Atomic Bomb On Hiroshima, By Wilfred Burchett

“When you arrive in Hiroshima, you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation” – Wilfred Burchett. That is a quote directly from Wilfred Burchett speaking of the damage that was left after the judgment call from President Harry Truman to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Today my assignment is to consider myself as President Truman at that time and settle on if I would have taken the same course of action as the commander and chief. Truman indeed faced an impracticable choice preceding his giving of the command to drop the bomb; either he could risk the lives of fifty percent of American soldiers or he could use the new found nuclear weapon on the people and cities of Japan. Most Americans have questioned the acts of President Truman back in those days, as a matter of fact those debates still carry on today; conversely today I try to put myself in his shoes to see if he was justified in his decision. . First I would like to look at some of the facts that led up to the pivotal verdict which caused so much destruction to Japan and its people. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States would engage in World War II against Japan. I truly don’t believe anyone believed that the war would last as long as it did; nevertheless, after 44 months of fighting, the American people were growing weary of the war and wanted their troops to come home. Many