Truman and the A-bomb: Targeting noncombatants, using the bomb, and his defending the "decision"

Truman and the A-Bomb:

Targeting Noncombatants, Using the Bomb, and His Defending the "Decision"*

I have told the Sec[retaryl of War, Mr. Stimson[,] to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.... The target will be a purely military one.

Harry S. Truman, 25 July 19451

The atomic bomb . . . is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them by the wholesale.

Harry S. Truman, 19 January 19532

I don't believe in speculating on the mental feeling and as far as the bomb is concerned I ordered its use for a military reason - for no other cause - and it saved the lives of a great many of our soldiers. That is all I had in mind.

Harry S. Truman, c. 1953-543

SCHOLARS of the Truman administration have long benefited from the informed counsel and friendly atmosphere of the Harry S. Truman Library, dating back to its opening years under Philip Brooks, its first director, and Philip Lagerquist, its remarkably knowledgeable first supervising archivist, and continuing through the services of archivists Erwin Mueller (now retired) and Dennis Bilger, librarian Elizabeth Safly, and archivist Randy Sowell, among others. To assist students, and possibly also scholars, the library a handful of years ago, under supervisory archivist Ray Geselbracht, began putting together useful special boxes (called "student research files"), often including over sixty documents mostly drawn from the Library's archival holdings, on important issues and events in the Truman period. At present, there are over forty-eight special boxes on, among other subjects, the A-bomb, the Baruch Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, civil rights, the 1948 presidential campaign, immigration policy, McCarthyism, the recognition of Israel, and the steel dispute of 1952.

By design, these compilations seldom include many pages from published collections of documents or much secondary literature, and usually concentrate on presenting Truman Library holdings. These special research boxes, constituting a thoughtful distillation from the Library's very large archives in numerous files relating to a subject, can greatly help undergraduates and beginning graduate students, inform visiting laypeople, and also aid scholars who want to start by skimming the "cream."

About twenty of...