This is CBSI on the world. I'm with Evan Thomas. His new book is Road to Surrender,

Three Men in the Countdown to the End of World War II. The two bombs have been used against Hiroshima

and Nagasaki. The Japanese cabinet is frozen. It cannot move one way or the other. It's negotiating in some

fashion. The Americans, however, are reacting to the after-action photos that they're seeing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And now the question is, what comes next? because the Japanese had not yet surrendered.

Evan, the thinking is that there's another bomb. I believe it will be ready the middle of the

month. General Marshall is aware there's another bomb. There might be even more bombs. I think he's

asked how many can I have by November 1st?

The third bomb seems to be the one that the debate is, General Spots, for example, do we use it on

Tokyo? What was their thinking about dropping that bomb on the emperor? General Spots, although he's

in his heart against dropping any atom bombs, he comes up with the idea of bombing Tokyo.

Now, that may sound pretty apocalyptic, but actually his thought is to drop the bomb on a burned out area of Tokyo.

About 16 square miles were burned in March, at least another five square

miles in May. Much of Tokyo is just a burn ruin. And so General Spots's thought is they will drop a bomb

in the burned-out area. They had this grisly expression called the scare radius.

The radius of the bomb would be enough not to kill the emperor and his men,

but where they'd see the flash and the boom, it would scare them, the scare radius,

not the lethal radius, but the scare radius.

Or spots also had to thought of dropping the bomb in Tokyo Harbor to create a

demonstration there. Now, in retrospect, that would have been unwise because it would have created a

radioactive tidal wave. So that was not a good idea, but he did have that idea. And that's what

they're thinking about at third bomb. And it appears that they persuaded Truman

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