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Table of Contents

1. North vs. South Korea

2. The Korean War and the Cold War

3. 'No Substitute for Victory'

4. The Korean War Reaches a Stalemate

5. Korean War Casualties&nbsp;

The Korean war began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea's behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and casualties mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider war with Russia and China-or even, as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in what many in the U.S. refer to as "the Forgotten War" for the lack of attention it received compared to more well-known conflicts like World War I and II and the Vietnam War. The Korean peninsula remains divided today.

North vs. South Korea

"If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war," U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) once said, "the unanimous choice would have been Korea." The peninsula had landed in America's lap almost by accident. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Korea had been a part of the Japanese empire, and after World War II it fell to the Americans and the Soviets to decide what should be done with their enemy's imperial possessions. In August 1945, two young aides at the State Department divided the Korean peninsula in half along the 38th parallel. The Russians occupied the area north of the line and the United States occupied the area to its south.

Did you know? Unlike World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War did not get much media attention in the United States. The most famous representation of the war in popular culture is the television series "M*A*S*H," which was set in a field hospital in South Korea. The series ran from 1972 until 1983, and its final episode was the most-watched in television history.

By the end of the decade, two new states had formed on the peninsula. In the south, the anti-communist dictator Syngman Rhee (1875-1965) enjoyed the reluctant support of the American government; in the north, the communist dictator Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) enjoyed the slightly more enthusiastic support of the Soviets. Neither dictator was content to remain on his side of the 38th parallel, however, and border skirmishes were common. Nearly 10,000 North and South Korean soldiers were killed in battle before the war even began.

The Korean War and the Cold War

Even so, the North Korean invasion came as an alarming surprise to American officials. As far as they were concerned, this was not simply a border dispute between two unstable dictatorships on the other side of the globe. Instead, many feared it was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world. For this reason, nonintervention was not considered an option by many top decision makers. (In fact, in April 1950, a National Security Council report known as NSC-68 had recommended that the United States use military force to "contain" communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring, "regardless of the intrinsic strategic or economic value of the lands in question.")

"If we let Korea down," President Harry Truman (1884-1972) said, "the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another." The fight on the Korean peninsula was a symbol of the global struggle between east and west, good and evil, in the Cold War. As the North Korean army pushed into Seoul, the South Korean capital, the United States readied its troops for a war against communism itself.

At first, the war was a defensive one to get the communists out of South Korea, and it went badly for the Allies. The North Korean army was well-disciplined, well-trained and well-equipped; Rhee's forces in the South Korean army, by contrast, were frightened, confused and seemed inclined to flee the battlefield at any provocation. Also, it was one of the hottest and driest summers on record, and desperately thirsty American soldiers were often forced to drink water from rice paddies that had been fertilized with human waste. As a result, dangerous intestinal diseases and other illnesses were a constant threat.

By the end of the summer, President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), the commander in charge of the Asian theater, had decided on a new set of war aims. Now, for the Allies, the Korean War was an offensive one: It was a war to "liberate" the North from the communists.

Initially, this new strategy was a success. The Inch'on Landing, an amphibious assault at Inch'on, pushed the North Koreans out of Seoul and back to their side of the 38th parallel. But as American troops crossed the boundary and headed north toward the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and Communist China, the Chinese started to worry about protecting themselves from what they called "armed aggression against Chinese territory." Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) sent troops to North Korea and warned the United States to keep away from the Yalu boundary unless it wanted full-scale war.

'No Substitute for Victory'

This was something that President Truman and his advisers decidedly did not want: They were sure that such a war would lead to Soviet aggression in Europe, the deployment of atomic weapons and millions of senseless deaths. To General MacArthur, however, anything short of this wider war represented "appeasement," an unacceptable knuckling under to the communists.

As President Truman looked for a way to prevent war with the Chinese, MacArthur did all he could to provoke it. Finally, in March 1951, he sent a letter to Joseph Martin, a House Republican leader who shared MacArthur's support for declaring all-out war on China-and who could be counted upon to leak the letter to the press. "There is," MacArthur wrote, "no substitute for victory" against international communism.

For Truman, this letter was the last straw. On April 11, the president fired the general for insubordination.

The Korean War Reaches a Stalemate

In July 1951, President Truman and his new military commanders started peace talks at Panmunjom. Still, the fighting continued along the 38th parallel as negotiations stalled. Both sides were willing to accept a ceasefire that maintained the 38th parallel boundary, but they could not agree on whether prisoners of war should be forcibly "repatriated." (The Chinese and the North Koreans said yes; the United States said no.)

Finally, after more than two years of negotiations, the adversaries signed an armistice on July 27, 1953. The agreement allowed the POWs to stay where they liked; drew a new boundary near the 38th parallel that gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square miles of territory; and created a 2-mile-wide "demilitarized zone" that still exists today.

Korean War Casualties

The Korean War was relatively short but exceptionally bloody. Nearly 5 million people died. More than half of these-about 10 percent of Korea's prewar population-were civilians. (This rate of civilian casualties was higher than World War II's and the Vietnam War's.) Almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, and more than 100,000 were wounded. Today, they are remembered at the Korean War Veterans Memorial near the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a series of 19 steel statues of servicemen, and the Korean War memorial in Fullerton, California, the first on the West Coast to include the names of the more than 30,000 Americans who died in the war.

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Korean War - Causes, Timeline & Veterans

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On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. Explore the war's causes, timeline, facts and end.

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During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Discovering the Missiles

After seizing power in the Caribbean island nation of Cuba in 1959, leftist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro (1926-2016) aligned himself with the Soviet Union. Under Castro, Cuba grew dependent on the Soviets for military and economic aid. During this time, the U.S. and the Soviets (and their respective allies) were engaged in the Cold War (1945-91), an ongoing series of largely political and economic clashes.

Did you know? The actor Kevin Costner (1955-) starred in a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis titled Thirteen Days. Released in 2000, the movie's tagline was "You'll never believe how close we came."

The two superpowers plunged into one of their biggest Cold War confrontations after the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Major Richard Heyser making a high-altitude pass over Cuba on October 14, 1962, photographed a Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation.

President Kennedy was briefed about the situation on October 16, and he immediately called together a group of advisors and officials known as the executive committee, or ExComm. For nearly the next two weeks, the president and his team wrestled with a diplomatic crisis of epic proportions, as did their counterparts in the Soviet Union.

A New Threat to the U.S.

For the American officials, the urgency of the situation stemmed from the fact that the nuclear-armed Cuban missiles were being installed so close to the U.S. mainland-just 90 miles south of Florida. From that launch point, they were capable of quickly reaching targets in the eastern U.S. If allowed to become operational, the missiles would fundamentally alter the complexion of the nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which up to that point had been dominated by the Americans.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had gambled on sending the missiles to Cuba with the specific goal of increasing his nation's nuclear strike capability. The Soviets had long felt uneasy about the number of nuclear weapons that were targeted at them from sites in Western Europe and Turkey, and they saw the deployment of missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field. Another key factor in the Soviet missile scheme was the hostile relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. The Kennedy administration had already launched one attack on the island-the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961-and Castro and Khrushchev saw the missiles as a means of deterring further U.S. aggression.

Kennedy Weighs the Options

From the outset of the crisis, Kennedy and ExComm determined that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was unacceptable. The challenge facing them was to orchestrate their removal without initiating a wider conflict-and possibly a nuclear war. In deliberations that stretched on for nearly a week, they came up with a variety of options, including a bombing attack on the missile sites and a full-scale invasion of Cuba. But Kennedy ultimately decided on a more measured approach. First, he would employ the U.S. Navy to establish a blockade, or quarantine, of the island to prevent the Soviets from delivering additional missiles and military equipment. Second, he would deliver an ultimatum that the existing missiles be removed.

In a television broadcast on October 22, 1962, the president notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact the blockade and made it clear that the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this public declaration, people around the globe nervously waited for the Soviet response. Some Americans, fearing their country was on the brink of nuclear war, hoarded food and gas.

HISTORY Vault: Nuclear Terror

Showdown at Sea: U.S. Blockades Cuba

A crucial moment in the unfolding crisis arrived on October 24, when Soviet ships bound for Cuba neared the line of U.S. vessels enforcing the blockade. An attempt by the Soviets to breach the blockade would likely have sparked a military confrontation that could have quickly escalated to a nuclear exchange. But the Soviet ships stopped short of the blockade.

Although the events at sea offered a positive sign that war could be averted, they did nothing to address the problem of the missiles already in Cuba. The tense standoff between the superpowers continued through the week, and on October 27, an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and a U.S. invasion force was readied in Florida. (The 35-year-old pilot of the downed plane, Major Rudolf Anderson, is considered the sole U.S. combat casualty of the Cuban missile crisis.) "I thought it was the last Saturday I would ever see," recalled U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009), as quoted by Martin Walker in "The Cold War." A similar sense of doom was felt by other key players on both sides.

A Deal Ends the Standoff

Despite the enormous tension, Soviet and American leaders found a way out of the impasse. During the crisis, the Americans and Soviets had exchanged letters and other communications, and on October 26, Khrushchev sent a message to Kennedy in which he offered to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for a promise by U.S. leaders not to invade Cuba. The following day, the Soviet leader sent a letter proposing that the USSR would dismantle its missiles in Cuba if the Americans removed their missile installations in Turkey.

Officially, the Kennedy administration decided to accept the terms of the first message and ignore the second Khrushchev letter entirely. Privately, however, American officials also agreed to withdraw their nation's missiles from Turkey. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925-68) personally delivered the message to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, and on October 28, the crisis drew to a close.

Both the Americans and Soviets were sobered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. The following year, a direct "hot line" communication link was installed between Washington and Moscow to help defuse similar situations, and the superpowers signed two treaties related to nuclear weapons. The Cold War was and the nuclear arms race was far from over, though. In fact, another legacy of the crisis was that it convinced the Soviets to increase their investment in an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. from Soviet territory.

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Cuban Missile Crisis - Causes, Timeline & Significance | HISTORY

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The Cuban Missile crisis was a 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over Soviet missiles in Cuba.

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The Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 was a failed attack launched by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to push Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power. Since 1959, officials at the U.S. State Department and the CIA had attempted to remove Castro. Finally, on April 17, 1961, the CIA launched what its leaders believed would be the definitive strike: a full-scale invasion of Cuba by 1,400 American-trained Cubans who had fled their homes when Castro took over. However, the invasion was doomed from the start. The invaders were badly outnumbered by Castro's troops, and they surrendered after less than 24 hours of fighting.
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Castro Seizes Power

On January 1, 1959, a young Cuban nationalist named Fidel Castro drove his guerrilla army into Havana and overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the nation's American-backed president.

Many Cubans welcomed Castro's 1959 overthrow of the dictatorial Batista, yet the new order on the island just about 90 miles from the United States made American officials nervous. Batista had been a corrupt and repressive dictator, but he was considered to be pro-American and was an ally to U.S. corporations.

At that time, American businesses and wealthy individuals owned almost half of Cuba's sugar plantations and the majority of its cattle ranches, mines and utilities. Batista did little to restrict their operations. He was also reliably anticommunist.

Castro, by contrast, was a communist who disapproved of the approach that Americans took to their business and interests in Cuba. It was time, he believed, for Cubans to assume more control of their nation. "Cuba Sí, Yanquis No" became one of his most popular slogans.

Did you know? Castro's regime was considered such a threat to U.S. interests that secret American operatives even tried to have him assassinated.

Eisenhower and the Cold War

Almost as soon as he came to power, Castro took steps to reduce American influence on the island. He nationalized American-dominated industries such as sugar and mining, introduced land reform schemes and called on other Latin American governments to act with more autonomy.
WATCH VIDEO: Fidel Castro
In response, early in 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to recruit 1,400 Cuban exiles-living in Miami and led by José Miró Cardona, a former Castro government official-and begin training them to overthrow Castro.

In May 1960, Castro established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and the United States responded by prohibiting the importation of Cuban sugar. To prevent the Cuban economy from collapsing-sugar exports to the United States comprised 80 percent of the country's total-the U.S.S.R. agreed to buy the sugar.

Kennedy Inherits the Invasion Plan

In January 1961, the U.S. government severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and stepped up its preparations for an invasion. Some State Department and other advisors to the new American president, John F. Kennedy, maintained that Castro posed no real threat to America.

Nonetheless, the new president believed that masterminding the Cuban leader's removal would show the Soviets, China and skeptical Americans that he was serious about winning the Cold War.

Kennedy had inherited Eisenhower's CIA campaign to train and equip a guerrilla army of Cuban exiles, but he had some doubts about the wisdom of the plan. The last thing he wanted, he said, was "direct, overt" intervention by the American military in Cuba: Soviets would likely see this as an act of war and might retaliate.

However, CIA officers told him they could keep U.S. involvement in the invasion a secret and, if all went according to plan, the campaign would spark an anti-Castro uprising on the island.

Bay of Pigs Invasion Begins

The first part of the plan was to destroy Castro's tiny air force, making it impossible for his military to resist the invaders. On April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in a squadron of American B-26 bombers, painted to look like stolen Cuban planes, and conducted a strike against Cuban airfields.

However, it turned out that Castro and his advisers knew about the raid and had moved his planes out of harm's way. Frustrated, Kennedy began to suspect that the plan the CIA had promised would be "both clandestine and successful" might in fact be "too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful."

But it was too late to hit the brakes: On April 17, the Cuban exile brigade began its invasion at an isolated spot on the island's southern shore known as the Bay of Pigs.

Almost immediately, the invasion was a disaster. The CIA had wanted to keep it a secret for as long as possible, but a radio station on the beach (which the agency's reconnaissance team had failed to spot) broadcast every detail of the operation to listeners across Cuba. Unexpected coral reefs sank some of the exiles' ships as they pulled into shore. Backup paratroopers landed in the wrong place.

Before long, Castro's troops had pinned the invaders on the beach, and the exiles surrendered after less than a day of fighting; 114 were killed and over 1,100 were taken prisoner.

Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs

According to many historians, the CIA and the Cuban exile brigade believed that President Kennedy would eventually allow the American military to intervene in Cuba on their behalf. However, the president was resolute: As much as he did not want to "abandon Cuba to the communists," he said, he would not start a fight that might end in World War III.

His efforts to overthrow Castro never flagged-in November 1961, Kennedy approved Operation Mongoose, an espionage and sabotage campaign-but never went so far as to provoke an outright war. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis inflamed American-Cuban-Soviet tensions even further.
READ MORE: The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Timeline
Sources

The Bay of Pigs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion and its Aftermath, April 1961-October 1962. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.
After 60 years, Bay of Pigs disaster still haunts veterans who fought. National Geographic.

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The Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 was a failed attack launched by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to push Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power. Since 1959, officials at the U.S. State Department and the CIA had attempted to remove Castro.

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Aerial view of Hiroshima depicts the terrific destructive force of the atomic bomb
United States Army Air Corps; Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

By August, 1945, Japan had lost World War II. Japan and the United States both knew it. How long would it be, however, before Japan surrendered? Japan was split between surrender or fighting to the end. They chose to fight.

In mid-July, President Harry S Truman was notified of the successful test of the atomic bomb, what he called "the most terrible bomb in the history of the world." Thousands of hours of research and development as well as billions of dollars had contributed to its production. This was no theoretical research project. It was created to destroy and kill on a massive scale. As president, it was Harry Truman's decision if the weapon would be used with the goal to end the war. "It is an awful responsibility that has come to us," the president wrote.

President Truman had four options: 1) continue conventional bombing of Japanese cities; 2) invade Japan; 3) demonstrate the bomb on an unpopulated island; or, 4) drop the bomb on an inhabited Japanese city.

While the United States began conventional bombing of Japan as early as 1942, the mission did not begin in earnest until mid-1944. Between April 1944 and August, 1945, an estimated 333,000 Japanese people were killed and 473,000 more wounded in air raids. A single firebombing attack on Tokyo in March 1945 killed more than 80,000 people. Truman later remarked, "Despite their heavy losses at Okinawa and the firebombing of Tokyo, the Japanese refused to surrender. The saturation bombing of Japan took much fiercer tolls and wrought far and away more havoc than the atomic bomb. Far and away. The firebombing of Tokyo was one of the most terrible things that ever happened, and they didn't surrender after that although Tokyo was almost completely destroyed."

In August 1945, it was clear that conventional bombing was not effective.

The United States could launch a traditional ground invasion of the Japanese home islands. However, experience showed that the Japanese did not easily surrender. They had been willing to make great sacrifices to defend the smallest islands. They were likely to fight even more fiercely if the United States invaded their homeland. During the battle at Iwo Jima in 1945, 6,200 US soldiers died. Later that year, on Okinawa, 13,000 soldiers and sailors were killed. Casualties on Okinawa were 35 percent; one out of three US participants was wounded or killed. Truman was afraid that an invasion of Japan would look like "Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other." Casualty predictions varied, but all were high. The price of invasion would be millions of American dead and wounded.

Estimates did not include Japanese casualties. Truman and his military advisers assumed that a ground invasion would "be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire, but also by a fanatically hostile population." Documents discovered after the war indicated that they were right. Despite knowing the cause was hopeless, Japan planned a resistance so ferocious, resulting in costs so appalling, that they hoped that the United States would simply call for a cease fire where each nation would agree to stop fighting and each nation would retain the territory they occupied at the time. Almost one-quarter million Japanese casualties were expected in the invasion. Truman wrote, "My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a human feeling for the women and children of Japan."

In August 1945, it appeared inevitable that Japanese civilians would have to suffer more death and casualties before surrender. A ground invasion would result in excessive American casualties as well.

Another option was to demonstrate the power of atomic bomb to frighten the Japanese into surrendering. An island target was considered, but it raised several concerns. First, who would Japan select to evaluate the demonstration and advise the government? A single scientist? A committee of politicians? How much time would elapse before Japan communicated its decision-and how would that time be used? To prepare for more fighting? Would a nation surrender based on the opinion of a single person or small group? Second, what if the bomb turned out to be a dud? This was a new weapon, not clearly understood. The world would be watching the demonstration of a new weapon so frightening that an enemy would surrender without a fight. What if this "super weapon" didn't work? Would that encourage Japan to fight harder? Third, there were only two bombs in existence at the time. More were in production, but, dud or not, was it worth it to expend 50% of the country's atomic arsenal in a demonstration?

In May 1945, Truman had formed the Interim Committee, a committee to advise the president about matters pertaining to the use of nuclear energy and weapons. The Committee's first priority was to advise on the use of the atomic bomb. After prolonged debate, the president received the Committee's historic conclusion: "We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war. We can see no acceptable alternative to direct military use."

Truman and his advisors concluded that only bombing a city would make an adequate impression. Any advance warning to evacuate a city would endanger the bomber crews; the Japanese would be forewarned and attempt to shoot them down. The target cities were carefully chosen. First, it had to be a city that had suffered little damage from conventional bombing so it couldn't be argued that the damage came from anything other than the atomic bomb. Second, it must be a city primarily devoted to military production. This was complicated, however, because in Japan, workers homes were intermingled with factories so that it was impossible to find a target that was exclusively military. Finally, Truman stipulated it should not be a city of traditional cultural significance to Japan, such as Kyoto. Truman did not seek to destroy Japanese culture or people; the goal was to destroy Japan's ability to make war.

So, on the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the world's first atom bomb over the city of Hiroshima.

The temperature near the blast site reached 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. The sky seemed to explode. Birds ignited in midair; asphalt boiled. People over two miles away burst into crumbling cinders. Others with raw skin hanging in flaps around their hips leaped shrieking into waterways to escape the heat. Men without feet stumbled about on the charred stumps of their ankles. Women without jaws screamed incoherently for help. Bodies described as "boiled octopuses" littered the destroyed streets. Children, tongues swollen with thirst, pushed floating corpses aside to soothe their scalded throats with bloody river water.

One eyewitness at Hiroshima recalled, "I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared.... I was shocked by the sight.... Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that - but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima - was so shocking that I simply can't express what I felt.... Hiroshima didn't exist - that was mainly what I saw - Hiroshima just didn't exist."

Approximately 80,000 people were killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 were injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the atomic fallout.

The President released a press release, which read in part, "Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. .... 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."

A 21-year-old American second lieutenant recalled, "When the bombs dropped and news began to circulate that [the invasion of Japan] would not, after all, take place, that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all."

One week later, on August 14, 1945, after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered. World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history, with between 50 and 85 million fatalities, was finally over.

At the time, the president seemed conflicted over his decision. The day after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, Truman received a telegram from Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, encouraging the president to use as many atomic bombs as possible on Japan, claiming the American people believed "that we should continue to strike the Japanese until they are brought groveling to their knees." Truman responded, "I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can't bring myself to believe that because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner. For myself I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the 'pigheadedness' of the leaders of a nation, and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless absolutely necessary."

On August 9, the day the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, Truman received a telegram from Samuel McCrea Cavert, a Protestant clergyman, who pleaded with the president to stop the bombing "before any further devastation by atomic bomb is visited upon her [Japan's] people." Two days later, Truman replied, "The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast."

Looking back, President Truman never shirked personal responsibility for his decision, but neither did he apologize. He asserted that he would not use the bomb in later conflicts, such as Korea. Nevertheless, given the same circumstances and choices that confronted him in Japan in 1945, he said he would do exactly the same thing.

It was heavy burden to bear. Speaking of himself as president, Truman said, "And he alone, in all the world, must say Yes or No to that awesome, ultimate question, 'Shall we drop the bomb on a living target?'" Every president since Harry Truman has had that power. None has exercised it.

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Harry Truman's Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (U.S. National Park Service)

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By August, 1945, Japan had lost World War II. Japan and the United States both knew it. How long would it be, however, before Japan surrendered? Japan was split between surrender or fighting to the end. They chose to fight.

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America Declares War

The agencies leading up to the Manhattan Project were first formed in 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after U.S. intelligence operatives reported that scientists working for Adolf Hitler were already working on a nuclear weapon.

At first, Roosevelt set up the Advisory Committee on Uranium, a team of scientists and military officials tasked with researching uranium's potential role as a weapon. Based on the committee's findings, the U.S. government started funding research by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard at Columbia University, which was focused on radioactive isotope separation (also known as uranium enrichment) and nuclear chain reactions.

The Advisory Committee on Uranium's name was changed in 1940 to the National Defense Research Committee, before finally being renamed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941 and adding Fermi to its list of members.

That same year, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt declared that the U.S. would enter World War II and align with Great Britain, France and Russia to fight against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific theater.

The Army Corps of Engineers joined the OSRD in 1942 with President Roosevelt's approval, and the project officially morphed into a military initiative, with scientists serving in a supporting role.

The Manhattan Project Begins

The OSRD formed the Manhattan Engineer District in 1942 and based it in the New York City borough of the same name. U.S. Army Colonel Leslie R. Groves was appointed to lead the project.

Fermi and Szilard were still engaged in research on nuclear chain reactions, the process by which atoms separate and interact, now at the University of Chicago, and successfully enriching uranium to produce uranium-235.

Meanwhile, scientists like Glenn Seaborg were producing microscopic samples of pure plutonium, and Canadian government and military officials were working on nuclear research at several sites in Canada.

On December 28, 1942, President Roosevelt authorized the formation of the Manhattan Project to combine these various research efforts with the goal of weaponizing nuclear energy. Facilities were set up in remote locations in New Mexico, Tennessee and Washington, as well as sites in Canada, for this research and related atomic tests to be performed.

Robert Oppenheimer and Project Y

Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was already working on the concept of nuclear fission (along with Edward Teller and others) when he was named director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in northern New Mexico in 1943.

Los Alamos Laboratory-the creation of which was known as Project Y-was formally established on January 1, 1943. The complex is where the first Manhattan Project bombs were built and tested.

On July 16, 1945, in a remote desert location near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated-the Trinity Test -creating an enormous mushroom cloud some 40,000 feet high and ushering in the Atomic Age.

Scientists working under Oppenheimer had developed two distinct types of bombs: a uranium-based design called "the Little Boy" and a plutonium-based weapon called "the Fat Man." With both designs in the works at Los Alamos, they became an important part of U.S. strategy aimed at bringing an end to World War II.

The Potsdam Conference

With the Germans sustaining heavy losses in Europe and nearing surrender, the consensus among U.S. military leaders in 1945 was that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end and force a full-scale invasion of the island nation, resulting in significant casualties on both sides.

On July 26, 1945, at the Potsdam Conference in the Allied-occupied city of Potsdam, Germany, the U.S. delivered an ultimatum to Japan-surrender under the terms outlined in the Potsdam Declaration (which, among other provisions, called for the Japanese to form a new, democratic and peaceful government) or face "prompt and utter destruction."

As the Potsdam Declaration provided no role for the emperor in Japan's future, the ruler of the island nation was unwilling to accept its terms.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Meanwhile, the military leaders of the Manhattan Project had identified Hiroshima, Japan, as an ideal target for an atomic bomb, given its size and the fact that there were no known American prisoners of war in the area. A forceful demonstration of the technology developed in New Mexico was deemed necessary to encourage the Japanese to surrender.

With no surrender agreement in place, on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay bomber plane dropped the as-yet untested "Little Boy" bomb some 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, causing unprecedented destruction and death over an area of five square miles. Three days later, with still no surrender declared, on August 9th, the "Fat Man" bomb was dropped over Nagasaki, the site of a torpedo-building plant, destroying more than three square miles of the city.

The two bombs combined killed more than 100,000 people and leveled the two Japanese cities to the ground.

The Japanese informed Washington, which following Roosevelt's death was under the new leadership of President Harry Truman, of their intention to surrender on August 10th, and formally surrendered on August 14, 1945.

Legacy of the Manhattan Project

With the development of weapons designed to bring about the end of World War II as its stated mission, it's easy to think that the story of the Manhattan Project ends in August 1945. However, that's far from the case.

Following the end of the war, the United States formed the Atomic Energy Commission to oversee research efforts designed to apply the technologies developed under the Manhattan Project to other fields.

Ultimately, in 1964, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson put an end to the U.S. government's effective monopoly over nuclear energy by allowing for private ownership of nuclear materials.

The nuclear fission technology perfected by the Manhattan Project engineers has since become the basis for the development of nuclear reactors, power generators, as well as other innovations, including medical imaging systems and radiation therapies for various forms of cancer.

Sources

Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. U.S. Army Center of Military History.
The Manhattan Project-Its Story. U.S. Department of Energy: Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
Leo Szilárd, a traffic light and a slice of nuclear history. Scientific American.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967). Atomic Archive.

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The agencies leading up to the Manhattan Project were first formed in 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after U.S. intelligence operatives reported that scientists working for Adolf Hitler were already working on a nuclear weapon. At first, Roosevelt set up the Advisory Committee on Uranium, a team of scientists and military officials tasked with researching uranium's potential role as a weapon.

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