The US decision to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 remains one of the most controversial events of the twentieth century. However, the controversy over the rights and wrongs of dropping the bomb has tended to obscure a number of fundamental and sobering truths about the development of this fearsome weapon. Above all, as this fascinating new history shows, the bomb dropped by a US pilot that hot August morning in 1945 was in many ways the world's offspring, in both a technological and a moral sense. And it was the world that would have to face its consequences, strategically, diplomatically, and culturally, in the years ahead.

Introduction: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima 1. The World's Atom 2. Great Britain: Refugees, Air Power, and the Possibility of the Bomb 3. Japan and Germany: The Doomsday Scenario 4. The United States: Imagining and Building the Bomb 5. The United States, II: Using the Bomb 6. Japan: The Atomic Bombs, and War's End 7. The Bomb, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War 8. The World's Bomb: Strategy, Culture, and Ethics, 1945-2000 Epilogue: The Bomb in the 21st Century

Andrew J. Rotter , Charles A. Dana Professor, Department of History, Colgate University

`Review from previous edition Informed and coherently argued' THE |d 13/03/08