It's time once again for the AskHistorians Book Giveaway! Our lucky winner this month is Elm! The selection of books we have available this month are:

• The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan, recommended by /u/NMW.

• This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason by Mark Molesky, recommend by /u/caffarelli.

• The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom by Grant Jones, recommended by /u/mictlantecuhtli.

• And my own suggestion this month (shamelessly stolen from our guest), Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower.

Want a chance to get a free book? Help support the podcast via Patreon!

Special thanks to /u/40kfreak, Eric Hacke, Will Raybould, Elm, Charles-Eric Lemelin, Andrew Stead, William Ryan, Stuart Gorman, Bill Rubin, Sarah Gilbert, Mark Katerberg, Vlad, and Max M. for their generous support of the podcast through the AskHistorians Patreon. And thanks to all our new supporters as well!

And a big big thanks to Alex Wellerstein for being such a wonderful guest on the show!

From the article mentioned:

The draft version of the strike order, written on July 24, 1945, gave the targets as “Hiroshima, Kokura, and Niigata in the priority listed.” On the version in Groves’s papers, in the National Archives, someone has crossed out “in the priority listed” and scrawled in “and Nagasaki.”

Do we know who altered the orders and why?

Just wanted to say a huge thanks to you guys for doing the podcast, it was an awesome episode that kept me entertained on my runs!

I also had a question for /u/restricteddata, how do you feel that public outreach (like your blog) has affected your academic career? Has it helped or hindered it? Or has it just been another avenue of exploration? As someone who is just starting down a similar career path I'm curious what your experiences of public outreach have been.

Thanks again!

Hey /u/restricteddata,

1. What was the international reaction to the bombs? What were international headlines like?

2. I saw a paper from shortly after Nagasaki that had a government scientist arguing that there would not be any radiation fallout. Is this true?

Given that I live near the area, I have always been curious as to the reasons why Oak Ridge, TN was chosen to do a lot of the grunt work in the process of manufacturing the bombs. How in the world did they come up with a place in the middle of nowhere in TN to do all of this?

We went over some documents regarding the dropping of the bombs recently in University and one particularly interesting one was a Petition from Chicago based scientists/engineers pleading with Truman to reconsider dropping the weapon from July 1945. Our course is more a historiography/history theory course so we didn't touch more on this point.

How common was this sentiment throughout the Manhatten Project prior to the weapon actually being used? And if it was not a common sentiment, what would have made the Chicagoan ones express this?

Here's a link to the petition for reference.

Was there a significant number of suicides by survivors in the weeks / months / years after the bomb was dropped?

I can't imagine losing everything - potentially all work, family and friends in one moment.

I can't seem to find the podcast on Android. Not on Pocket Cast or Google Play music, and the link doesn't work for me.

Question for /u/restricteddata:

Did Truman even make a decision to use the bomb at all? You've made it clear that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Truman never really sat down with his advisers at any point and carefully weighed the pros and cons of using the bomb. My question takes this a step further by asking whether Truman even made a decision in the first place. I noticed that the formal authorization for using the atomic bombs wasn't even sent out under Truman's name.

I'm just wondering if there was ever a point where Truman told anyone, "I hereby authorize/command you to use the atomic bombs."

So there's an anecdote in former Ford president and Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca's autobiography of him touring Kyoto with Mitsubishi Motors chairman Tomio Kubo and asking how such a beautiful, peaceful city came to be home to a major engine manufacturing plant. (Hopefully you can read at least part of this at the Google books link.) Kubo told him it was where they built bombers during the war, because President & Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt vacationed in Kyoto before the war and fell in love with it, so FDR gave orders the city wasn't to be bombed. The Japanese apparently learned of these orders and built their aircraft plant there.

When you related Henry Stimson's rumoured personal connection to Kyoto as one of the bandied-about reasons it was spared as a nuclear target, I remembered this anecdote immediately, but was immediately skeptical at how close the two stories are. Is there any evidence that FDR had a personal affinity for Kyoto that shaped his military policy towards it? I've not heard of this anywhere else, so I'm wondering if the anecdote was actually referring to Stimson, but Iacocca, Kubo, or whomever Kubo heard the story from got confused at some point and attributed it to FDR.

Hello Professor Wellerstein,

I've scoured the blog and the subreddit for an answer to this, but I couldn't find it. Feel free to offer a link or a copy-paste answer if you have already provided one. The context of Oppenheimer's "I am become death" quote had me wondering; did Oppenheimer himself express regret or doubt in the project? Did he consider himself a pacifist?