BOOK: The Target Committee by Paul Ham

My Review: This book was great and very informative but made me angry at the same time. Everyone knows the almighty damage nuclear weapons can do and yet here we have a group of men picking and choosing which cities to destroy first, not even a thinking about the millions of innocent people that died or had a painful health effects many years after, their is never going to be any justification for that.

How did America choose the targets for the atomic bomb? 

What made Hiroshima preferable over Kyoto or Tokyo?

Critical to the mission to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a series of meetings set up in mid-1945 and comprising America’s most powerful military, political and scientific chiefs.

The committee men would decide where and how the first nuclear weapons would be used in anger.

In this absorbing and provocative narrative, historian Paul Ham shines a torch on their arguments to reveal the thinking behind the atomic destruction of two cities and how the Target Committee justified it at the time.

Quotes from The Target Committee:

‘The ideal target city for an atomic bomb should possess sentimental value to the Japanese so its destruction would adversely affect the will of the people to continue the war’ – Major General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project

‘Kyoto lies in the form of a cup and thus would be exceptionally vulnerable, It is exclusively a place of homes and art and shrines’ - Henry Stimson, US War Secretary