Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War (2024) s01e01 Episode Script
The Sun Came Up Tremendous
1
[engines roaring in distance]
[uneasy music playing]
[rapid gunfire in distance]
[Tom Nichols] If you define a Cold War
as a state of conflict
with a nuclear-armed opponent
where you can't get at each other,
even though you are
functionally hostile to each other,
then we're in a new Cold War
with the Russians.
[tense music playing]
[reporter] More Russian forces
on the move.
Surface-to-air missiles
in the country's far east
due to join what Moscow says
are military exercises near Ukraine.
It's easy in some ways
to say that the Cold War ended
in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But if you open the newspaper
on any given day,
we're still living
with the aftermath of the Cold War.
What we're seeing
is still that story playing out.
[reporter] Columns of Russian tanks
and armored vehicles
are reported to be pouring
across the Ukrainian border tonight.
Swarms of helicopters
flying in low over the countryside,
creating panic and terror
for the people living there.
[anchor] After months of preparations,
the Russian president Vladimir Putin
has launched a major
military operation against Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has begun.
[explosion]
[explosions in distance]
[rumbling]
Oh. It's close.
[loud blast]
[somber music playing]
[officer speaking Russian]
[Robert Gates]
Putin is obsessed with Ukraine.
He does not want
to recreate the Soviet Union.
He wants to recreate the Russian Empire.
[Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukrainian]
They see Ukraine as part of their empire,
a part of the Soviet Union.
They consider it their legacy,
their property,
which they want to take back.
[Giorgi Kandelaki in English] Putin said
the collapse of the Soviet Union
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe
of the 20th century.
[crowd cheering]
[speaking Russian]
[Garry Kasparov] For him, winning the war
in Ukraine is not just, you know,
destroying Ukrainian Statehood.
[rumbling]
I think it's a war to basically
replay results of the Cold War.
[somber music continues]
[Pavel Palazhchenko] The Cold War did end,
but now we are living through
a new edition of the Cold War.
And it's a very dangerous Cold War.
[somber music continues]
[anchor in Russian] How can they threaten
the boundless Russia with nuclear weapons
when they are only a small island?
The island is so small
that one Sarmat missile is enough
to sink it once and for all.
[Rose Gottemoeller in English]
These people showing films of London
being vaporized by a nuclear weapon
and laughing about it on the nightly news.
These are shocking, shocking situations.
[Putin in Russian]
Organizers of any provocation
threatening the fundamental interests
of our security will regret it,
like they haven't regretted anything
for a long time.
[in English]
We are not seeking a new Cold War.
It is something that we thought
that we would never see again.
The pictures that we saw
from the Second World War
I mean, right now,
how can this be happening?
[dramatic music playing]
[blast]
[theme music playing]
[music fades]
[noble music playing]
[Timothy Naftali] The Cold War,
which began in phases,
ultimately became
a global existential struggle
between the United States and its allies,
and the Soviet Union and its allies.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Naftali] At its peak,
the Cold War touched every continent,
with the exception of Antarctica,
and practically
every country in the world.
It shaped the decolonization
of great, large European empires.
It shaped domestic politics
in the great capitals of Europe
[speaking in Spanish]
[Naftali]North America,
and Asia.
For many, many people around the world,
it affected their daily lives.
And in some cases, it killed them.
It created a need
for intelligence services,
for secret activity, that never went away.
Vladimir Putin cannot be understood
without reference to the Cold War.
His worldview is a product
of the way in which the Soviet Union
collapsed in the late '80s and early '90s.
It set off an arms race that changed
virtually everything about American life,
but also really destabilized
global relationships
and caused infinite amount of harm
around the globe
for most of the 20th century.
[Stephen Kinzer] It seemed
so obvious and so clear.
We were so good.
We were the country
that finally was virtuous,
in addition to being powerful.
Everybody in America was supposed
to embrace this single narrative.
And it was logical that we would then
be threatened by a hostile,
evil force that wanted nothing
but destruction and nihilism.
[Naftali] The Cold War
was the first war in history
that held the possibility
of ending in apocalypse.
[music intensifies]
[Naftali] That's what made it different.
And that's what made it
so psychologically threatening.
If you got it wrong, we weren't talking
about the loss of a thousand people.
We weren't talking about the loss of,
God forbid, 10,000 people.
We were talking about the potential loss
of millions of people,
perhaps a billion people.
That was a scale of awfulness
that was never before
within the power of statesmen.
Why was it there?
Because of nuclear weapons.
[music fades to silence]
[Nichols] The arrival of nuclear weapons
is what helps the Cold War to play out.
They can't be disentangled
from one another.
[intriguing music playing]
[Naftali] The question
of when to use nuclear weapons
has always haunted
every country that has them.
[light switch click]
I'm not sure that there would be
a Cold War without nuclear weapons.
[Tom Z. Collina] Over the history
of nuclear weapons,
we've gotten very close
to catastrophe numerous times.
[alarms ringing]
We survived that
not because we were smart.
It was because we were lucky.
[mechanical thud]
[whirring]
[Sam Nunn] Einstein supposedly said,
"I know not with what weapons
World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought
with sticks and stones."
So, that's the nuclear world we live in.
[Lesley M. M. Blume] Once humans
stop seeing other humans as human,
the most horrific acts are possible.
There seems to me to be evidence
that lessons that we thought were learned
were not learned,
and that history is not history,
but we are in an ongoing tide.
[crowd clamoring]
[Richard Rhodes] Nuclear fission,
splitting heavy elements,
was discovered just at Christmastime
in 1938 in Nazi Germany,
Berlin,
by two, curiously,
chemists and a physicist.
And they were experimenting
with bombarding a solution
of uranium nitrate with a particular kind
of subatomic particle, called a neutron.
[sinuous music playing]
[Rhodes] When a neutron
enters the uranium nucleus,
it's rather as if the Moon hit the Earth.
Even if it's just flying
at normal room temperature,
when it goes in, everything goes crazy.
It's sufficient energy
from one fission of one atom
to make a grain of sand visibly jump.
It's enormous.
It's very exothermic, in physics terms.
Puts out a lot of energy
for very little input.
German scientists published a paper
in a British journal, Nature.
And the whole world woke up one day
to headlines in the New York Times
and the London papers.
They split the atom!
One of the more brilliant scientists
in American history, Robert Oppenheimer,
started thinking,
"Well, what can you do with the energy
that comes out of this amazing reaction?"
Within a week, he had a drawing
on the blackboard of an atomic bomb.
If you could get this reaction
to cause another reaction
and another reaction,
and another reaction,
until you had like 80 generations,
you could blow up a city.
Oppenheimer saw that immediately.
Almost all the physicists did.
[ominous note plays]
[Naftali] History provides us
with a cast of monsters.
Hitler was a one-person show.
[in German] Today, we must remove
undesirable elements proven to be bad.
What is bad has no place among us!
[crowd cheering]
[Naftali in English] Hitler was the worst
that mankind had ever created.
[Rhodes] The idea that Hitler
would have his Thousand-Year Reich
powered with atomic bombs
terrified people.
Particularly those who were Jewish
and had escaped what was already
beginning to be the Holocaust.
[brooding music playing]
[Rhodes] And, of course,
the United States was not yet at war.
[crowd cheering]
This nation will remain a neutral nation.
[Rhodes] Albert Einstein, the most famous
scientist in the world at the time,
drafted a letter
that would go under Einstein's signature
to President Roosevelt.
[Gregg Herken]
Essentially, the letter said that
we believe it will be possible,
in a relatively short time,
to build weapons
of remarkable destructiveness,
and we want you to be aware of that
and to take action so that we,
the Western world, have this weapon first.
The fear is a Nazi atomic weapons program.
And the sense
is that this is a race with Berlin.
British scientists, Canadian scientists,
and American scientists,
they are convinced
that smart physicists in Germany
are trying to give Adolf Hitler
the ultimate weapon
to win his war of conquest.
When World War II started in Europe,
Joseph Stalin was the leader
of the Soviet Union,
and the Soviets and the Nazis were allies.
The Hitler-Stalin pact resulted
in a carving up of Eastern Europe.
The Soviets gained the Baltic States.
They also gained
the eastern part of Poland.
And they also gained a piece of Romania.
They misunderstood Hitler
as much as the Western democracies
misunderstood Hitler.
[gunfire]
[Naftali] In 1941,
Hitler betrays his new Soviet allies
by invading the Soviet Union.
Initially, it looked like
the Nazis would beat the Soviets.
The Soviets were caught by surprise.
Stalin actually can't even
bring himself to talk publicly
to the Soviet people for days.
[Stalin speaking in Russian]
[Naftali] He is so distraught at his own
strategic stupidity of trusting Berlin.
And the war was not only
what was happening in Europe,
but also what was happening in Asia.
The Japanese sought empire in Asia.
It wanted to control China.
They ultimately
would control Southeast Asia.
They would control the Philippines.
They even had their sights on India.
Hirohito, the Japanese emperor,
was the leader.
[Akira Yamada in Japanese]
In Japan at that time,
the Emperor was the judiciary,
legislation, and administration,
as well as the supreme commander
of the Japanese army and navy.
However, many Japanese believed
that the Emperor's ancestors
could be traced back to a god.
[crowd cheering]
[Naftali in English] In 1940, the Japanese
entered an alliance with Berlin and Rome.
The Americans mistakenly assumed
that the Japanese would never attack
a territory of the United States.
[Rhodes] Some of the committee that was
going to plan the Manhattan Project,
the program to build the first bombs,
met on December 6th, 1941 in Washington,
and woke up the next morning
to Pearl Harbor.
[torpedoes whistling]
[siren blaring]
[gunfire]
[Blume] It took Pearl Harbor
to bring America into the war.
[Roosevelt] Yesterday, December 7th, 1941
a date which will live in infamy
the United States of America
was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
No matter how long it may take us
to overcome this premeditated invasion,
the American people
in their righteous might
will win through to absolute victory.
[crowd cheering]
[somber music playing]
During World War II
we basically have the Axis powers,
which are Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan.
And the Allies
[indistinct chatter]
being the United States,
the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.
The United States did assist
the Soviet Union by giving them weapons.
By coordinating to a certain extent
on military campaigns.
But the one thing the United States
was not going to do
was to share its scientific secrets
with the Soviet Union,
particularly when it came
to the Manhattan Project.
[Alex Wellerstein] The Army takes over
the Manhattan Project in 1942.
[Rhodes] That's when General Dick Groves
was chosen to run the Manhattan Project.
[Groves] I must endeavor
to conduct this program
in such a way as to serve
the best interests of the United States.
[Wellerstein]
Groves was a military engineer.
Before the Manhattan Project,
he had been in charge of making sure
the Pentagon got constructed.
So he knew how to do big projects.
Pentagon was the largest office building
in the entire world at the time.
He's gruff.
His number-two person described him
as the biggest SOB he had ever worked for.
He was incredibly arrogant,
thought he knew more than everybody.
He says, "I need this project to have
the number-one priority
of the entire war," formally.
And what this high-level priority means
is he can get any resource he wants.
He can get any scientist
or person he wants.
[Rhodes] He put together a program
that eventually involved
a number of sites around the country
where uranium would be separated
into the rare isotope that chain-reacts.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Rhodes] Plutonium would be bred
in giant graphite fuel reactors
in eastern Washington
where there was plenty of cold water
to keep the reactors cool,
and where it was far enough away
from anywhere that if they blew up,
nobody would be killed.
Except the people
who worked there, of course.
He put this whole program together
and hired some 600,000 people.
Groves saw something in Oppenheimer
and chose him to direct this laboratory.
When they were looking for a place
where the bombs themselves
would be designed and built,
Oppenheimer said,
"Let's go look in New Mexico."
[evocative music playing]
[wind whistling]
[horse neighs]
[horse grunts]
[Herken] Los Alamos became a secret lab
cut off from the rest of the world.
It was surrounded by barbed wire.
People who worked there
had to get a special pass to go in.
The children who were born
in the hospital there
were given the post office box address
because the location
could not be revealed.
[Rhodes] The people who were there during
the war remember it as an amazing place,
almost like the Olympian heights
of the Gods.
When you think about
what they were doing, it's really ironic.
They were working on a weapon,
whatever their good intentions,
that was gonna kill a lot of people.
It would really be its only use.
But they knew that they were
working on something that,
if the Germans got it first,
would destroy the world.
The task of defeating Hitler
may be long and arduous.
There are a few appeasers
and Nazi sympathizers
who say that it cannot be done.
They even asked me
to negotiate with Hitler,
to pray for crumbs
from his victorious table.
This course I have rejected,
and I reject it again.
[solemn music playing]
[Naftali] Franklin Roosevelt began
the atomic weapons program.
He expected to live long enough to decide
whether or not to use atomic weapons.
[electricity crackling]
[Naftali] We'll never know
if he would have dropped bombs on anyone.
He dies in April of 1945.
[solemn music continues]
[Naftali] His vice president,
Harry S. Truman,
knows nothing about the Manhattan Project.
So that there can be
no possible misunderstanding,
both Germany and Japan can be certain
beyond any shadow of a doubt
[gunshot]
that America will continue
the fight for freedom
until no vestige of resistance remains.
[Herken] It was about ten days afterwards
that the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson,
thought it was time that the new president
should know about the bomb.
[dramatic music playing]
[Wellerstein] Stimson's memo
is all about the diplomatic questions
raised by the Manhattan Project.
What is the world gonna look like
after an atomic bomb is used?
He's trying to impress
upon Truman this is not just a weapon.
This is the most important
turning point of the human race.
- [gunfire]
- [explosion]
[Naftali] 1945,
military progress in Europe
was edging further
than scientific progress on the bomb.
[reporter] The British, the American,
and the Red armies begin the last battles
with a common front
in a broken and dismembered Germany.
[Naftali] Hitler was largely alone,
shaking in his bunker.
In 1945, that man shot himself
after killing his wife.
The threat posed by Adolf Hitler was over,
though Nazi ideology did not,
sadly, disappear.
[Karl Dönitz in German]
German men and women,
soldiers of the armed forces.
Our leader, Adolf Hitler,
has fallen.
[tense music playing]
[Truman in English]
Much remains to be done.
The victory won in the West
must now be won in the East.
The whole world must be cleansed
of the evil from which
half the world has been freed.
[gunfire]
[J. Samuel Walker] The question became,
how do we secure a victory against Japan?
And there was a great deal of concern
that the war against Japan
could last for months, if not years,
beyond the defeat of Germany.
[Blume] Even after Pearl Harbor,
and the rage and the shock
that that event brought
you know, the US government
still had to galvanize public opinion
to involve it in another world war.
[screams in Japanese]
[Blume] There was still the enormous task
of making Americans
hate the Japanese enough
to fight them in the way
that they needed to be fought for defeat.
There was an enormous information
and propaganda campaign
to portray the Japanese in a certain way.
[man in Japanese accent] You say
you can destroy us by outfighting us.
You cannot. You cannot outfight us
because the path ahead of you
lies straight up the steep
and rocky mountain of Japan.
And it is slippery with blood.
Your blood!
[Blume] And there was, you know,
a heavy racial overtone to it.
I mean, Germans, when they were depicted,
they were sinister enemies.
They were, you know, to be killed.
They were targets.
But they were still seen
as icy human beings.
But the Japanese were often portrayed
almost as a subspecies.
There really is a sense
for the American public
that the Japanese are subhumans.
There can be no peace in the world
until the military power of Japan
is destroyed.
[tense music builds]
[Walker] There was a firebombing raid
on Tokyo, March 9th and 10th, 1945.
[distant explosions]
[Walker] It killed 87,000 people.
And it was just horrendous.
[Blume] Bomber pilots eviscerated
16 square miles of Tokyo
in one night air raid.
[gunfire]
[Walker] Japanese civilians
were being killed.
[gunfire]
[Walker] People burned like matchsticks.
They tried to flee to rivers,
and the rivers caught on fire.
But there was no sign yet
that the Japanese were ready to surrender.
And then the Battle of Okinawa happens.
[heavy gunfire]
[gunfire]
[somber music playing]
[Walker] The Battle of Okinawa
ended on June the 22nd.
And Okinawa was an extraordinarily
costly battle for American troops
and American ships and American sailors.
[Rhodes] We lost something like
12,000 men at Okinawa.
They lost about 200,000.
It was a terrible, bloody slaughter
the closer we got to the home islands.
And there was great concern
in the military
that we would have to invade
the home island of Japan.
[Stimson] We're going
to destroy Japan's armies,
Japan's navy, Japan's air forces,
Japan's war factories.
Japan's whole power to wage war.
[Walker] After Okinawa,
it became even more clear
that we needed to find a way
to end a war without an invasion.
Truman faced the responsibility
for finding a way to end a war
against Japan on American terms
at the lowest possible cost
in American lives.
[Rhodes] Sixty-five million people
killed in the Second World War.
The worst war in human history.
Anything that would end such a war,
you can see why people
thought of it as a deliverance.
[Naftali] At the moment,
when the US military was making plans
for the invasion of the home islands,
the scientists
at the Manhattan Project said,
"We're about to test this idea."
[Rhodes] Because implosion
was such a new technology,
nobody really quite knew
how this would work.
It was clear that they had to test it
before they used it in the military.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Herken] In order to, uh, test the bomb,
you had to find a place that was remote
where the bomb could go off,
and you could have
some plausible deniability
as to tell people what it was.
They didn't want the radioactive fallout
to be going down toward a populated area,
so they looked around,
and they decided that Alamogordo,
what is now the White Sands test area
out in the New Mexican desert,
would be the best place to do it.
This test was scheduled
for the morning of July 16th, 1945.
They didn't want to stir up
a bunch of dirt and make it radioactive,
so they put the bomb up on top of a tower,
100 feet high.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Rhodes] It was just
the innards of the weapon,
a tangle of cables and wires.
They didn't have the radar on it
and all the other The tail and so forth.
This assembly was put
in a little tin corrugated iron cabin
up on top of a steel tower,
and one of the scientists
was delegated to sit with it all night
after it'd been completely put together.
There was a storm front
that was passing through
that made him a little nervous
because he thought, "Well, if lightning
hits this tower, I'm dead."
[chuckling] "Bomb goes off
and I'm vaporized."
Fortunately, the rain stopped
about 4:00 a.m., and the sky cleared.
The scientists had come down
from Los Alamos in large numbers.
[Herken] All the scientists
who'd worked at Los Alamos
wanted to be at Trinity
to see the results of their labor.
There was quite
a whole delegation out there.
[Rhodes] The scientists were on a hillside
about 20 miles away.
There were some big,
massive bunkers buried in the ground
almost 10,000 yards away.
[Blume] One of the concerns was,
would the bomb have
a higher-than-anticipated mushroom cloud?
Would it carry contaminated fallout
throughout populated parts of the country?
For them, it was a real possibility,
but they tested it anyway.
[male voice] Nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four,
three, two, one.
Now.
[loud rumble]
[ominous music playing]
[Oppenheimer] We knew
the world would not be the same.
Few people laughed.
Few people cried.
Most people were silent.
I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture,
the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu.
"Now I am become death,
the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that
one way or another.
[ominous choral music playing]
[silence]
[ominous music resumes]
[Rhodes] People jumped up
and started looking at it.
There was a general sense of real relief
because this technology
that they had invented
in a period of about eight months,
this brand-new technology had worked.
[Blume] It was thought that the area
surrounding the Trinity test site
was largely uninhabited.
But in reality,
nearly half a million people
lived in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico,
within 150-mile radius
of the Trinity test site in 1945.
About 40 miles away,
there's a camp, a girls' dance camp.
About ten girls
who were about 13 years old
were fast asleep in their bunks.
[explosion]
[Blume] Suddenly, boom.
An enormous explosion
shakes their bunkhouse
and throws the girls out of their bunks.
They and their dance instructor
run outside,
and one of them later recalled
that the sky was just painful to look at.
It was so bright. She said, quote,
"It was as if the sun came up.
Tremendous."
[dramatic music rising]
[Blume] And then a few hours later,
these girls look up
and there's white ash
falling from the sky,
and they think that it's snow.
So they put on their bathing suits
and they go to a local stream
to play in the snow,
and they're pressing it into their faces.
And they said, "It's hot instead of cold.
Why is this snow hot?"
And in their reasoning,
they said, "It's hot because it's summer."
And only one of them survived to 30.
The New Mexicans
had not been told ahead of time
that the test would take place.
They were not evacuated ahead of time,
nor were they evacuated
or told afterwards.
In fact, the government
put out a press report
that a munitions dump had exploded nearby,
and that's what
these people had experienced.
It didn't do much to explain
why this snow was falling from the sky,
or why all their family pets
were dying all of a sudden,
or their livestock
was starting to turn white in patches.
[mooing]
The blast in the Trinity test
literally turned the sand
into green glass.
[cheering]
[melancholy music playing]
[cheering]
[Audra J. Wolfe] Truman got news
that this test had been successful
during the Potsdam Conference.
[melancholy music continues]
[Wolfe] Truman and Stalin and Churchill
were trying to work out
what the balance of power was going to be
among the Allies,
who were expecting to win the war.
[reporter] The big three meetings are held
in Kaiser Wilhelm's former palace.
Here, the fate of Germany and the end
of Japanese aggression will be settled.
[Wellerstein] They are meeting the Soviets
for the first time, Truman and Stimson.
Truman is meeting Stalin in person.
[Plokhy] The West
certainly didn't understand
whom they were dealing with
when it comes to Stalin.
He had a lot of charisma.
He made a good impression on people,
and he wanted to make that impression.
[reporter] It was
at this historic conference
that the dividing of Germany
into four zones of occupation took place.
[Wellerstein] The American officials
are very distressed at Potsdam
because they're starting to realize
that the world is being divided up
in a way that they didn't
quite anticipate.
That these allies, who were always
sort of enemies of my enemy,
were actually quite paranoid,
and expansionist, and hard to trust.
It was becoming clear
that once the Soviets took over territory,
they essentially kept the territory.
[Rhodes] The Russians were going
to enter the war against the Japanese
on the 15th of August.
And Truman was hoping
that he could get the war over with
before Stalin entered the war in the East,
so that Japan wouldn't be divided
the way Germany was going to be divided.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Walker] Truman was notified
about the test of the plutonium bomb
at Alamogordo,
and how powerful it was,
and how it exceeded expectations.
And that was great news for Truman
because he thought it might help him
in his negotiations with Stalin.
And so one question that came up was,
"So, do we tell Stalin about the bomb?"
[David Holloway] The recommendation
to Truman was, "Tell Stalin."
It would be important for the two of them
to discuss how the bomb should become
somehow an instrument of peace
rather than of war.
But Truman ignored that advice.
Truman was very bucked up
by the news of the successful test,
and Churchill waxed eloquent
about it, saying,
"Now we can tell the Russians
where to get off."
Truman went over to Stalin and said,
"We have a weapon
of unusual destructive force."
Stalin said nothing, just nodded.
And that was the only official exchange
between the US and the Soviet Union.
[fanfare playing]
[reporter] Even while we celebrate
victory in Europe,
British and American chiefs of staff
plan strategy for victory in Japan.
And their heads of government prepare
an ultimatum to the people of Japan.
[Naftali] Truman sought
unconditional surrender from Japan.
[man] We call upon the government of Japan
to proclaim unconditional surrender.
The alternative is prompt
and utter destruction.
[Naftali] The Japanese
didn't want to surrender,
and they certainly didn't want
to surrender unconditionally
because they feared that that would mean
the end of the empire,
and that the Emperor
would be forced to abdicate.
[Walker] There was a division
within the Japanese government
between those who wanted to seek peace,
as long as the Emperor
could remain on his throne,
and those who wanted to fight on
for as long as possible
in order to hopefully
get better surrender terms.
And there was, in fact,
paralysis within the Japanese government
about what to do.
[Kazuhiko Togo]
My grandfather, Shigenori Togo,
was foreign minister of Japan.
Throughout the beginning of his tenure
until the very end,
he had only one motive.
Avoid unconditional surrender.
Because if you agree
to unconditional surrender,
Togo might run the risk of the fate
of the Imperial family becoming dubious.
That, he couldn't.
[Ukeru Magosaki] There is a group
of conflicting opinions
inside the government,
also inside the military groups,
that it's better to fight to the end,
to the death.
On the other side,
there are rational people
that said we faced such casualties.
It is time to end the war.
[Togo] When the Potsdam Declaration
reached Togo, 26th of July,
the hardliners in the military
said that this is not good.
[cheering]
[Togo] We should make the world know
that Potsdam is not acceptable.
[Rhodes] We're really angry
at the Japanese
for not surrendering
when we knew they had been defeated.
[Walker] The hatred between
the United States and Japan
was unparalleled.
[intense music playing]
[Kakita] I was born in Los Angeles.
In 1940, we went to Japan
to visit our ailing grandparents.
My parents had to go back to the States
because they still
had some business there.
They left my older brother and me
in the care of my grandparents.
Here we were in the middle of Hiroshima,
living with our grandparents.
And then, before my parents
could come back for us
the war started.
And we were in the middle of Hiroshima
for the duration of the war.
[dramatic music playing]
[reporter] More than 100,000 men, women,
and children, all of Japanese ancestry,
removed from their homes
in the Pacific Coast state.
Two-thirds of the evacuees
are American citizens by right of birth.
[Kakita] Shortly after they returned
to the United States,
my parents were sent
to a concentration camp,
along with 120,000 other
Japanese-Americans.
There were ten of them,
I believe, altogether,
scattered around the United States.
They suffered tremendously in the camp.
I mean, they lost everything.
Can you imagine somebody telling you,
you have to get out of your house?
You got two suitcases
full of things you can carry with you,
and the police throw you
in the concentration camp
for three, four years.
[reporter] The entire community
bounded by a wire fence
and guarded by military police,
symbols of the military nature
of the evacuation.
[Walker] Maybe somebody would have said,
"Well, you know, maybe it's not right
to use a weapon this powerful
against a civilian population"
if we'd had it against Germany.
But the racial factor
against Japan, I think,
prevented any real second thoughts.
It was to spare the Japanese people
from utter destruction,
that the ultimatum of July the 26th
was issued at Potsdam.
Their leaders promptly rejected
that ultimatum.
If they do not now accept our terms,
they may expect
a rain of ruin from the air,
the like of which
has never been seen on this earth.
[Walker] Here we have a bomb more powerful
than anything ever before developed.
If it worked the way scientists
thought it would work,
if, in fact, an atomic bomb
could wipe out a city with one bomb,
hopefully the shock of that
would finally be enough
to convince the Japanese government
that it was time to surrender.
[Gar Alperovitz] Also, the Red Army
was coming into Manchuria.
It's very clear that American policymakers
were rushing to get the war over with
before the Russians came in.
We didn't want them
to get very far into Manchuria,
and we certainly
didn't want them in Japan.
[Blume] Leslie Groves had been charged
with creating the atomic bomb
and getting it ready for wartime use.
And he pursued this
with relentless determination.
And by mid-July, the first bomb
was nearly ready for use.
[Walker] In order to have a good target,
a few cities were set aside.
[Wellerstein] You want a city
that is going to really have
a good before and after picture,
so that you can show what this weapon
is capable of both to scare the Japanese,
and scare the rest of the world
about the power of this thing.
[Herken] Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura,
and Kyoto were on the list,
and Stimson famously vetoed Kyoto
because it was kind of
the intellectual center of Japan.
He insisted that Kyoto
be taken off the list.
[Wellerstein] He goes to Truman,
and the framing he uses is, essentially,
that Kyoto is a civilian target.
Hiroshima is a valid military target.
The Japanese will never forgive us
if we destroy a major civilian target.
He refers to Hiroshima repeatedly
as a purely military target.
This is not totally correct.
Hiroshima, yeah,
it has a military base in it,
but it's 90% civilians.
It's a real city.
It's not just a military base.
It's not clear
Truman understands all this.
[bell tolls]
[Kakita] We woke up early in the morning,
the morning of August 6.
Put on our school clothes
because school was in session.
And on our way to school,
we were told that school was canceled
that day because enemy aircraft,
that would be American aircraft,
was still in the area.
And they were afraid of,
you know, additional bombing.
We were 0.8 miles from the hypocenter,
which is considered pretty close.
- [atmospheric music playing]
- [trolley bell ringing]
[indistinct chatter]
[plane engine humming]
[poignant music playing]
My brother, he saw the airplane
and the secondary,
he saw something was in the distance.
A very small, tiny block.
That was atomic bomb.
It didn't come down straight.
And then for a while,
it went with the airplane
and then made a curve and dropped.
And then he turned back, and it exploded.
[loud blast]
[unsettling music playing]
[Ogura] There was a flash.
[blast]
[Ogura] Everything I was seeing
turned white.
Couldn't see anything. No color at all.
And then there was a strong blast.
[loud blast]
[Ogura] I felt like I was, like,
in a tornado or a typhoon.
And then unconscious.
Everybody became unconscious.
And then when I opened my eyes,
everywhere was just broken.
[desolate music playing]
[Kunihiko Iida in Japanese]
I had been looking at the koi fish.
My mom called for me,
and I went inside the house.
It was at that moment
the atomic bomb was dropped.
Had I still been outside
at the time the bomb went off,
I would have been killed instantaneously.
[Teruko Yahata] My mom went to the closet,
it looked like it was about to collapse,
and yanked a large futon out of it.
She threw it over the family,
who had all gathered together.
So she said, "Let's die here as a family,"
and wrapped us into a bundle.
It's a feeling that I can never forget,
not even decades later.
For as long as I live,
I will never forget that moment.
[Kakita in English] I don't recall
seeing the flash, nor hear the boom.
I was knocked out instantaneously.
When I came to,
the bathhouse was on top of me.
[Iida in Japanese] I was buried alive.
I wanted to call out, "Mom! Help me!"
But I couldn't speak.
[Kingo Kawahara] There was something
like a blast wave,
and then all the walls and stuff
were blown out.
After the blast, my body just floated,
and then hit the ground.
Then I realized
my back
was burnt.
Just remembering it, I hate to remember
anything about those days.
[Yahata] The atomic bomb
exploded at a height of 600 meters
above the ground in the sky
over Hiroshima City,
with a population of 350,000.
The fireball had a core temperature
of several million degrees.
Ferocious heat rays, like those generated
by burning magnesium,
were unleashed over the entire city.
About two or three seconds
after the blast,
the people who had been exposed
to those heat rays
were severely burned
and many of them died.
[somber music playing]
[Iida] The rivers
were filled with corpses.
So many corpses in the river,
there was no space in between.
One could not gather
the bodies of the dead.
The remains turned to ash,
so you couldn't collect them.
The bones had turned to ash.
[Kakita in English] We saw
the hordes of people from the inner city
with tremendous injuries.
Skins on their body
would be dripping from their bodies.
The pattern of clothes
would be etched on the bodies.
People that were
directly exposed to the rain,
they were burned so terribly,
to get some relief,
they would jump into the river,
only to die.
[Masaaki Takano in Japanese]
The elementary school I attended
is on the other side of this mountain.
That's where I got exposed
to the radiation.
I went down this road,
and the sky was completely dark
when I got here.
And it started raining when
the radiation fallout was coming down.
[Yahata] The large raindrops
pelted down and drenched us.
We were soaked.
We didn't know it at the time,
but it was black rain,
contaminated with radioactive material.
Then when the evening came,
we looked back toward the city
from the mountains.
It was burning so ferociously
that it could almost scorch the night sky.
And I think about how so many people
were burned alive in those flames,
and it tears me apart.
Young children,
you know?
Older parents,
all those people who couldn't escape
and were burned alive, so many of them.
The smoke was filled
with the smell of burning bodies.
So even today,
in the heat of the summer,
when it's sizzling hot,
or when it's so hot
you can feel it on your skin,
that smell of burning bodies,
and the screams,
it all rushes back to me,
in all five senses.
Even now.
[somber music playing]
[Kakita in English] Seventy thousand
people died within the first hour.
One hundred and forty thousand,
twice that number,
who have died by December of 1945.
[plane engine humming]
[Kakita] Three days later, on August 9th,
Nagasaki was bombed.
[explosion]
[desolate music playing]
The initial target for the second bomb
was actually not Nagasaki, it was Kokura.
But because of cloud cover,
the crew decided
that they couldn't drop it on Kokura.
So they went to the secondary target.
[Rhodes] The second bomb's called Fat Man.
The Hiroshima bomb was the uranium bomb,
and it yielded about 15 kilotons,
15,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
The Fat Man was a plutonium bomb,
and it yielded
about 22,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
It actually gets dropped on Urakami,
which is a district of Nagasaki
just north.
Urakami, historically,
has been the kind of center
of the Catholic community in Nagasaki.
There were 8,500 Christians
killed in the cathedral.
There were two priests
hearing confessions,
and a couple dozen parishioners
immediately killed.
The cathedral's destroyed.
[Walker] We don't know exactly
how many people died in Nagasaki.
The most recent estimate's about 80,000.
The deaths are calculated
as of December 1st
because about 15 or 20% died
from acute exposure to radiation.
When Truman initially hears
about the Hiroshima mission,
he's thrilled.
And he stays
unambiguously positive about it
until Stimson gives him
the first damage reports of Hiroshima.
This is unambiguously a city.
This is not a military base.
[Walker] Truman had just
gotten back from Potsdam,
and Stimson came to see him,
and he had some photographs of Hiroshima.
And he said, "As far as we can tell,
the bomb killed 100,000 people."
Truman was shocked by that.
[Wellerstein] Truman starts to report
having these, like, stress headaches
and other sort of physiological symptoms
of stress and discomfort.
He starts describing the atomic bomb
from this moment on
not as the greatest thing in history,
but as a weapon that should not be used
as a regular military weapon of war.
It's a real turning point,
the learning about these casualties.
On August 10th, 1945,
General Groves sends a memo
to the chief of staff, General Marshall.
And he says, you know, we were planning
to have a third bomb on Japan
by the end of the month,
but we've had some real success
in speeding it up,
and we're gonna be ready
to drop that bomb in a week.
[Walker] Truman went
to a cabinet meeting and he said,
"I have ordered that no further bombs
be used without my express authorization."
[Wellerstein] It's literally a scrawl
on a piece of paper in handwriting.
"You can't do this
without the president's authorization."
This is the beginning
of presidential control
of nuclear use in the United States.
I have received this afternoon a message
from the Japanese government,
in reply to the message
forwarded to that government
by the Secretary of State on August 11th.
I deem this reply a full acceptance
of the Potsdam Declaration,
which specifies the unconditional
surrender of Japan.
[cheering]
[bittersweet music playing]
There's a lot of dispute about Truman's
motives in using the bomb in Japan.
[Nolan] You have the dominant narrative
being the bomb ended the war,
it saved American lives.
The Japanese would not
have surrendered without it.
It was ultimately a good, right,
that was used.
But then you had a counternarrative.
We didn't need to use the bomb.
Japan would have surrendered.
We didn't need a land invasion
in order to be victorious.
Some have said the atom bomb
wasn't the end of World War II,
but it was the first strike
in the Cold War.
[Alperovitz] Why'd they use the bomb
against two non-military targets?
Civilian cities.
I mean, there's very small,
tiny little military installations,
but they were not military bases.
You can't get the precise answer,
but you can get pretty close to it.
It seemed very clear to policymakers
that the war could end
so long as you told the Japanese
that they could keep their god-like figure
in a powerless role.
And secondly, the war would end
when the Russians came in.
That will collapse the politics.
That'll be the turning point.
This is a letter from Secretary of War,
Henry L. Stimson to President Truman,
July 2, 1945.
[reading letter]
He's basically saying
that the United States
is totally in control of the Japanese war,
and that we have capacity
to deal with them in any way we want.
Which is true.
So, it was not a question
of whether the war would go on.
It's a brutal question
of using the atomic bombs
in order to end the war
without the Russians.
Many American policymakers
knew the Japanese couldn't face
the great powers
when the Russians came in,
and that the Russian attack
would end the war.
They desperately wanted to end the war
before the Russians got to Japan,
and better if they could end it
before they got far into Manchuria.
So it's a diplomatic and political use
at that point in time,
and it's a major tragedy.
Some would say a war crime.
[interviewer] What do you make of this,
that we didn't need to drop the bomb?
You know
I find that truly scurrilous
for someone to say all these years later.
We didn't know.
We didn't know if the bombs would work.
We didn't know if they would
force the Japanese to surrender.
We didn't know if Stalin
was gonna come in when he came in,
or when he would come in,
or if he would come in.
We didn't know any of that.
What we did know
was that the Japanese
were prepared to sacrifice
every one of their human beings
who lived in those islands to fight.
The closer we got to Japan
as we marched up the islands
in the South Pacific one by one,
the harder they fought.
There was no indication that the war
was just suddenly going to end.
The Japanese were gonna say,
"Oh, sorry! Time to stop."
It didn't work that way.
[dramatic music playing]
[Blume] In the United States, there was
overwhelming support for the bombs.
Ecstatic support.
The vast majority,
over 75% of people polled,
said that they approved
of the use of the bombs.
In one poll that was conducted
shortly after the bombings,
23% of those polled said that they wished
that even more atomic bombs
could've been used on Japan
before that country had surrendered.
That's how strong
the feeling of vengeance was.
It really wasn't until John Hersey's
bombshell reporting in The New Yorker,
where The New Yorker gives over
an entire issue of the magazine
to his first-person reporting
from Hiroshima,
that brings the power
and the awful horror of the bomb
home to the American public.
Americans really began to reckon
with the cost and the horror
of what they had unleashed on the world.
[Wellerstein] End of 1946,
you're starting to see more voices
that go against
the Manhattan Project narrative,
that are starting to say things like,
"Maybe the bombs weren't necessary."
A lot of those voices
are senior military officials.
It's Admiral Leahy.
It's General Eisenhower.
[Holloway] The wartime alliance
with the Soviet Union
was in some ways
a marriage of convenience,
and it broke down more quickly,
I think, than anyone anticipated.
The Soviet Union thought,
"We won the war with Germany."
"We occupy half of Europe."
"Our standing now is great."
"Our power is so much greater
than it was before the war."
[crowd cheering]
[Holloway] And suddenly,
the bomb comes and introduces
a whole new element of uncertainty
into the balance of power.
So on the 20th of August,
so two weeks to the day after Hiroshima,
Stalin signs a decree.
"Build the bomb as soon as possible."
The invention of nuclear weapons
changes everything that comes after it.
[cheering]
[applause]
[Garrett Graff] You begin to see the US
and Europe and the Soviet Union
lurch towards this idea of a Cold War
that's gonna pit the two superpowers
against each other.
The Soviet Union and its agents
have destroyed the independence
and democratic character of a whole series
of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.
[dramatic music builds]
[Wolfe] The United States
is the only country
to have ever used
an atomic weapon in warfare.
These weapons really changed
the fate of the 20th century.
They changed the nature of the conflict
between the United States
and the Soviet Union,
particularly once the Soviet Union
had access to these weapons.
They were so big and so destructive
that basically they couldn't be used.
This is one of the reasons that we think
of the Cold War as a cold war.
It could not be hot.
For the Cold War to be hot
between the two rival powers
would have been a suicide pact.
[dramatic music playing]
[Wolfe] So instead, the Cold War
was conducted through economic means.
Through psychological means.
And through proxy battlefields
across the world.
To avoid situations
in which US and Soviet troops
might engage each other directly
in a way that might lead
to an all-out nuclear war.
The calculated pressures
of aggressive communism
have forced us instead
to live in a world of turmoil.
[Joseph McCarthy] But I do have in my hand
the names of 57 individuals
who are either communists,
who are certainly loyal
to the Communist Party.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
[cheering]
[clamoring]
I think the driving force
that was in us all,
that we're aware of it, was fear.
When you can't control things,
fear can ravage you.
[closing theme music playing]
[engines roaring in distance]
[uneasy music playing]
[rapid gunfire in distance]
[Tom Nichols] If you define a Cold War
as a state of conflict
with a nuclear-armed opponent
where you can't get at each other,
even though you are
functionally hostile to each other,
then we're in a new Cold War
with the Russians.
[tense music playing]
[reporter] More Russian forces
on the move.
Surface-to-air missiles
in the country's far east
due to join what Moscow says
are military exercises near Ukraine.
It's easy in some ways
to say that the Cold War ended
in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But if you open the newspaper
on any given day,
we're still living
with the aftermath of the Cold War.
What we're seeing
is still that story playing out.
[reporter] Columns of Russian tanks
and armored vehicles
are reported to be pouring
across the Ukrainian border tonight.
Swarms of helicopters
flying in low over the countryside,
creating panic and terror
for the people living there.
[anchor] After months of preparations,
the Russian president Vladimir Putin
has launched a major
military operation against Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has begun.
[explosion]
[explosions in distance]
[rumbling]
Oh. It's close.
[loud blast]
[somber music playing]
[officer speaking Russian]
[Robert Gates]
Putin is obsessed with Ukraine.
He does not want
to recreate the Soviet Union.
He wants to recreate the Russian Empire.
[Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukrainian]
They see Ukraine as part of their empire,
a part of the Soviet Union.
They consider it their legacy,
their property,
which they want to take back.
[Giorgi Kandelaki in English] Putin said
the collapse of the Soviet Union
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe
of the 20th century.
[crowd cheering]
[speaking Russian]
[Garry Kasparov] For him, winning the war
in Ukraine is not just, you know,
destroying Ukrainian Statehood.
[rumbling]
I think it's a war to basically
replay results of the Cold War.
[somber music continues]
[Pavel Palazhchenko] The Cold War did end,
but now we are living through
a new edition of the Cold War.
And it's a very dangerous Cold War.
[somber music continues]
[anchor in Russian] How can they threaten
the boundless Russia with nuclear weapons
when they are only a small island?
The island is so small
that one Sarmat missile is enough
to sink it once and for all.
[Rose Gottemoeller in English]
These people showing films of London
being vaporized by a nuclear weapon
and laughing about it on the nightly news.
These are shocking, shocking situations.
[Putin in Russian]
Organizers of any provocation
threatening the fundamental interests
of our security will regret it,
like they haven't regretted anything
for a long time.
[in English]
We are not seeking a new Cold War.
It is something that we thought
that we would never see again.
The pictures that we saw
from the Second World War
I mean, right now,
how can this be happening?
[dramatic music playing]
[blast]
[theme music playing]
[music fades]
[noble music playing]
[Timothy Naftali] The Cold War,
which began in phases,
ultimately became
a global existential struggle
between the United States and its allies,
and the Soviet Union and its allies.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Naftali] At its peak,
the Cold War touched every continent,
with the exception of Antarctica,
and practically
every country in the world.
It shaped the decolonization
of great, large European empires.
It shaped domestic politics
in the great capitals of Europe
[speaking in Spanish]
[Naftali]North America,
and Asia.
For many, many people around the world,
it affected their daily lives.
And in some cases, it killed them.
It created a need
for intelligence services,
for secret activity, that never went away.
Vladimir Putin cannot be understood
without reference to the Cold War.
His worldview is a product
of the way in which the Soviet Union
collapsed in the late '80s and early '90s.
It set off an arms race that changed
virtually everything about American life,
but also really destabilized
global relationships
and caused infinite amount of harm
around the globe
for most of the 20th century.
[Stephen Kinzer] It seemed
so obvious and so clear.
We were so good.
We were the country
that finally was virtuous,
in addition to being powerful.
Everybody in America was supposed
to embrace this single narrative.
And it was logical that we would then
be threatened by a hostile,
evil force that wanted nothing
but destruction and nihilism.
[Naftali] The Cold War
was the first war in history
that held the possibility
of ending in apocalypse.
[music intensifies]
[Naftali] That's what made it different.
And that's what made it
so psychologically threatening.
If you got it wrong, we weren't talking
about the loss of a thousand people.
We weren't talking about the loss of,
God forbid, 10,000 people.
We were talking about the potential loss
of millions of people,
perhaps a billion people.
That was a scale of awfulness
that was never before
within the power of statesmen.
Why was it there?
Because of nuclear weapons.
[music fades to silence]
[Nichols] The arrival of nuclear weapons
is what helps the Cold War to play out.
They can't be disentangled
from one another.
[intriguing music playing]
[Naftali] The question
of when to use nuclear weapons
has always haunted
every country that has them.
[light switch click]
I'm not sure that there would be
a Cold War without nuclear weapons.
[Tom Z. Collina] Over the history
of nuclear weapons,
we've gotten very close
to catastrophe numerous times.
[alarms ringing]
We survived that
not because we were smart.
It was because we were lucky.
[mechanical thud]
[whirring]
[Sam Nunn] Einstein supposedly said,
"I know not with what weapons
World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought
with sticks and stones."
So, that's the nuclear world we live in.
[Lesley M. M. Blume] Once humans
stop seeing other humans as human,
the most horrific acts are possible.
There seems to me to be evidence
that lessons that we thought were learned
were not learned,
and that history is not history,
but we are in an ongoing tide.
[crowd clamoring]
[Richard Rhodes] Nuclear fission,
splitting heavy elements,
was discovered just at Christmastime
in 1938 in Nazi Germany,
Berlin,
by two, curiously,
chemists and a physicist.
And they were experimenting
with bombarding a solution
of uranium nitrate with a particular kind
of subatomic particle, called a neutron.
[sinuous music playing]
[Rhodes] When a neutron
enters the uranium nucleus,
it's rather as if the Moon hit the Earth.
Even if it's just flying
at normal room temperature,
when it goes in, everything goes crazy.
It's sufficient energy
from one fission of one atom
to make a grain of sand visibly jump.
It's enormous.
It's very exothermic, in physics terms.
Puts out a lot of energy
for very little input.
German scientists published a paper
in a British journal, Nature.
And the whole world woke up one day
to headlines in the New York Times
and the London papers.
They split the atom!
One of the more brilliant scientists
in American history, Robert Oppenheimer,
started thinking,
"Well, what can you do with the energy
that comes out of this amazing reaction?"
Within a week, he had a drawing
on the blackboard of an atomic bomb.
If you could get this reaction
to cause another reaction
and another reaction,
and another reaction,
until you had like 80 generations,
you could blow up a city.
Oppenheimer saw that immediately.
Almost all the physicists did.
[ominous note plays]
[Naftali] History provides us
with a cast of monsters.
Hitler was a one-person show.
[in German] Today, we must remove
undesirable elements proven to be bad.
What is bad has no place among us!
[crowd cheering]
[Naftali in English] Hitler was the worst
that mankind had ever created.
[Rhodes] The idea that Hitler
would have his Thousand-Year Reich
powered with atomic bombs
terrified people.
Particularly those who were Jewish
and had escaped what was already
beginning to be the Holocaust.
[brooding music playing]
[Rhodes] And, of course,
the United States was not yet at war.
[crowd cheering]
This nation will remain a neutral nation.
[Rhodes] Albert Einstein, the most famous
scientist in the world at the time,
drafted a letter
that would go under Einstein's signature
to President Roosevelt.
[Gregg Herken]
Essentially, the letter said that
we believe it will be possible,
in a relatively short time,
to build weapons
of remarkable destructiveness,
and we want you to be aware of that
and to take action so that we,
the Western world, have this weapon first.
The fear is a Nazi atomic weapons program.
And the sense
is that this is a race with Berlin.
British scientists, Canadian scientists,
and American scientists,
they are convinced
that smart physicists in Germany
are trying to give Adolf Hitler
the ultimate weapon
to win his war of conquest.
When World War II started in Europe,
Joseph Stalin was the leader
of the Soviet Union,
and the Soviets and the Nazis were allies.
The Hitler-Stalin pact resulted
in a carving up of Eastern Europe.
The Soviets gained the Baltic States.
They also gained
the eastern part of Poland.
And they also gained a piece of Romania.
They misunderstood Hitler
as much as the Western democracies
misunderstood Hitler.
[gunfire]
[Naftali] In 1941,
Hitler betrays his new Soviet allies
by invading the Soviet Union.
Initially, it looked like
the Nazis would beat the Soviets.
The Soviets were caught by surprise.
Stalin actually can't even
bring himself to talk publicly
to the Soviet people for days.
[Stalin speaking in Russian]
[Naftali] He is so distraught at his own
strategic stupidity of trusting Berlin.
And the war was not only
what was happening in Europe,
but also what was happening in Asia.
The Japanese sought empire in Asia.
It wanted to control China.
They ultimately
would control Southeast Asia.
They would control the Philippines.
They even had their sights on India.
Hirohito, the Japanese emperor,
was the leader.
[Akira Yamada in Japanese]
In Japan at that time,
the Emperor was the judiciary,
legislation, and administration,
as well as the supreme commander
of the Japanese army and navy.
However, many Japanese believed
that the Emperor's ancestors
could be traced back to a god.
[crowd cheering]
[Naftali in English] In 1940, the Japanese
entered an alliance with Berlin and Rome.
The Americans mistakenly assumed
that the Japanese would never attack
a territory of the United States.
[Rhodes] Some of the committee that was
going to plan the Manhattan Project,
the program to build the first bombs,
met on December 6th, 1941 in Washington,
and woke up the next morning
to Pearl Harbor.
[torpedoes whistling]
[siren blaring]
[gunfire]
[Blume] It took Pearl Harbor
to bring America into the war.
[Roosevelt] Yesterday, December 7th, 1941
a date which will live in infamy
the United States of America
was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
No matter how long it may take us
to overcome this premeditated invasion,
the American people
in their righteous might
will win through to absolute victory.
[crowd cheering]
[somber music playing]
During World War II
we basically have the Axis powers,
which are Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan.
And the Allies
[indistinct chatter]
being the United States,
the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.
The United States did assist
the Soviet Union by giving them weapons.
By coordinating to a certain extent
on military campaigns.
But the one thing the United States
was not going to do
was to share its scientific secrets
with the Soviet Union,
particularly when it came
to the Manhattan Project.
[Alex Wellerstein] The Army takes over
the Manhattan Project in 1942.
[Rhodes] That's when General Dick Groves
was chosen to run the Manhattan Project.
[Groves] I must endeavor
to conduct this program
in such a way as to serve
the best interests of the United States.
[Wellerstein]
Groves was a military engineer.
Before the Manhattan Project,
he had been in charge of making sure
the Pentagon got constructed.
So he knew how to do big projects.
Pentagon was the largest office building
in the entire world at the time.
He's gruff.
His number-two person described him
as the biggest SOB he had ever worked for.
He was incredibly arrogant,
thought he knew more than everybody.
He says, "I need this project to have
the number-one priority
of the entire war," formally.
And what this high-level priority means
is he can get any resource he wants.
He can get any scientist
or person he wants.
[Rhodes] He put together a program
that eventually involved
a number of sites around the country
where uranium would be separated
into the rare isotope that chain-reacts.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Rhodes] Plutonium would be bred
in giant graphite fuel reactors
in eastern Washington
where there was plenty of cold water
to keep the reactors cool,
and where it was far enough away
from anywhere that if they blew up,
nobody would be killed.
Except the people
who worked there, of course.
He put this whole program together
and hired some 600,000 people.
Groves saw something in Oppenheimer
and chose him to direct this laboratory.
When they were looking for a place
where the bombs themselves
would be designed and built,
Oppenheimer said,
"Let's go look in New Mexico."
[evocative music playing]
[wind whistling]
[horse neighs]
[horse grunts]
[Herken] Los Alamos became a secret lab
cut off from the rest of the world.
It was surrounded by barbed wire.
People who worked there
had to get a special pass to go in.
The children who were born
in the hospital there
were given the post office box address
because the location
could not be revealed.
[Rhodes] The people who were there during
the war remember it as an amazing place,
almost like the Olympian heights
of the Gods.
When you think about
what they were doing, it's really ironic.
They were working on a weapon,
whatever their good intentions,
that was gonna kill a lot of people.
It would really be its only use.
But they knew that they were
working on something that,
if the Germans got it first,
would destroy the world.
The task of defeating Hitler
may be long and arduous.
There are a few appeasers
and Nazi sympathizers
who say that it cannot be done.
They even asked me
to negotiate with Hitler,
to pray for crumbs
from his victorious table.
This course I have rejected,
and I reject it again.
[solemn music playing]
[Naftali] Franklin Roosevelt began
the atomic weapons program.
He expected to live long enough to decide
whether or not to use atomic weapons.
[electricity crackling]
[Naftali] We'll never know
if he would have dropped bombs on anyone.
He dies in April of 1945.
[solemn music continues]
[Naftali] His vice president,
Harry S. Truman,
knows nothing about the Manhattan Project.
So that there can be
no possible misunderstanding,
both Germany and Japan can be certain
beyond any shadow of a doubt
[gunshot]
that America will continue
the fight for freedom
until no vestige of resistance remains.
[Herken] It was about ten days afterwards
that the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson,
thought it was time that the new president
should know about the bomb.
[dramatic music playing]
[Wellerstein] Stimson's memo
is all about the diplomatic questions
raised by the Manhattan Project.
What is the world gonna look like
after an atomic bomb is used?
He's trying to impress
upon Truman this is not just a weapon.
This is the most important
turning point of the human race.
- [gunfire]
- [explosion]
[Naftali] 1945,
military progress in Europe
was edging further
than scientific progress on the bomb.
[reporter] The British, the American,
and the Red armies begin the last battles
with a common front
in a broken and dismembered Germany.
[Naftali] Hitler was largely alone,
shaking in his bunker.
In 1945, that man shot himself
after killing his wife.
The threat posed by Adolf Hitler was over,
though Nazi ideology did not,
sadly, disappear.
[Karl Dönitz in German]
German men and women,
soldiers of the armed forces.
Our leader, Adolf Hitler,
has fallen.
[tense music playing]
[Truman in English]
Much remains to be done.
The victory won in the West
must now be won in the East.
The whole world must be cleansed
of the evil from which
half the world has been freed.
[gunfire]
[J. Samuel Walker] The question became,
how do we secure a victory against Japan?
And there was a great deal of concern
that the war against Japan
could last for months, if not years,
beyond the defeat of Germany.
[Blume] Even after Pearl Harbor,
and the rage and the shock
that that event brought
you know, the US government
still had to galvanize public opinion
to involve it in another world war.
[screams in Japanese]
[Blume] There was still the enormous task
of making Americans
hate the Japanese enough
to fight them in the way
that they needed to be fought for defeat.
There was an enormous information
and propaganda campaign
to portray the Japanese in a certain way.
[man in Japanese accent] You say
you can destroy us by outfighting us.
You cannot. You cannot outfight us
because the path ahead of you
lies straight up the steep
and rocky mountain of Japan.
And it is slippery with blood.
Your blood!
[Blume] And there was, you know,
a heavy racial overtone to it.
I mean, Germans, when they were depicted,
they were sinister enemies.
They were, you know, to be killed.
They were targets.
But they were still seen
as icy human beings.
But the Japanese were often portrayed
almost as a subspecies.
There really is a sense
for the American public
that the Japanese are subhumans.
There can be no peace in the world
until the military power of Japan
is destroyed.
[tense music builds]
[Walker] There was a firebombing raid
on Tokyo, March 9th and 10th, 1945.
[distant explosions]
[Walker] It killed 87,000 people.
And it was just horrendous.
[Blume] Bomber pilots eviscerated
16 square miles of Tokyo
in one night air raid.
[gunfire]
[Walker] Japanese civilians
were being killed.
[gunfire]
[Walker] People burned like matchsticks.
They tried to flee to rivers,
and the rivers caught on fire.
But there was no sign yet
that the Japanese were ready to surrender.
And then the Battle of Okinawa happens.
[heavy gunfire]
[gunfire]
[somber music playing]
[Walker] The Battle of Okinawa
ended on June the 22nd.
And Okinawa was an extraordinarily
costly battle for American troops
and American ships and American sailors.
[Rhodes] We lost something like
12,000 men at Okinawa.
They lost about 200,000.
It was a terrible, bloody slaughter
the closer we got to the home islands.
And there was great concern
in the military
that we would have to invade
the home island of Japan.
[Stimson] We're going
to destroy Japan's armies,
Japan's navy, Japan's air forces,
Japan's war factories.
Japan's whole power to wage war.
[Walker] After Okinawa,
it became even more clear
that we needed to find a way
to end a war without an invasion.
Truman faced the responsibility
for finding a way to end a war
against Japan on American terms
at the lowest possible cost
in American lives.
[Rhodes] Sixty-five million people
killed in the Second World War.
The worst war in human history.
Anything that would end such a war,
you can see why people
thought of it as a deliverance.
[Naftali] At the moment,
when the US military was making plans
for the invasion of the home islands,
the scientists
at the Manhattan Project said,
"We're about to test this idea."
[Rhodes] Because implosion
was such a new technology,
nobody really quite knew
how this would work.
It was clear that they had to test it
before they used it in the military.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Herken] In order to, uh, test the bomb,
you had to find a place that was remote
where the bomb could go off,
and you could have
some plausible deniability
as to tell people what it was.
They didn't want the radioactive fallout
to be going down toward a populated area,
so they looked around,
and they decided that Alamogordo,
what is now the White Sands test area
out in the New Mexican desert,
would be the best place to do it.
This test was scheduled
for the morning of July 16th, 1945.
They didn't want to stir up
a bunch of dirt and make it radioactive,
so they put the bomb up on top of a tower,
100 feet high.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Rhodes] It was just
the innards of the weapon,
a tangle of cables and wires.
They didn't have the radar on it
and all the other The tail and so forth.
This assembly was put
in a little tin corrugated iron cabin
up on top of a steel tower,
and one of the scientists
was delegated to sit with it all night
after it'd been completely put together.
There was a storm front
that was passing through
that made him a little nervous
because he thought, "Well, if lightning
hits this tower, I'm dead."
[chuckling] "Bomb goes off
and I'm vaporized."
Fortunately, the rain stopped
about 4:00 a.m., and the sky cleared.
The scientists had come down
from Los Alamos in large numbers.
[Herken] All the scientists
who'd worked at Los Alamos
wanted to be at Trinity
to see the results of their labor.
There was quite
a whole delegation out there.
[Rhodes] The scientists were on a hillside
about 20 miles away.
There were some big,
massive bunkers buried in the ground
almost 10,000 yards away.
[Blume] One of the concerns was,
would the bomb have
a higher-than-anticipated mushroom cloud?
Would it carry contaminated fallout
throughout populated parts of the country?
For them, it was a real possibility,
but they tested it anyway.
[male voice] Nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four,
three, two, one.
Now.
[loud rumble]
[ominous music playing]
[Oppenheimer] We knew
the world would not be the same.
Few people laughed.
Few people cried.
Most people were silent.
I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture,
the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu.
"Now I am become death,
the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that
one way or another.
[ominous choral music playing]
[silence]
[ominous music resumes]
[Rhodes] People jumped up
and started looking at it.
There was a general sense of real relief
because this technology
that they had invented
in a period of about eight months,
this brand-new technology had worked.
[Blume] It was thought that the area
surrounding the Trinity test site
was largely uninhabited.
But in reality,
nearly half a million people
lived in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico,
within 150-mile radius
of the Trinity test site in 1945.
About 40 miles away,
there's a camp, a girls' dance camp.
About ten girls
who were about 13 years old
were fast asleep in their bunks.
[explosion]
[Blume] Suddenly, boom.
An enormous explosion
shakes their bunkhouse
and throws the girls out of their bunks.
They and their dance instructor
run outside,
and one of them later recalled
that the sky was just painful to look at.
It was so bright. She said, quote,
"It was as if the sun came up.
Tremendous."
[dramatic music rising]
[Blume] And then a few hours later,
these girls look up
and there's white ash
falling from the sky,
and they think that it's snow.
So they put on their bathing suits
and they go to a local stream
to play in the snow,
and they're pressing it into their faces.
And they said, "It's hot instead of cold.
Why is this snow hot?"
And in their reasoning,
they said, "It's hot because it's summer."
And only one of them survived to 30.
The New Mexicans
had not been told ahead of time
that the test would take place.
They were not evacuated ahead of time,
nor were they evacuated
or told afterwards.
In fact, the government
put out a press report
that a munitions dump had exploded nearby,
and that's what
these people had experienced.
It didn't do much to explain
why this snow was falling from the sky,
or why all their family pets
were dying all of a sudden,
or their livestock
was starting to turn white in patches.
[mooing]
The blast in the Trinity test
literally turned the sand
into green glass.
[cheering]
[melancholy music playing]
[cheering]
[Audra J. Wolfe] Truman got news
that this test had been successful
during the Potsdam Conference.
[melancholy music continues]
[Wolfe] Truman and Stalin and Churchill
were trying to work out
what the balance of power was going to be
among the Allies,
who were expecting to win the war.
[reporter] The big three meetings are held
in Kaiser Wilhelm's former palace.
Here, the fate of Germany and the end
of Japanese aggression will be settled.
[Wellerstein] They are meeting the Soviets
for the first time, Truman and Stimson.
Truman is meeting Stalin in person.
[Plokhy] The West
certainly didn't understand
whom they were dealing with
when it comes to Stalin.
He had a lot of charisma.
He made a good impression on people,
and he wanted to make that impression.
[reporter] It was
at this historic conference
that the dividing of Germany
into four zones of occupation took place.
[Wellerstein] The American officials
are very distressed at Potsdam
because they're starting to realize
that the world is being divided up
in a way that they didn't
quite anticipate.
That these allies, who were always
sort of enemies of my enemy,
were actually quite paranoid,
and expansionist, and hard to trust.
It was becoming clear
that once the Soviets took over territory,
they essentially kept the territory.
[Rhodes] The Russians were going
to enter the war against the Japanese
on the 15th of August.
And Truman was hoping
that he could get the war over with
before Stalin entered the war in the East,
so that Japan wouldn't be divided
the way Germany was going to be divided.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Walker] Truman was notified
about the test of the plutonium bomb
at Alamogordo,
and how powerful it was,
and how it exceeded expectations.
And that was great news for Truman
because he thought it might help him
in his negotiations with Stalin.
And so one question that came up was,
"So, do we tell Stalin about the bomb?"
[David Holloway] The recommendation
to Truman was, "Tell Stalin."
It would be important for the two of them
to discuss how the bomb should become
somehow an instrument of peace
rather than of war.
But Truman ignored that advice.
Truman was very bucked up
by the news of the successful test,
and Churchill waxed eloquent
about it, saying,
"Now we can tell the Russians
where to get off."
Truman went over to Stalin and said,
"We have a weapon
of unusual destructive force."
Stalin said nothing, just nodded.
And that was the only official exchange
between the US and the Soviet Union.
[fanfare playing]
[reporter] Even while we celebrate
victory in Europe,
British and American chiefs of staff
plan strategy for victory in Japan.
And their heads of government prepare
an ultimatum to the people of Japan.
[Naftali] Truman sought
unconditional surrender from Japan.
[man] We call upon the government of Japan
to proclaim unconditional surrender.
The alternative is prompt
and utter destruction.
[Naftali] The Japanese
didn't want to surrender,
and they certainly didn't want
to surrender unconditionally
because they feared that that would mean
the end of the empire,
and that the Emperor
would be forced to abdicate.
[Walker] There was a division
within the Japanese government
between those who wanted to seek peace,
as long as the Emperor
could remain on his throne,
and those who wanted to fight on
for as long as possible
in order to hopefully
get better surrender terms.
And there was, in fact,
paralysis within the Japanese government
about what to do.
[Kazuhiko Togo]
My grandfather, Shigenori Togo,
was foreign minister of Japan.
Throughout the beginning of his tenure
until the very end,
he had only one motive.
Avoid unconditional surrender.
Because if you agree
to unconditional surrender,
Togo might run the risk of the fate
of the Imperial family becoming dubious.
That, he couldn't.
[Ukeru Magosaki] There is a group
of conflicting opinions
inside the government,
also inside the military groups,
that it's better to fight to the end,
to the death.
On the other side,
there are rational people
that said we faced such casualties.
It is time to end the war.
[Togo] When the Potsdam Declaration
reached Togo, 26th of July,
the hardliners in the military
said that this is not good.
[cheering]
[Togo] We should make the world know
that Potsdam is not acceptable.
[Rhodes] We're really angry
at the Japanese
for not surrendering
when we knew they had been defeated.
[Walker] The hatred between
the United States and Japan
was unparalleled.
[intense music playing]
[Kakita] I was born in Los Angeles.
In 1940, we went to Japan
to visit our ailing grandparents.
My parents had to go back to the States
because they still
had some business there.
They left my older brother and me
in the care of my grandparents.
Here we were in the middle of Hiroshima,
living with our grandparents.
And then, before my parents
could come back for us
the war started.
And we were in the middle of Hiroshima
for the duration of the war.
[dramatic music playing]
[reporter] More than 100,000 men, women,
and children, all of Japanese ancestry,
removed from their homes
in the Pacific Coast state.
Two-thirds of the evacuees
are American citizens by right of birth.
[Kakita] Shortly after they returned
to the United States,
my parents were sent
to a concentration camp,
along with 120,000 other
Japanese-Americans.
There were ten of them,
I believe, altogether,
scattered around the United States.
They suffered tremendously in the camp.
I mean, they lost everything.
Can you imagine somebody telling you,
you have to get out of your house?
You got two suitcases
full of things you can carry with you,
and the police throw you
in the concentration camp
for three, four years.
[reporter] The entire community
bounded by a wire fence
and guarded by military police,
symbols of the military nature
of the evacuation.
[Walker] Maybe somebody would have said,
"Well, you know, maybe it's not right
to use a weapon this powerful
against a civilian population"
if we'd had it against Germany.
But the racial factor
against Japan, I think,
prevented any real second thoughts.
It was to spare the Japanese people
from utter destruction,
that the ultimatum of July the 26th
was issued at Potsdam.
Their leaders promptly rejected
that ultimatum.
If they do not now accept our terms,
they may expect
a rain of ruin from the air,
the like of which
has never been seen on this earth.
[Walker] Here we have a bomb more powerful
than anything ever before developed.
If it worked the way scientists
thought it would work,
if, in fact, an atomic bomb
could wipe out a city with one bomb,
hopefully the shock of that
would finally be enough
to convince the Japanese government
that it was time to surrender.
[Gar Alperovitz] Also, the Red Army
was coming into Manchuria.
It's very clear that American policymakers
were rushing to get the war over with
before the Russians came in.
We didn't want them
to get very far into Manchuria,
and we certainly
didn't want them in Japan.
[Blume] Leslie Groves had been charged
with creating the atomic bomb
and getting it ready for wartime use.
And he pursued this
with relentless determination.
And by mid-July, the first bomb
was nearly ready for use.
[Walker] In order to have a good target,
a few cities were set aside.
[Wellerstein] You want a city
that is going to really have
a good before and after picture,
so that you can show what this weapon
is capable of both to scare the Japanese,
and scare the rest of the world
about the power of this thing.
[Herken] Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura,
and Kyoto were on the list,
and Stimson famously vetoed Kyoto
because it was kind of
the intellectual center of Japan.
He insisted that Kyoto
be taken off the list.
[Wellerstein] He goes to Truman,
and the framing he uses is, essentially,
that Kyoto is a civilian target.
Hiroshima is a valid military target.
The Japanese will never forgive us
if we destroy a major civilian target.
He refers to Hiroshima repeatedly
as a purely military target.
This is not totally correct.
Hiroshima, yeah,
it has a military base in it,
but it's 90% civilians.
It's a real city.
It's not just a military base.
It's not clear
Truman understands all this.
[bell tolls]
[Kakita] We woke up early in the morning,
the morning of August 6.
Put on our school clothes
because school was in session.
And on our way to school,
we were told that school was canceled
that day because enemy aircraft,
that would be American aircraft,
was still in the area.
And they were afraid of,
you know, additional bombing.
We were 0.8 miles from the hypocenter,
which is considered pretty close.
- [atmospheric music playing]
- [trolley bell ringing]
[indistinct chatter]
[plane engine humming]
[poignant music playing]
My brother, he saw the airplane
and the secondary,
he saw something was in the distance.
A very small, tiny block.
That was atomic bomb.
It didn't come down straight.
And then for a while,
it went with the airplane
and then made a curve and dropped.
And then he turned back, and it exploded.
[loud blast]
[unsettling music playing]
[Ogura] There was a flash.
[blast]
[Ogura] Everything I was seeing
turned white.
Couldn't see anything. No color at all.
And then there was a strong blast.
[loud blast]
[Ogura] I felt like I was, like,
in a tornado or a typhoon.
And then unconscious.
Everybody became unconscious.
And then when I opened my eyes,
everywhere was just broken.
[desolate music playing]
[Kunihiko Iida in Japanese]
I had been looking at the koi fish.
My mom called for me,
and I went inside the house.
It was at that moment
the atomic bomb was dropped.
Had I still been outside
at the time the bomb went off,
I would have been killed instantaneously.
[Teruko Yahata] My mom went to the closet,
it looked like it was about to collapse,
and yanked a large futon out of it.
She threw it over the family,
who had all gathered together.
So she said, "Let's die here as a family,"
and wrapped us into a bundle.
It's a feeling that I can never forget,
not even decades later.
For as long as I live,
I will never forget that moment.
[Kakita in English] I don't recall
seeing the flash, nor hear the boom.
I was knocked out instantaneously.
When I came to,
the bathhouse was on top of me.
[Iida in Japanese] I was buried alive.
I wanted to call out, "Mom! Help me!"
But I couldn't speak.
[Kingo Kawahara] There was something
like a blast wave,
and then all the walls and stuff
were blown out.
After the blast, my body just floated,
and then hit the ground.
Then I realized
my back
was burnt.
Just remembering it, I hate to remember
anything about those days.
[Yahata] The atomic bomb
exploded at a height of 600 meters
above the ground in the sky
over Hiroshima City,
with a population of 350,000.
The fireball had a core temperature
of several million degrees.
Ferocious heat rays, like those generated
by burning magnesium,
were unleashed over the entire city.
About two or three seconds
after the blast,
the people who had been exposed
to those heat rays
were severely burned
and many of them died.
[somber music playing]
[Iida] The rivers
were filled with corpses.
So many corpses in the river,
there was no space in between.
One could not gather
the bodies of the dead.
The remains turned to ash,
so you couldn't collect them.
The bones had turned to ash.
[Kakita in English] We saw
the hordes of people from the inner city
with tremendous injuries.
Skins on their body
would be dripping from their bodies.
The pattern of clothes
would be etched on the bodies.
People that were
directly exposed to the rain,
they were burned so terribly,
to get some relief,
they would jump into the river,
only to die.
[Masaaki Takano in Japanese]
The elementary school I attended
is on the other side of this mountain.
That's where I got exposed
to the radiation.
I went down this road,
and the sky was completely dark
when I got here.
And it started raining when
the radiation fallout was coming down.
[Yahata] The large raindrops
pelted down and drenched us.
We were soaked.
We didn't know it at the time,
but it was black rain,
contaminated with radioactive material.
Then when the evening came,
we looked back toward the city
from the mountains.
It was burning so ferociously
that it could almost scorch the night sky.
And I think about how so many people
were burned alive in those flames,
and it tears me apart.
Young children,
you know?
Older parents,
all those people who couldn't escape
and were burned alive, so many of them.
The smoke was filled
with the smell of burning bodies.
So even today,
in the heat of the summer,
when it's sizzling hot,
or when it's so hot
you can feel it on your skin,
that smell of burning bodies,
and the screams,
it all rushes back to me,
in all five senses.
Even now.
[somber music playing]
[Kakita in English] Seventy thousand
people died within the first hour.
One hundred and forty thousand,
twice that number,
who have died by December of 1945.
[plane engine humming]
[Kakita] Three days later, on August 9th,
Nagasaki was bombed.
[explosion]
[desolate music playing]
The initial target for the second bomb
was actually not Nagasaki, it was Kokura.
But because of cloud cover,
the crew decided
that they couldn't drop it on Kokura.
So they went to the secondary target.
[Rhodes] The second bomb's called Fat Man.
The Hiroshima bomb was the uranium bomb,
and it yielded about 15 kilotons,
15,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
The Fat Man was a plutonium bomb,
and it yielded
about 22,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
It actually gets dropped on Urakami,
which is a district of Nagasaki
just north.
Urakami, historically,
has been the kind of center
of the Catholic community in Nagasaki.
There were 8,500 Christians
killed in the cathedral.
There were two priests
hearing confessions,
and a couple dozen parishioners
immediately killed.
The cathedral's destroyed.
[Walker] We don't know exactly
how many people died in Nagasaki.
The most recent estimate's about 80,000.
The deaths are calculated
as of December 1st
because about 15 or 20% died
from acute exposure to radiation.
When Truman initially hears
about the Hiroshima mission,
he's thrilled.
And he stays
unambiguously positive about it
until Stimson gives him
the first damage reports of Hiroshima.
This is unambiguously a city.
This is not a military base.
[Walker] Truman had just
gotten back from Potsdam,
and Stimson came to see him,
and he had some photographs of Hiroshima.
And he said, "As far as we can tell,
the bomb killed 100,000 people."
Truman was shocked by that.
[Wellerstein] Truman starts to report
having these, like, stress headaches
and other sort of physiological symptoms
of stress and discomfort.
He starts describing the atomic bomb
from this moment on
not as the greatest thing in history,
but as a weapon that should not be used
as a regular military weapon of war.
It's a real turning point,
the learning about these casualties.
On August 10th, 1945,
General Groves sends a memo
to the chief of staff, General Marshall.
And he says, you know, we were planning
to have a third bomb on Japan
by the end of the month,
but we've had some real success
in speeding it up,
and we're gonna be ready
to drop that bomb in a week.
[Walker] Truman went
to a cabinet meeting and he said,
"I have ordered that no further bombs
be used without my express authorization."
[Wellerstein] It's literally a scrawl
on a piece of paper in handwriting.
"You can't do this
without the president's authorization."
This is the beginning
of presidential control
of nuclear use in the United States.
I have received this afternoon a message
from the Japanese government,
in reply to the message
forwarded to that government
by the Secretary of State on August 11th.
I deem this reply a full acceptance
of the Potsdam Declaration,
which specifies the unconditional
surrender of Japan.
[cheering]
[bittersweet music playing]
There's a lot of dispute about Truman's
motives in using the bomb in Japan.
[Nolan] You have the dominant narrative
being the bomb ended the war,
it saved American lives.
The Japanese would not
have surrendered without it.
It was ultimately a good, right,
that was used.
But then you had a counternarrative.
We didn't need to use the bomb.
Japan would have surrendered.
We didn't need a land invasion
in order to be victorious.
Some have said the atom bomb
wasn't the end of World War II,
but it was the first strike
in the Cold War.
[Alperovitz] Why'd they use the bomb
against two non-military targets?
Civilian cities.
I mean, there's very small,
tiny little military installations,
but they were not military bases.
You can't get the precise answer,
but you can get pretty close to it.
It seemed very clear to policymakers
that the war could end
so long as you told the Japanese
that they could keep their god-like figure
in a powerless role.
And secondly, the war would end
when the Russians came in.
That will collapse the politics.
That'll be the turning point.
This is a letter from Secretary of War,
Henry L. Stimson to President Truman,
July 2, 1945.
[reading letter]
He's basically saying
that the United States
is totally in control of the Japanese war,
and that we have capacity
to deal with them in any way we want.
Which is true.
So, it was not a question
of whether the war would go on.
It's a brutal question
of using the atomic bombs
in order to end the war
without the Russians.
Many American policymakers
knew the Japanese couldn't face
the great powers
when the Russians came in,
and that the Russian attack
would end the war.
They desperately wanted to end the war
before the Russians got to Japan,
and better if they could end it
before they got far into Manchuria.
So it's a diplomatic and political use
at that point in time,
and it's a major tragedy.
Some would say a war crime.
[interviewer] What do you make of this,
that we didn't need to drop the bomb?
You know
I find that truly scurrilous
for someone to say all these years later.
We didn't know.
We didn't know if the bombs would work.
We didn't know if they would
force the Japanese to surrender.
We didn't know if Stalin
was gonna come in when he came in,
or when he would come in,
or if he would come in.
We didn't know any of that.
What we did know
was that the Japanese
were prepared to sacrifice
every one of their human beings
who lived in those islands to fight.
The closer we got to Japan
as we marched up the islands
in the South Pacific one by one,
the harder they fought.
There was no indication that the war
was just suddenly going to end.
The Japanese were gonna say,
"Oh, sorry! Time to stop."
It didn't work that way.
[dramatic music playing]
[Blume] In the United States, there was
overwhelming support for the bombs.
Ecstatic support.
The vast majority,
over 75% of people polled,
said that they approved
of the use of the bombs.
In one poll that was conducted
shortly after the bombings,
23% of those polled said that they wished
that even more atomic bombs
could've been used on Japan
before that country had surrendered.
That's how strong
the feeling of vengeance was.
It really wasn't until John Hersey's
bombshell reporting in The New Yorker,
where The New Yorker gives over
an entire issue of the magazine
to his first-person reporting
from Hiroshima,
that brings the power
and the awful horror of the bomb
home to the American public.
Americans really began to reckon
with the cost and the horror
of what they had unleashed on the world.
[Wellerstein] End of 1946,
you're starting to see more voices
that go against
the Manhattan Project narrative,
that are starting to say things like,
"Maybe the bombs weren't necessary."
A lot of those voices
are senior military officials.
It's Admiral Leahy.
It's General Eisenhower.
[Holloway] The wartime alliance
with the Soviet Union
was in some ways
a marriage of convenience,
and it broke down more quickly,
I think, than anyone anticipated.
The Soviet Union thought,
"We won the war with Germany."
"We occupy half of Europe."
"Our standing now is great."
"Our power is so much greater
than it was before the war."
[crowd cheering]
[Holloway] And suddenly,
the bomb comes and introduces
a whole new element of uncertainty
into the balance of power.
So on the 20th of August,
so two weeks to the day after Hiroshima,
Stalin signs a decree.
"Build the bomb as soon as possible."
The invention of nuclear weapons
changes everything that comes after it.
[cheering]
[applause]
[Garrett Graff] You begin to see the US
and Europe and the Soviet Union
lurch towards this idea of a Cold War
that's gonna pit the two superpowers
against each other.
The Soviet Union and its agents
have destroyed the independence
and democratic character of a whole series
of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.
[dramatic music builds]
[Wolfe] The United States
is the only country
to have ever used
an atomic weapon in warfare.
These weapons really changed
the fate of the 20th century.
They changed the nature of the conflict
between the United States
and the Soviet Union,
particularly once the Soviet Union
had access to these weapons.
They were so big and so destructive
that basically they couldn't be used.
This is one of the reasons that we think
of the Cold War as a cold war.
It could not be hot.
For the Cold War to be hot
between the two rival powers
would have been a suicide pact.
[dramatic music playing]
[Wolfe] So instead, the Cold War
was conducted through economic means.
Through psychological means.
And through proxy battlefields
across the world.
To avoid situations
in which US and Soviet troops
might engage each other directly
in a way that might lead
to an all-out nuclear war.
The calculated pressures
of aggressive communism
have forced us instead
to live in a world of turmoil.
[Joseph McCarthy] But I do have in my hand
the names of 57 individuals
who are either communists,
who are certainly loyal
to the Communist Party.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
[cheering]
[clamoring]
I think the driving force
that was in us all,
that we're aware of it, was fear.
When you can't control things,
fear can ravage you.
[closing theme music playing]