8. America Saw the Development of Atomic Weapons as a Race Against the Germans
The US atomic program began with a letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that advised him of German research into atomic weapons, and the awful consequences if Hitler got an atomic bomb first. From the start, America’s atomic research was thus viewed and pursued as a life and death race to beat Germany to the atomic punch. The entire goal of the Manhattan Project was to develop atomic bombs to drop on Germany before Germany developed atomic bombs to drop on America and her allies. Germany was simply fortunate in that she surrendered before the Manhattan Project bore the fruits that had been intended all along for Germany.
In addition, nuclear weapons were not viewed back then with the same repugnance with which they are viewed today. They were not seen as awful and horrific last resort weapons whose use would be unthinkable except in the direst emergency. Instead, atomic bombs in the summer of 1945 were new weapons whose potential and impact had not yet been thought through. For most people at the time, an atomic bomb was simply another bomb, just a big and exceptionally destructive one. Modern abhorrence of nuclear weapons did not exist to the same extent when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. So if America had developed atomic weapons before Germany’s surrender, there would have been few compunctions about their use on German cities.
