road work, business man, sales rep., Captain in the United States Army, a United States Senator, and Vice President. Harry S. Truman became President of The United States on April 12, 1945 after Franklin Delano Roosevelt had passed away from a heart attack. He never knew what he was really getting himself into.Harry S. Truman had only been the President of The United States for thirteen days when Henry L. Stimson, The Secretary of War, delivered a complete report on the United States of America’s new secret weapon that would supposedly end World War II. Before Harry S. Truman received this report, he had no idea that such a weapon existed or that the American scientists had been trying to develop the atomic bomb over the last four years.On July 21, 1945 while at Potsdam, Truman received the results from General Leslie Groves testing of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo. The results were as follows: A force of 15-20,000 tons of TNT, a fireball lasting several seconds, a mushroom cloud rising skyward approximately 41,000 feet above sea level. There were many secondary explosions within the mushroom cloud causing a 1,200-foot crater in the ground. The 100 feet tower, which the bomb had been detonated in and a seventy-foot steel tower a half-mile away was disintegrated.It became obvious that Truman had two choices: invade mainland Japan or drop the atomic bomb. If Truman chose to invade Japan, he calculated he would need a ground force of 766,700 soldiers with roughly 31,000 American casualties within the first 30 days (Hamby 19). In addition to the estimated casualties of the invading ground force the estimated 100,000 prisoners of war would be slaughtered (Ferrell 24). The order was issued by Japan’s vice minister of war as follows: “Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation or what, dispose of them as the situatio...
