The Future of Bear Markets & Recessions
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him the Nazis could be developing atomic weapons. Einstein urged the president to begin work on our own nuclear weapons.
Six short years later the Manhattan Project made these weapons a reality, first with a successful test in New Mexico in the summer of 1945. A month later two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, accelerating the end of the second world war.
The truth is, the decision makers almost certainly didn’t have the range of options we often assume (or wish) they had. The idea that President Truman could have done something other than use the atomic bomb on Japan is probably a little out of step with the political realities of the time. As the historian Garry Wills wrote in his book Bomb Power: “If it became known that the United States had a knockout weapon it did not use, the families of any Americans killed after the development of the bomb would be furious. The public, the press, and Congress would turn on the President and his advisors. There would have been a cry to impeach President Truman and court-martial General Groves. The administration would be convicted of spending billions of dollars and draining massive amounts of brain power and manpower from other war projects and all for nothing.”
Two decades later an NBC news documentary called The Decision to Drop the Bomb interviewed the architect of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. He described the scene following the decision to use these weapons of mass destruction:
