“Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power,” the American intellectual Henry Adams wrote in 1862, “and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.” The grandson and great-grandson of two American presidents, Adams was writing at the height of the Civil War, concerned about science outpacing morality. Eight decades later, with the U.S. in the throes of another, even more devastating war, three men would reckon with the dilemma that Adams foresaw. Their stories are brilliantly told in Evan Thomas’s new book, The Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.
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Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II; By Evan Thomas; Random House
336 pp., $28.00
A former journalist at Time and Newsweek and author of eleven books, Thomas has chosen three very different individuals to tell the tale of the final days of World War II and the decision to use nuclear weapons for the first time. What emerges is a deeply human story, with men wrestling with decisions upon which potentially millions of lives would be lost — and saved.
Two of them were in the unenviable position of having to kill thousands in order, Thomas convincingly argues, to save thousands more. And they were conscious that by using nuclear weapons, they were changing warfare, and indeed the world, forever.
