d. On August 6, 1945, President Truman sanctioned the first ever use of an atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later a second was dropped on Nagasaki. Less than one month later on September 2nd, 1945, Japan signed an official document of surrender on the one condition that their emperor stay safe. America had successfully accomplished its goals; defeat Japan while at the same time showing its worldwide super power abilities.
             " 'I have often been asked,' Otto Frisch wrote many years afterward of the moment he understood that a bomb might be possible after all, before he and Peierls carried the news to Mark Oliphant, 'why I didn't abandon the project there and then, saying nothing to anybody. Why start on a project which, if it was successful, would end with the production of a weapon of unparalleled violence, a weapon of mass destruction such as the world had never seen? The answer was very simple. We were at war, and the idea was reasonably obvious; very probably some German scientists had had the same idea and were working on it.'" (Rhodes 325). The action of dropping the atomic bomb was morally justifiable, and under no circumstances can we question the intentional death of hundreds of thousands of people, who, in fact, were our enemy.
             The atomic bomb was ultimately used against Japan, but it was built as a response to a German threat. In late 1938, German scientists discovered how to split the uranium atom, releasing nuclear energy. When physicists in the United States learned of this discovery, many feared that Hitler might acquire a frightening new weapon: an atomic bomb. Refugees from the Nazis, most notably the Hungarian physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, feared this possibility so much that they began the search for a way to warn Western governments.
             Truman confronted a complicated situation in Europe and in the Far East. Japan, although weakened, was not willing to su...