This is John Bachelor. I speak tonight with the distinguished author, Evan Thomas, his

new book is Road to Surrender, Three Man and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

In specific, we focus on the interim committee meeting May 31, 1945 in Washington. The Secretary

of War Henry Stimson, the commander of the Army, George Marshall, Oppenheimer's at

present, so as Jimmy Burns, the assistant to the now deceased FDR. Both all the men are

looking to recommend to Harry Truman, the new president, to go ahead with the bomb. They're

not entirely sure what the bomb can do. As Evan describes, they leave out the radiation

part. They estimated it might kill 20,000 people. They imagine they'll be able to drop

on a manufacturing plant surrounded by workers' houses. All of this is make-believe. And what

we now see is that the first bombs, the one dropped in August of 1945, were the product

of a lot of guesswork and presumption and skipping parts. Here's Evan Thomas.

Well, it's twofold. One is to talk about targeting this atom bomb, but also to talk about

the world after the war is over. The control of the atom bomb. Is there a way to control

it, to limit this Frankenstein monster from getting out there? They talk about both

things. It is, I would say, an incoherent meeting. It's not what we'd imagine smart guys

would do. They end up with a kind of a muzzle. They decide that they're going to drop it

on a war plant surrounded by workers' homes. That's an attempt to have it both ways to say

that it's a military target, but it's going to kill a lot of people. Historians have had fun

with that because it's incoherent description, but it gets that enormous ambiguity of what

they're doing. They don't want to be war criminals. On the other hand, they want to end the war,

and they have to kill a lot of people to do it. And they're troubled by that. You know,

also, they don't absolutely know how big this bomb is. Oppenheim is there. And he says,

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