THE MOST AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY

The buck stopped with him.

Wellerstein, a historian of science, writes that President Truman was “the one who made the modern nuclear age, and rooted the personage of the US president at the core of it.” When President Roosevelt died in 1945, his successor faced, in his words, the “most awful responsibility a man ever had.” Scientists were preparing to test the first atomic weapon—a weapon that Truman knew nothing about. But he would be the one to decide if, when, and where this powerful new weapon might be used. The atomic bombs used on Japan led to unconditional surrender, and the atomic age moved into an arms race. Truman knew the only advantage the U.S. had was “the know-how” of putting the widely known science of nuclear fission “practically to work,” but that other nations—of most concern, the Soviet Union—would soon join the nuclear club. Truman wanted to keep the U.S. atomic program in civilian hands and refused repeated military requests to deploy nuclear weapons for possible use in Korea. He saw the atomic bomb in these terms: “It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.” Truman jockeyed Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his own cabinet into agreeing that the ultimate decision on the use of nuclear weapons by U.S. forces rested with the American president, and that policy remains in place today. Balancing nuances on all sides left Truman with “a complicated legacy,” the author concludes: “The sum of his choices might lead one to believe that Truman was the most important anti-nuclear president of the 20th century….[H]e was so plainly human, pulled here and there by the forces of history, by the things he knew and did not know, and by his conscience.”

A nuanced portrait of a president who shaped the modern nuclear age.