REVIEW --- Books: Accepting the Nuclear Option

 

“The Most Awful Responsibility

 

By Alex Wellerstein

 

Harper, 432 pages, $32

 

Harry Truman's legacy froze the moment the mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima. For years, historians followed the bomb's echoes through the Cold War: Bikini Atoll and nuclear bunkers, Strangelove and SALT, detente and Defcon, Star Wars and saber rattling, to hit a few low points.

 

Yet the accidental president made other decisions, less known but no less consequential, during his tenure. In "The Most Awful Responsibility," Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, focuses on Truman's struggle to control America's nuclear arsenal: Who keeps the weapons, and who gets to authorize their use?

 

Truman had a surprisingly limited role in the atomic bombings of Japan on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945. The big decisions had been made while President Franklin D. Roosevelt was alive; despite his frail health, Roosevelt didn't let Truman in on the secret. When FDR died on April 12, 1945, and Truman was sworn in, the bewildered Missourian had little choice but to go along with the consensus decision to use the bomb against Japan if it refused to surrender. "The only major decision about the bomb that he directly participated in was the question of whether Kyoto or Hiroshima would be the first target," writes Mr. Wellerstein. "He made no decision about a second bombing whatsoever, and was almost certainly surprised by the attack on Nagasaki."

 

Part of the reason for Truman's detachment was the immense scope of the job thrust upon him. "Truman had a nearly endless number of things to learn, attend to, and decide upon over the first few months of his presidency," Mr. Wellerstein notes.

 

Drawing from once-secret conversations and the diary entries of a handful of eyewitnesses who were privy to the whole picture, Mr. Wellerstein finds evidence that Truman believed Hiroshima was "a 'purely military' target . . . an army base, and not a city full of noncombatants." He concludes: "Truman entirely misunderstood the targeting of Hiroshima."

 

The scale of the civilian casualties left deep scars on Truman. Mr. Wellerstein notes that during a cabinet meeting on Aug. 10, Truman announced that there would be no further atomic bombings of Japan. "He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," according to one cabinet member. "He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, 'all those kids.'"

 

The war wasn't long over before Truman supported legislation establishing the Atomic Energy Commission to regulate nuclear technology, swallow the Manhattan Project infrastructure and take custody of America's modest atomic arsenal, while retaining the discretion to transfer weapons and material back to the military as needed. With that decision, the key to Armageddon's door remained firmly in the president's pocket -- as it has, more or less, ever since.

 

"The Most Awful Responsibility" sympathetically portrays Truman's conflicted soul over the mass death inflicted by the atomic bomb. The Truman of early 1948, writes Mr. Wellerstein, "is a man who has no love of the atomic bomb, and no intention of using it. It is a Truman who absolutely seemed to express something like regret about the atomic bombings of Japan when he was out of the public eye, and to use his emotional feelings about the bomb as part of what was guiding his atomic policy going forward."

 

As the Cold War heated up, Truman's attitude changed. The Berlin Blockade, a Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia, Mao's victory in China and North Korea's invasion of South Korea transformed him into a reluctant hawk. Stalin's behavior, and an unfortunate leak from a highly placed senator, drove Truman to authorize work on "the Super," a thermonuclear bomb hundreds of times more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima. "Truman did, ultimately, embrace the building of the Super, but in the most reluctant and hands-off way possible," Mr. Wellerstein writes. He also authorized the military to take limited custody of atomic weapons.

 

The verdict is mixed. Truman "is not so clueless as some of his contemporary critics imagined him," Mr. Wellerstein tells us. "But he was also not so clearheaded in his vision of the world as many of his modern defenders would like to make him out to be." The 33rd president was "plainly human, pulled here and there by forces of history, by the things he knew and did not know, and his conscience." Mr. Wellerstein believes Truman "felt a tremendous sense of responsibility to others and let that responsibility guide him on a path through a world of unprecedented danger."

 

Winston Churchill once quipped that if he were the world's dictator, he would "make it a criminal offense for anyone to go around bothering molecules. And the little atom would be left in peace forever." Now it was up to Truman, keeper of atomic secrets, to limit the flight of the furies.

 

Mr. Wellerstein presents his story in clear, direct prose, incorporating the words of Truman, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Manhattan Project commander Gen. Leslie Groves and others. He carefully dissects what they said and what they likely meant. His interpretive approach, refined over years of studying the nuclear threat, credibly sifts the historical record without slowing the book's tempo. "The Most Awful Responsibility" is a well-written opus unpacking Truman's -- and America's -- complicated relationship with nuclear weapons.

 

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Mr. Jordan's next book, "Ike and Winston: World War, Cold War, and an Extraordinary Friendship," will be published in May.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: Accepting the Nuclear Option. Jordan, Jonathan W.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 Jan 2026: C9.