itself. As Commander in Chief, as a veteran of the First World War, as a man of common sense, Truman must have wondered what on earth his Secretary of War was talking about, especially when Stimson added that “a certain moral responsibility” followed from American leadership in nuclear technology which the nation could not shirk “without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization which it would further.” Was the United States morally obligated to give away a devastating new weapon of war?
Now Stimson called in Groves. The general brought with him a report on the status of the Manhattan Project that he had presented to the Secretary of War two days earlier. Both Stimson and Groves insisted Truman read the document while they waited. The President was restive. He had a threatening note from Stalin to deal with. He had to prepare to open the United Nations conference even though Stimson had just informed him that allowing the conference to proceed in ignorance of the bomb was a sham. A scene of darkening comedy followed as the proud man who had challenged Averell Harriman to keep sending him long messages tried to avoid public instruction in the minutiae of a secret project he had fought doggedly as a senator to investigate. Groves misunderstood completely:
Mr. Truman did not like to read long reports. This report was not long, considering the size of the project. It was about twenty-four pages and he would constantly interrupt his reading to say, “Why, I don't like to read papers.” And Mr. Stimson and I would reply: “Well we can't tell you this in any more concise language. This is a big project.” For example, we discussed our relations with the British in about four or five lines. It was that much condensed. We had to explain all the processes and we might just say what they were and that was about all.
After the reading of the lesson, Groves notes, “a great deal of emphasis was placed on foreign relations and particularly on the Russian situation” — Truman reverting to his immediate problems. He “made it very definite,” Groves adds for the record, “that he was in entire agreement with the necessity for the project.”
The final point in Stimson's memorandum was the proposal Bush and Conant had initiated to establish what Stimson called “a select committee… for recommending action to the Executive and legislative branches of our government.” Truman approved.
In his memoirs the President describes his meeting with Stimson and Groves with tact and perhaps even a measure of private humor: “I listened with absorbed interest, for Stimson was a man of great wisdom and foresight. He went into considerable detail in describing the nature and the power of the projected weapon… Byrnes had already told me that the weapon might be so powerful as to be capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an unprecedented scale.” That was when Byrnes had crowed that the new bombs might allow the United States to dictate its own terms at the end of the war. “Stimson, on the other hand, seemed at least as much concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten this war… I thanked him for his enlightening presentation of this awesome subject, and as I saw him to the door I felt how fortunate the country was to have so able and so wise a man in its service.” High praise, but the President was not sufficiently impressed at the outset with Stimson and Harriman to invite either man to accompany him to the next conference of the Big Three. Both found it necessary, when the time came, to invite themselves. Jimmy Byrnes went at the President's invitation and sat at the President's right hand.
Discussion between Truman and his various advisers was one level of discourse in the spring of 1945 on the uses of the atomic bomb. Another was joined two days after Stimson and Groves briefed the President when a Target Committee under Groves' authority met for the first time in Lauris Norstad's conference room at the Pentagon. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, who would represent the Manhattan Project as Groves' deputy to the Pacific Command, chaired the committee; besides Farrell it counted two other Air Force officers — a colonel and a major — and five scientists, including John von Neumann and British physicist William G. Penney. Groves opened the meeting with a variant of his usual speech to Manhattan Project working groups: how important their duty was, how secret it must be kept. He had already discussed targets with the MiMtary Policy Committee and now informed his Target Committee that it should propose no more than four.
Farrell laid down the basics: B-29 range for such important missions no more than 1,500 miles; visual bombing essential so that these untried and valuable bombs could be aimed with certainty and their effects photographed; probable targets “urban or industrial Japanese areas” in July, August or September; each mission to be given one primary and two alternate targets with spotter planes sent ahead to confirm visibility.
Most of the first meeting was devoted to worrying about the Japanese weather. After lunch the committee brought in the Twentieth Air Force's top meteorologist, who told them that June was the worst weather month in Japan; “a little improvement is present in July; a little bit better weather is present in August; September weather is bad.” January was the best month, but no one intended to wait that long. The meteorologist said he could forecast a good day for bombing operations only twenty-four hours ahead, but he could give two days' notice of bad weather. He suggested they station submarines near the target areas to radio back weather readings.
Later in the afternoon they began considering targets. Groves had extended Farrell's guidelines:
I had set as the governing factor that the targets chosen should be places the bombing of which would most adversely affect the will of the Japanese people to continue the war. Beyond that, they should be military in nature, consisting either of important headquarters or troop concentrations, or centers of production of military equipment and supplies. To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.
But such pristine targets had already become scarce in Japan. If the first choice the Target Committee identified at its first meeting was hardly big enough to confine the potential damage, it was the best the enemy had left to offer:
Hiroshima is the largest untouched target not on the 21st Bomber Command priority list. Consideration should be given to this city.
“Tokyo,” the committee notes continue, “is a possibility but it is now practically all bombed and burned out and is practically rubble with only the palace grounds left standing. Consideration is only possible here.”
The Target Committee did not yet fully understand the level of authority it commanded. With a few words to Groves it could exempt a Japanese city from Curtis LeMay's relentless firebombing, preserving it through spring mornings of cherry blossoms and summer nights of wild monsoons for a more historic fate. The committee thought it took second priority behind LeMay rather than first priority ahead, and in emphasizing these mistaken priorities the colonel who reviewed the Twentieth Air Force's bombing directive for the committee revealed what the United States' policy in Japan in all its deadly ambiguity had become:
It should be remembered that in our selection of any target, the 20th Air Force is operating primarily to laying waste all the main Japanese cities, and that they do not propose to save some important primary target for us if it interferes with the operation of the war from their point of view. Their existing procedure has been to bomb the hell out of Tokyo, bomb the aircraft, manufacturing and assembly plants, engine plants and in general paralyze the aircraft industry so as to eliminate opposition to the 20th Air Force operations. The 20th Air Force is systematically bombing out the following cities with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on another:
Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yawata & Nagasaki.
If the Japanese were prepared to eat stones, the Americans were prepared to supply them.
The colonel also advised that the Twentieth Air Force planned to increase its delivery of conventional bombs steadily until it was dropping 100,000 tons a month by the end of 1945.
The group decided to study seventeen targets including Tokyo Bay, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima, Kokura, Fukuoka, Nagasaki and Sasebo. Targets already destroyed would be culled from the list. The weather people would review weather reports. Penney would consider “the size of the bomb burst, the amount of damage expected, and the ultimate distance at which people would be killed.” Von Neumann would be responsible for computations. Adjourning its initial meeting the Target Committee planned to meet again in mid-May in Robert Oppenheimer's office at Los Alamos.
A third level of discourse on the uses of the bomb revealed itself as Henry Stimson assembled the committee
