Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Harry S Truman: Speech Draft:

It was a decision to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings. The Secretary of War Mr. Stimson and I weighed that decision most prayerfully. The President had to decide. It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities and I still think they were and are.

But I couldn’t help but think of the necessity of blotting out women, children and more combatants. We picked a couple of cities where war work was the principle industry and dropped the bombs. Russia hurried in and that war ended...