Why We Fight (9 of 48)
JOHNSON: The United States bombed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945.
And three days later, they detonated another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki.
PRESIDENT TRUMAN: What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.
VIDAL: I can remember in the Pacific when the word spread that the bombs had been dropped 99.9% of us were delighted, because we'd been convinced that if Japan was not hit by nuclear weapons, one million of us would be killed.
Drop those bombs and they will surrender.
Well, they were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs.
MAN: Why? To show off.
To frighten Stalin.
To change the balance of power in the world.
To declare war on Communism.
Perhaps we were starting a preemptive world war Eisenhower hated the dropping of them and thought it should not have been done.
JOHN EISENHOWER: We just thought war was terrible enough as it was.
I cannot trace evolution in my dad's thinking.
He was complex.
He was a five-star general but he was never a military fanatic, never.
One night in July of '45, that day, the Secretary of War had told my father about the development of the atomic weapon, atomic bomb.
We were sitting up in his bedroom, and he said that his own first impression his own emotion, had been to...
to be feeling down low.
We...
He wished we hadn't invented it.
MAN: In the background was the growing conflict between two great powers to shape the post-war world.
Already an iron curtain had dropped around Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia. |
