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Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. By Michael D. Gordin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xv+209. $24.95.
On the sixth of August 1945 the city of Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb. Two days later the Red Army attacked and overwhelmed the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria; and on the ninth of August a second bomb struck Nagasaki. Three weeks previously, U.S. intelligence had learned from intercepted signals that the Japanese government had informed the Russians that the emperor "desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated." Around the same time (mid-July), when President Harry Truman received Joseph Stalin's assurance at the PotsdamConference that the Red Army attack was forthcoming, he noted: "Fini Japs when that comes about." And the following day he wrote to his wife: "I've gotten what I came for-Stalin goes to war August 15 . . . I'll say that we'll end the war a year sooner now." The war was rapidly winding down and its end was near.
In those early days of August, the atomic bomb figured prominently...