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It was President Truman who made that decision and he had his motives.

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Truman actually made no such decision.

  1. the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan was made before FDR died, they would obviously not be needed on Germany
  2. the target selection list was made in a meeting in May 1945 (Truman was not there and made no suggestions)
  3. orders were written by the Army to drop the atomic bombs on Japan as quickly as they became available
  4. one bomb was tested on July 16, 1945 to confirm the complicated plutonium implosion design worked as expected, Truman was informed at the Yalta conference of this
  5. the Little Boy and Fatman atomic bombs arrived on Tinian in early August
  6. the field commanders of the 509th composite group selected 3 Japanese cities from the approved list for the Little Boy atomic bomb
  7. Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima (the primary target for the mission) on August 6, 1945
  8. the field commanders of the 509th composite group selected 3 Japanese cities from the approved list for the Fatman atomic bomb
  9. Fatman was dropped on Nagasaki (the secondary target for the mission, Kokura the primary was to smoky for the bombardier to see the Aim Point)
  10. Los Alamos completed another Fatman type atomic bomb and shipped it to San Francisco
  11. the Japanese indicated that they would surrender
  12. Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Japan to stop (this was Truman's only decision and order related to the use of atomic bombs, up to then he just allowed the previous decisions to remain in place with no interference)
  13. when the next atomic bomb arrived in San Francisco it was returned to Los Alamos instead of being flown to Tinian (where it had been planned to drop it on a third Japanese city sometime in late August)
Truman's postwar policy was to virtually gut the conventional military forces of the US (to maintain a balanced budget) and depend 100% on atomic bombs in any future war. Unfortunately in gutting the conventional military forces he also significantly crippled both the Manhattan Project (which was still responsible for building those atomic bombs until the AEC took over in 1947) and the aircraft industry that was needed to build the new atomic capable bombers (e.g. B-29 Silverplate, B-36, B-47, B-50).

When the AEC briefed Truman in 1947 on the status of the US atomic stockpile, they reported something like "we have parts for about a dozen atomic bombs but nobody that knows how to assemble those into usable atomic bombs and there are no plans to train people to assemble atomic bombs", it is said that Truman's face blanched grey as he realized he actually had neither a conventional military nor an atomic military available with which to defend the US. It seems Truman was expecting a stockpile of 100 to 150 ready to use atomic bombs by 1947, but he had made no attempts to monitor the status of the stockpile from the end of the war until the AEC was established two years later.

Truman was an extremely hands off president, leaving many decisions to subordinates and leaving previously made decisions by others stand unless he saw a vital need to "change direction".

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