Truman and his advisors thus fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence”. They convinced themselves that the new weapon would enable them to force their will on the Soviet Union. The atomic bomb was “a hammer”, as Truman himself put it, that he would wave over the heads of “those boys in the Kremlin”. More

Our long-term objective is to include China in the international framework of cooperation which we are attempting to build among the key nations of the world. The global dispersal of power precludes the possibility of either a Pax Americana or a world ordered through a Soviet-American condominium. But we believe we can attain national security in a world of diversity in part by cultivating good relations with the newly emerging countries, none of which is more important than China. More

What remains particularly ghastly about the rationale for dropping two atomic bombs was the attempt on the part of its defenders to construct a redemptive narrative through a perversion of humanistic commitment, of mass slaughter justified in the name of saving lives and winning the war. More