Would Roosevelt have dropped the bomb?

by MyMostGuardedSecret

A quick google brings up a bunch of long blog posts and essays that all start off basically the same way: "we don't know. He died too fast." But that's obviously not a satisfying answer. What were his attitudes toward the bomb during his presidency? What did he tell his advisers about it? What have those close to him said on the matter since his death?

Obviously we can't get into the head of a dead man, and we can't predict an alternate future. But we can guess, based on some evidence, what he might have done.

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Presumably by "long blog posts" you include the one I wrote some time ago which discusses what we do and don't know about this? (It is the first result that comes up if you Google your title.) It discusses every piece of evidence that I have ever seen that gives any hint about this at all.

(I don't mean to give a short answer, but since I have actually written this up at some length with citation... I thought it was worth highlighting rather than re-hashing.)

I'm happy to answer further questions about it, but you should take a look at the examples I give there, which are very much in line with "what evidence do we have about his attitudes towards the use of the bomb" question. The answer is: we don't have much, but what we do have suggests he was open to using it (even against Germany, as I have written in another post).