The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction - The Atlantic
On May 10, 1945, three days after Germany had surrendered to the Allied powers and ended World War II in Europe, a carefully selected group of scientists and military personnel met in an office in Los Alamos, New Mexico. With Germany out of the war, the top minds within the Manhattan Project, the American effort to design an atomic bomb, focused on the choices of targets within Japan. The group was loosely known as the Target Committee, and the question they sought to answer essentially was this: Which of the preserved Japanese cities would best demonstrate the destructive power of the atomic bomb. General Leslie Groves, the Army engineer in charge of the Manhattan Project, had been ruminating on targets since late 1944. at a preliminary meeting two weeks earlier, he had laid down his criteria. The target should: possess sentimental value to the Japanese so its destruction would “adversely affect” the will of the people to continue the war. have some military significance—munitions factories, troop concentrations, and so on. be mostly intact, to demonstrate the awesome destructive power of an atomic bomb. A fortnight later, at the formal May 10 target meeting, Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist on the project, ran through the agenda. Source: www.theatlantic.com
