cts, there was an effort to establish the Americans as morally superior to the Japanese. Truman was no exception to this generalization, and on 25 July 1945 he wrote that the Japanese people were, "savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic..."(14) Furthermore, there was fear amongst Truman's advisors that if they were to, "interpret the supreme war goal more leniently for Japan than had been the case with Germany," they would, "leave an unwanted impression, at home and abroad, of 'appeasement.'"(15) Truman knew that if he backed down and did not remain firm on his stance with Japan the American public might be outraged. Furthermore, if the bomb was not dropped, Truman feared that it would prove extremely difficult in post war America to justify the two billion dollars(16) spent on the Manhattan Project.(17) Truman became president because Roosevelt died while in office, and although he never fully embraced the idea of being President, a desire to ensure the possibility of his reelection would certainly have been at least a subconscious consideration. The third major source of pressures on Truman to drop the bomb was diplomatic tensions with Russia. Today, nothing about the dropping of the bombs is debated by historians more than whether diplomatic tensions played a role in Truman's decision. Truman's predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, followed a program of cooperation and good relations with Russia, highlighted by the Lend-Lease program and the symbolic gestures of good nature at the Yalta conference. Truman broke away from these good-natured relations and sought to follow a new "hard-line" policy. While preparing for his first meeting with a Russian official as President of the United States, Truman exclaimed that if the Russians did not wish to be cooperative, "they could go to hell."(18) During his meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, "Truman told Molotov that the American interpretation [about the conflict over Poland] was...
