't reconfirm that he's understood these things. If you put it that way, it's not hard at all to understand how a president could be misunderstood about something. We have presidents misunderstanding things all the time. Um, this is a and this is also not some sort of like formal briefing with all of his adviserss in the room.

This is a one-on-one conversation with somebody who has a very definite goal in mind entering into this conversation. I I don't think Stimson would have wanted to mislead Truman at all. I that's just not his his character. But I I think it's totally possible he could have.

So you bring up uh an interesting point when you talk about the fact that uh Truman, as you said, may have entirely misunderstood the targeting of Hiroshima. Uh, and then you say, I've tried to provide the context here that would make this seem like a plausible interpretation because the idea of Truman being in italics so wrong on this matter feels fantastical on the face of it. But as you point out, stuff like this actually happens more often than we might think. How I'm trying to put myself in an empathetic sort of situation here with Truman and try to imagine how it must have felt to him if he did entirely misunderstood his choice of cities here when he got the casualty reports back. I mean, what is the moment of the light bulb going on over his head when he realizes what's happened here?

[snorts] So it by August 8th, 1945, he 100% knows that it's a city. And that's the first day that you have any reports from the Japanese that mention it being a city or casualties or anything like that. It's also the first intelligence they have over what happened to the target. They have the first photographs because it took them um two days for the smoke from the fires to dissipate to the point where they could get a good picture of Hiroshima. And we know that on that morning um [snorts] Stimson actually goes to Truman and shows him a a report on the damage to Hiroshima and it's clearly a city. Um what is Truman thinking? One can only guess. He is at this time reporting to people that he is suffering from terrible headaches and difficulty sleeping and other things like this. Um he there's a picture of him getting this report from from Stimson because it was the press was there and he's smiling but I don't know

maybe it's my my wanting to read into a photo behind his eyes. It doesn't look like a happy person. Um, you can look at them very on my website. I posted this photo among others and you can you can take a look and judge for yourself. But I I think Truman would be quite disturbed. I mean Truman is not thrilled at the idea of killing, as he put it, women and children. This is the the code. It's a it's like a sometimes these are called Trumanisms, but they're like repetitive phrases that is Truman's way of always talking about non-combatants to say women and children. does this throughout his whole life and career.

Um, now you might ask, well, what about Nagasaki? This is August 8th. Nagasaki is August 9th. If he doesn't want to bomb cities, why does he approve the bombing of Nagasaki? And I have found zero evidence that Truman knew that there was a second bomb about to be used. And in fact, while he's getting his briefing from Stimson, the plane is starting to take off uh in in from Tinian because of all the time zones and all of that kind of stuff. Um but you know with the first bomb, Truman was told right before it was going to be used. He was very interested in the schedule. He uh he himself always referred to it as just the atomic bomb and when it happens when it is used. The actual strike order, which I'm not sure Truman even actually saw, uh was approved by Stimson uh and Marshall, basically describes in detail how the first bomb will be used, but then says you can keep dropping bombs as soon as

they're available. Uh uh it's not clear to me at all that that Truman would have even remembered. He would have been told at least once early on that they were planning to have two bombs ready by early August. But the one time he asked about the schedule of bombings at Potam, he was read a telegram which we have which says that the first one of the tested type will be ready around the 1st of August and then the next one uh will be ready you know a week or so later. And um that is uh or even over a week later. And that sounds accurate uh unless you if but there's two types of bombs. There was the tested and the untested. And at no point did they clarify. By the way, there's an untested type of bomb that will also be ready by August 1st. So the the the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombs are different bombs.

Um I don't think Truman caught that. And again, being sympathetic with him, he's like negotiating with Stalin. He's got other things on his plate. Um I'm not sure he's catching these little tiny details which frankly would confuse most people today um who only knew a little bit about atomic bombings and things like that. So what what happens? Nagasaki gets you the bomb gets attacked on August 10th. Truman tells his cabinet that he has stop ordered the atomic bombings to be stopped and it's on the basis of the women and children and he tells them he can't stand the thought of killing all those kids. And so this is again if I'm reading into his psychology and again this is an an impossible job.

We we just acknowledge that. But if I'm trying to get inside his head, I see a person who realizes that he is not in in control of this thing at all and seizes that control back. And fascinating to a modern person in cold blood to look back and note that here's a man who doesn't want to kill any more women and children, but the firebombings continue after the Nagasaki attacks. That the the contradictions in this whole thing are are mind spinning. I think my sense about the firebombing in general is that Truman does not feel responsible for those in the same way he does the atomic bombing. And we could debate whether he should feel responsible for those, but my sense is that he doesn't. And that's an interesting distinction. It and maybe it's the distinction, as we you were saying earlier, between, you know, what's already been happening. The firebombings of course started under Roosevelt, not under Truman. Um, and

also this sense that sure that's an area that we count as the military's prerogative. But the atomic bombing to him does feel like something special. And again, we could say, well, is it that special? Is it different? Is it just a very effective way to do firebombing? I think Truman's own writing makes it clear again and again that he 100% thinks the atomic bomb even from the beginning even before it's used is special. I mean he he writes about it in at at Pottsam as being you know maybe the end of the world that was prophecied in the Bible.

Maybe this is the most terrible invention in the history of mankind. Um and certainly even by the time he leaves office in 1953 he gets asked again is it really so bad? And he and that's where the the quote about it it slaughtering uh uh civilians comes from where he just says, "I don't think you get it. This thing is worse. It's even worse than biological and chemical warfare. The atomic bomb is like the worst weapon ever made." Which that's a very strong sentiment. Again, we could disagree with Truman, but I think the important thing historically is to say, "Oh, he he really seems to believe this."

You know, it's interesting, too. you have sort of a I would call it a hardcore history uh point that you make when you talk about the functional difference a person would have experienced on the ground between something like a firebombing or the bombing of Dresden or Hamburg or anything like that that went on in Europe and the instantaneous change in in your world that happens when the atomic bomb is dropped and you had written that for someone on the ground all of this meaning the the bombing and the aftermath would have happened in an instant a normal morning immediately transformed into hell on earth. And then you write, quote, "The aftermath of the firebombings and the atomic bombings looked similar, but there were key differences in the experiences themselves. The firebombings took hours to unfold, and the threat of hundreds of B29s could be heard from a great distance. The atomic bomb was a weapon

of suddenness and of tremendous, almost instant destruction, followed up by the firestorm that engulfed the city core and consumed it block by block." end quote. But what's so it is it's like almost like I always thought that in Kurt Vonagget's description of of the h of the Dresden bombings, he talks about going into a bomb shelter and the city's intact and coming out of the bomb shelter and it's all gone. But that's the moment that anyone who lives through one of these atomic bombings experiences, not to mention, of course, the u the thermonuclear super weapons that have never been used in war. Uh, you make it clear that the one thing that Truman seems to have learned from all of this is that, as he put it, some dashing lieutenant colonel somewhere shouldn't have the power to order an attack here. How does this play into the fact that we've evolved into a a wartime situation here where all of this now is

wrapped up in the hands of our president as opposed to the joint chiefs of staff or a bunch of It's not a group decision. And that's Truman's um Truman's uh decision that he made. Right.

Right. That's part of his his legacy. He starting the day after Nagasaki centralizes any atomic use decisions in himself basically in him the president. And at first that's just sort of the arrangement. It eventually gets articulated as policy though I think later than most people realize. It's not really official US policy. There is, in fact, no official US policy about who decides who uses an atomic bomb until 1948. And even then, it's like one sentence. It's a sentence that says, well, it's up to the president, which which there were other options floated at the time, but that's ultimately what happened. Um uh I think the key thing here is that Truman's centralization of the of the use power in himself. Today we talk about that centralization as um being justified by either the constitution or by the strategy. Well, you have to make a decision very quickly. You know, we have lots of reasons for saying this is

how it ought to be. Um I think it's very clear that the reason Truman does that is he does not trust the military and he doesn't trust anybody. he trusts himself and he does not want to use these weapons again. This is one of his other things he repeats over the whole course of his administration that his whole goal is to never use nuclear weapons again. That that's the goal which again is is not the standard version of Truman that I think most people have in their head as a guy who's almost above everything else committed to the idea of not using nuclear weapons. There's again there's an obvious paradox here. The book tries to explain what that is. the result the resolution of it but uh uh it's ultimately the the presidential power to use nuclear weapons the exclusive presidential power to use nuclear weapons in the United States was created so that they wouldn't get used and that's I think surprising right

that's certainly not the way it's talked about today um today and and in previous administrations you know there's there's discussion about well could the military stop the president from being from using the bomb if he wanted to and uh that's exactly the flip of the situation in the 1940s.

So I see it as influencing the closest time we ever came to nuclear war famously. I mean maybe not but but famously the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy's problems with what he called the brass hats and everything. And you know, when we look back at history, you think it's a long time between the Truman administration and the Kennedy administration, but we're talking about, you know, a dozen years or something like that. And and with a with a general in between them as president, so maybe an unusual figure uh between the two. So the next civilian president you get in there is by comparison with his august second world war cabinet members like Curtis Lame that you mentioned earlier appears to be a kid, right?

a a low-level officer in the Second World War who doesn't know anything and is up against all these people that were actually dropping bombs on Japan. And yet, that's really, isn't it sort of the first test of Truman's centralization of the power of the bombs in the hands of civilians, even though Eisenhower had that power, he's sort of only a pseudo civilian. Um, how much did what Truman sort of tried to make standard operating procedure, civilian control of these bombs and what have you, how much of that impacted how the Cuban missile crisis unfolded and and those sorts of concerns that came to the four again then?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, so what happens in under Truman is he almost totally centralizes everything with himself, right? Because he does not trust the military. Under Eisenhower, things eventually flip. Eisenhower actually maintains initially a lot of Truman's policies, but he eventually for a variety of reasons goes entirely the other direction. So the military get access to these weapons under under Truman after World War II. The military never have access to more than nine nuclear weapons out of hundreds. And they only get that access in 1951. And it's a whole complicated story about why they get nine in 1951. Um, and it's not to use them. It's it's it's it's for political reasons. Um, under Eisenhower, they end up with 90% of the stockpile.

And some of this is because the the the weapons change. It's it's not possible to keep them sort of separated into their nuclear and their non-uclear components, which is what they did in the ' 40s. Um, and also the situation changes. The Soviet Union has hundreds of weapons. And so now they're very worried about being attacked. And they the the the fear of Eisenhower is not the military will start war without permission. The fear is we'll get caught with our pants down and we'll get destroyed by the Soviet Union. Um the result of all that is that in the by the end of the 50s before Kennedy takes uh power, the military has the ability to wage nuclear war. one on a scale much bigger than it ever could in the 40s, but like without any involvement from the president. I mean, there's no locks on the weapons in the 50s. There's no codes or anything like that. They just have them. They could use them. Um, and

uh and they're ready to use them and they're very clear uh at times and they even in the 40s they do this a little bit. people like Lame, they say, "Well, you know, if we had to use them and the president was in the way, right? We're not going to sit out this fight, right? If if if it looks like World War II is going down, we aren't going to let some political order from Washington. Even the great General Eisenhower stand in our way." So that's the situation when like Kennedy and his people take over and they are horrified by this. They don't realize that the nuclear war plan is much larger than they have really been told. It's all being all war planning is being done in the Pentagon.

It is not being shared with the White House. Um they do try to put some barriers in place. They're the ones who add locks to all weapons that are overseas and eventually domestic ones, uh the permissive action links. um they're the ones who try not completely successfully to centralize war planning within the executive branch. Like they don't let the joint chiefs of staff just make their own war plans without input from the White House. Um they they are the ones who start to push for like flexibility. Like the early war plans of the 50s and early 60s, you couldn't not nuke China even if China was not part of the war. Because the people who made those plans basically literally said, "Are you telling me you would have World War II and let a giant communist power survive?" No. Like, this is an ideological war. Which may not be what your politicians want to happen, but they're not in the loop. Um, uh, this is

covered, by the way, very well. Dan Ellberg's book, uh, The Doomsday Machine. Yes. All about this period. And he was personally involved in in some of these discussions and things like this. It's really interesting. Um but so like that's kind of the situation. So by the time of the Cuban missile crisis, yes, Kennedy 100% has been trying to basically convince both Kruev and his own generals that he's actually a tough guy and you know should not be underestimated. Um, he also is very well aware that despite his his efforts, if the military blunders into nuclear war, there isn't a whole lot that Kennedy himself can probably do to stop it. Um, it's not the kind of thing where if he doesn't give his positive order, they're all going to just stand there. They are they have their own uh uh uh people running things and they do not 100% trust Kennedy. And and that's an issue. It's one of the reasons that that whole crisis is so

dangerous is [snorts] that uh Kennedy recognizes only after it's sort of been going on for a little while that there are there are a lot of pathways to nuclear war and he doesn't have control over all of them. He cannot actually make the decision to avoid nuclear war under those conditions. What's crazy is when you look at all of the opportunities. I mean, the Cuban missile crisis obviously famous and maybe even oversighted compared to, you know, Berlin blockade, MacArthur wanting to to nuke the Chinese in Korea, the requested devmu by the French, the Vietnam war, and everything else. Uh oh, and not to mention accidents and and problems with uh false positives on radar and everything else. How much it seems to me that that that had things broken differently in the very early Truman eras, had had Truman allowed the military to control these weapons, which as they were pointing out are just like

weapons, right? We control all the other weapons, why not these? It seems to me some of those situations might have easily broken the other way. And if that's the case, can we suggest that Truman may be centralizing this and being distrustful of the military? Keeping these very unusual weapons may have likely been the reason that they weren't have more. I mean, if MacArthur controls the use of nuclear weapons on the ground in 195051, it seems to me they're likely used. So, so did the centralization of this in the hands of a single person who then has to live the rest of his life with knowing he made the decision to kill un untold numbers of people. I mean, that's how Truman has to live with this, right? How much does that impact the fact that we haven't had a nuclear war since?

I think quite a lot. I think if you had somebody there are people you could imagine being in power in 1950 1951 including Eisenhower uh including um Brian McMahon who was one of the major Democratic politicians at the time who was definitely planning to run for presidency in 52 but he happened to die of cancer first. Um but these people who who did not have qualms about either giving the military weapons or using these weapons uh and in fact some of these people really disliked the idea that these weapons created unique moral hazards especially in situations like the Korean War where they weren't the reason you aren't using them then is isn't because you think they're going to you're going to get nuked back. I mean, the Soviet Union has a tiny arsenal.

They can't really deliver them over great distances. They're not not using them because of deterrence. They're not using them uh for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that Truman has made it very clear that he's not interested in using these weapons. Um there were a contingent of people within the military who were trying to see and push the edges of well maybe under certain circumstances and and part of the reason they're doing this and they're explicit about this in in these classified hearings and things like that and some diary entries and things like this is that they're worried that there's this taboo being created. This idea that atomic bombs were not usable weapons because they are morally problematic.

And the person who is the most important person [snorts] to advocate that point of view is President Truman. And they know this. They're very clear about this at times that the president is the source. Like there's of course there's going to be, you know, people who are believe this in the common people and the Soviets are going to push that line as propaganda, etc. But the president is the only one at that point in his administration who actually advocates this view. So I think it's very important. There's been a lot of scholarship by largely political scientists over why nuclear weapons don't get used after World War II. And uh one of the answers some of it's things like deterrence and rational you know choices and things but a big answer uh is this belief that you nuclear weapons are not something you should use that there's a problem with using them and the bar for using them is much

higher than it is for other weapons especially in non-deterrent situations like the French at Dian Benfu or wherever where using them you're not worried about getting attacked back with nuclear weapons per se. Um, and if that's true, if that played any role at all, then uh I think having the first American president with nuclear weapons be one of the biggest subscribers to the taboo possible, that's got to have an impact, right? Um, and so, you know, the irony of Harry Truman, I think, is that he's the only president who who who presided over the use of nuclear weapons in war. He may be one of the main reasons they don't get used again.

You know, it's interesting and I I'll I'll make this the last question before asking you if you have any points that that I haven't already asked you. But, you know, I grew up uh in an era where we were very aware of the sort of damocles hanging over our heads. We did drills, all those kind it was, you know, there were movies, there were uh literature, everything sort of talked about this. We saw nuclear weapons on television being paraded down the streets of the Kremlin. I mean, all these kinds of things. And then during the '9s when we sort of had our what did they call it? the the the vacation or the break from history. I think a generation sort of forgot that that sort of damocles is still there and now we're reminded again Annie Jacobson's of course had a new book with nuclear war scenario. They're making a movie. Uh there's all kinds of good material including yours coming out here. Um,

what would we say then is the lesson from the era, the only era where these sorts of weapons have ever been employed against human beings now that we're being reminded that they're still out there that it could, you know, her her book's a wonderful example of just how easily dominoes could start to tumble, decisions could go from, you know, leaders pushing the envelope to being pulled by them. I mean, what is the lesson of something all the way back in 1945 for us in a sort of damocy situation that we're realizing never has left us since then by what Truman did in the way he sort of took this concrete and created a new reality with it that hardened and that is still our reality today. What's the lesson of this book in terms of real world things in 2025?

I think it's really easy, especially when we talk about nuclear weapons, to assume that they're sort of a big system that will lead to certain types of outcomes. Right? And generally, my experience is that a lot of people have a lot of faith in nuclear deterrence, right? Okay, we're we've got all of these weapons, we've got all of these self-interested, rational actors out there. They won't use them because it's not in their interest to do so. And that sounds great, assuming that they see it that way, which of course they may or may not depending on the people. I think the point of my book is that it's easy for us to abstract away the the individuals.

I think there have been trends in history which I support largely. You know, that there's been such a push back against the idea of like great man history, the idea that individuals are the ones pushing the trajectory of history forward. And that's completely right and good. This is not about great man history. But on the the other side of that extreme is just like well everything just kind of happens and uh there's forces that sort of things emerge from and it would happen one way or the other no matter what. Individuals don't matter and and I think there's something to be said for sometimes individuals matter. They're specific individuals get into positions of power.

They have specific uh mindsets, specific worldviews which are not just the product of everybody around them. Obviously, they're of their time. They have to be. What else could they be?

What if they're milit What if they're mentally unbalanced? What if they're mentally unbalanced? What if they just feel very strongly about women and children and the people around them don't? Who's right in that situation? Who's wrong? It doesn't matter. Right? The the issue is that these individuals matter a lot. And if we're going to be thinking about how these systems work, we do have to talk about the technical stuff and talk about the strategy and talk about the planning and all this stuff. At the end of the day, if the system is set up in such a way that ultimately the position of the one person at the top is the opinion that everybody else will probably bend themselves around, then that person really matters. And there's relevance in that for the United States. There's relevance in that in thinking about Russia. If you're thinking about how worried should you be about say Putin wanting to use nuclear weapons or even

in China with she uh part of it that is ultimately well what does he think the situation is what does he value what does he not value that stuff's hard to get at right getting inside somebody's head um but we have to do that if we're going to think about these things seriously we can't just put our faith in well they'll think about it the way I do because who knows who they've been talking to who knows how much they understand. Who knows how good their intelligence briefings are? Who knows if they understand the weapons correctly?

That's a th those are harder things to grasp than I think is is obvious. What's crazy is that a single person in a number of countries including North Korea may be our firewall protecting us from some sort of nuclear armageddon. And yet, as you point out in your book, in 1945, if we'd gone with sort of the group decision on things, we might have dropped atomic bombs on even more city that cities. The one guy who said no was the firewall in that situation. Uh, doctor, is there anything else I didn't ask you about today that you want to get in this conversation before we end it?

Uh, I'll just say if if if if people find the claims I make, especially delivered, you know, over a podcast to be hard to believe, please read the book. Uh, uh, I fully acknowledge that these are big claims and require evidence. And in the book, I try to give that evidence. And also, practically every source in the book I've found a way to make easy to access online. uh you can use either the footnotes or I mean every primary source. Uh I'm also setting up some documents on my own website of some of the key uh uh uh the key documents from it. People are more than welcome to take a look at this. Uh I I think this is an area that is uh again we we we're fed these kind of stories about how the atomic bombs were used and we weave them into our worldviews very seamlessly. And so anything that suggests something alternative seems I think a little surprising. But I think think people will be surprised that there's actually

other ways to look at this. Oh, for those of us who've read lots of books on this subject, you had all sorts of things I'd never heard, read, or thought about before. Uh Dr. Alex Wellerstein, thank you so much for coming on the program. It is a fantastic book.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. My thanks to Professor Alex Wellerstein for coming on the program today. His new book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age is great. I love books that don't just uh educate you on the subject that they're writing about, but then afterwards force you to, you know, rethink everything you thought you knew about a subject. Those are always, in my opinion, uh the best ones. And if nothing else, I'm, you know, it's another lens through which to view all this. And one of the lenses is sort of to put yourself in the position of a guy like Harry Truman. It really is sort of worthy of a of a movie or something. I mean, think about it. Guy's not anywhere near the presidency. It's not even on his mind. And then ipso facto this, oh, that happens. and you find yourself as as vice president all of a sudden to a guy who's not really

bringing you in at all because he's been president longer than anyone's been president ever in American history and he just sort of you know goes about doing his own things like a puppet master and a master politician and you're nowhere near anything and you've barely had the job for 5 seconds and he dies and now you're in control of it all and it happens to be in the middle of the greatest war humanity's ever been involved in and oh yeah there's a secret weapon we've been working on. It's the most terrible thing anyone's ever had control of. And what do you want to do with it?

Holy cow. And then, you know, in the book, Wellerstein puts you in his position sometimes where Truman is saying to people in small rooms, you have no idea what it's like to be in in this position. I'm in and having to make these sorts of decisions and then to try to maybe mitigate them, you know, not kill women and children because you're a decent human being and then wake up and find out that's exactly what you ordered or did or maybe never ordered at all. It's a fantastic look into a subject that, as I said, if you'd asked me about it before I read this book, I would have been a lot more sure of saying, well, yeah, you know, Truman ordered the uh bombs dropped and this and that. And well, that's sort of like the connect the dots sort of theory of history where these are bullet points and that's what we know. And as usual, when you start to dive into the white space between the dots, that's where all the interesting

nuance happens. And Wellerstein's book gets into all that. And the reason you should care and the reason we talk about nuclear weapons a lot and the reason it came up in every live show I did spontaneously with people is because this should be naturally interesting to us because it is the aams razor answer to the question what happened to humanity because we could kill ourselves in any number of different ways and something could kill us you know meteors some sort of pathogen but the most likely way we kill ourselves is going to be offing ourselves with our own weapon. happens because all we have to do to end up in that reality is everything we've ever done in the past forever.

We continue standard operating procedure as human beings going as far back as we can read certainly uh and we will certainly use these weapons and people do not think enough about what these weapons can do and when you realize where those lines cross right all we have to do is everything we've always done and what we have to work with now compared to what we've ever had before well this should be our number one concern shouldn't it because it's as I said the most likely answer to the question of, you know, how do we end up with statues of liberty in the sand?

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Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "EP34 Atomic Accountability"?

In order: 0:00 Harry S. Truman, Harry Truman, Alex Wellerstein, Adam Tus; 10:00 Harry S. Truman, Harry Truman, Hiroshima, Nagasaki; 20:00 Harry S. Truman, Joshua Stimson, Harry Truman; 30:00 Joshua Stimson, Harry S. Truman; 40:00 Joshua Stimson, Harry S. Truman, General Leslie Groves, Hiroshima; 50:00 Harry S. Truman, Nagasaki, Joshua Stimson, Hiroshima; 1:00:00 Harry S. Truman, Cuban Missile Crisis; 1:10:00 Harry S. Truman, Harry Truman, Alex Wellerstein, Atomic Age; 1:20:00 Harry S. Truman.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

14 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Harry S. Truman, Joshua Stimson, Harry Truman, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP34 Atomic Accountability"?

The episode runs 1 h 23 min; the transcript is about 14,844 words in 109 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 9, 2026.