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He was also uneasy about the long-term goals of both Churchill and Stalin. Later in the conflict, he referred to the "Four Policemen"-the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China-when discussing the post-war world. Churchill was opposed to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but he also was concerned with maintaining the far-flung British Empire and his nation's declining status as a world power.ĭuring the war, President Roosevelt was deeply concerned with keeping China and the Soviet Union fighting in order to tie up the bulk of the Japanese and German forces. Stalin, recognizing that Russia was invaded by Germany twice during the twentieth century, was primarily concerned with securing his western borders. There were fundamental ideological and cultural differences between the western democracies and the Soviet Union, and the Allied leaders had disparate visions for the post-war world. For their part, the western allies were painfully aware that Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 and brutally occupied the Baltic States and part of Finland after the war began.Ī second important diplomatic objective, especially toward the end of the conflict, was winning the peace. The Soviets complained that the Americans and British were prepared to fight until the last Russian fell.
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There were, for example, heated disagreements over a second military front in Europe. Wartime unity was difficult to maintain, however. The principal goal of the "Big Three" Allied leaders-President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet premier Josef Stalin-was winning the war, and most of their early diplomacy focused on military issues. Reports of approaching bad weather convinced the Americans to drop the next bomb on August 9.The "Grand Alliance," as Churchill phrased it, was a shaky expedient held together by the common desire to defeat the Axis Powers. The decision to use Fat Man just days after the explosion of Little Boy at Hiroshima was based on two calculations: the always-changeable Japanese weather-the appearance of a typhoon or other major weather event could force deployment to be postponed for weeks-and the belief that two bombings following in quick succession would convince the Japanese that the Americans had plenty of atomic devices and were ready to keep using them until Japan finally surrendered.
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The scientists and ordnance experts at Los Alamos had agonized for years over how to use plutonium in an atomic weapon, and Fat Man was the result. This was a plutonium implosion device of far greater complexity than the Little Boy bomb used at Hiroshima, which used uranium-235 in a fairly conventional explosive mechanism. Like Kokura and Hiroshima, it had not suffered much thus far from American conventional bombing.Īfter the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, workers on Tinian island labored intensely to put the finishing touches on the Fat Man bomb and prepare it for use. Nagasaki also was an important port city. It was larger, with an approximate population of 263,000 people, and some major military facilities, including two Mitsubishi military factories. The third choice, Nagasaki was a port city located about 100 miles from Kokura. That was one of the reasons the Target Committee thought it would be a good option after Hiroshima. The Americans knew all this, but strangely had not targeted the city yet in their conventional bombing campaign. In Kokura, a city of 130,000 people on the island of Kyushu, the Japanese operated one of their biggest ordnance factories, manufacturing among other things chemical weapons.
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Instead they identified Kokura as the second target after Hiroshima. The Target Committee appointed by President Harry Truman to decide which Japanese cities would receive the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombings did not place Nagasaki among their top two choices.