Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Hiroshima woke on a Monday. The rainy season had ended and the morning was clear. The all clear had sounded just before eight, so people came out of the shelters and went back to work, and several thousand schoolchildren carried on pulling down houses to make firebreaks against the raids everyone knew were coming.

Three aircraft were tracked coming in from the south. Nobody took much notice. In the entire history of aerial warfare, three aircraft had never mattered.

This book tells the whole of it: the empire that could not stop fighting, the secret industry built to make the impossible, the committee that chose the cities, both missions hour by hour, the survivors, and the eighty one years since.

And it asks the harder question. Not whether the decision was right, but whether anybody actually made one.