War Machines

SPLITTING THE ATOM DID BRING AN END to World War II, but it did not, as some prophesized, bring an end to war itself. Scientists and strategists were sure that nuclear arms would change the nature of war, but they didn’t know how. Albert Einstein, the German-born American physicist, famously warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the possibility of weaponized fission and urged the allies to make a nuclear bomb before the Nazis could. Soon after, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pooled their nations’ top physicists to produce “the bomb.” Although the work of the Manhattan Project was not complete until 1946, after the Nazis had been conquered, testing in July, 1945, led to President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and then, still waiting for surrender from Tokyo, a second bomb on Nagasaki on August 9. In the decades after, the threat of nuclear Armageddon cooled passions among European and East Asian states that would otherwise probably have touched off a third conventional “total” war. Instead, many believe the Cold War led directly to a scaling back of most conventional armies and navies, aside from the United States and the Soviet Union.