Jay Hughes
Professor Vincent Ferraro
World Politics
12/06/2012

“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.” This was vocalized by President Harry Truman in his famous speech where he declared the bombing on mainland Japan and, educated the American people of the capabilities their military had. Developed by a group of American scientists, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 10th 1945 respectively. These are the only two times that these bombs have ever been used to inflict damage on other countries but, physicists estimate that both bombs only used about 1/10th of 1% of their total capacity. From a moral standpoint, dropping the atomic bomb was the right thing to do because it ended up preventing millions of people from being killed by military warfare. Politically, it was also the right thing to do because it strategically helped end the war and, reminded the rest of the world of the supremacy of the United States as a Hegemon and militaristic power. If put in the position of President Truman, after careful analysis, I would choose to only drop one atomic bomb on Hiroshima. First, with the Japanese unwillingness to surrender, the United States was ready to commence with a top-secret mission titled Operation Downfall. This alternative to the nuclear bomb was the only other option the United States had to subjugate the Japanese into surrender. Knowing the Japanese were close to falling militaristically, the United States was ready to invade mainland Japan. This was the essence of Operation Downfall. Downfall was divided into two parts: Operation Olympic and