Riley Farrar
Professor McCoy
History 1302.B 7
April 22, 2010
Atomic Bomb: Good or Bad?
Dropping the atomic bomb changed the world forever. After people saw what kind of damaged one of these bombs could do to a city and people, no one would ever want to go to war again. One atomic bomb can destroy hundreds of thousands of people and completely wipe out an entire city. On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed three days later with use of another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Some people believe that the U.S. should not have dropped the atomic because the war would be over a few months later but, the question is would we have wanted to cause American soldiers lives to die on Japanese soil so that the U.S. would not have used the bomb? Some people believe that the U.S. did the right thing by dropping the two bombs over the Japanese cities. Robert James Maddox, the author of “The Biggest Decision: Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb” and myself think that the use of the atomic bombs was in fact the right thing to do.
“The Biggest Decision: Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb” by Robert James Maddox is about the decision making of to drop the atomic bomb or to send troops into Japanese cities instead. In the reading it shows how Harry Truman made his decision after discussing with the Joints Chiefs of Staff to either drop the atomic bomb or come up with other scenarios to avoid using an atomic bomb for the first time in the world’s history. Truman was hesitating about the use of a bomb because the damage that it could do was unknown at the time but an attack of the Japanese was inevitable. Truman deciding to drop the atomic bomb saved many American lives and it also showed that bombing Perl Harbor was a mistake for the Japanese and to the other European countries ever considering an attack on the U.S. Truman spent many months contemplating to use the bomb or not. With the U.S. having...