Word: stimsonisms
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...Henry Stimson knew a thing or two about excellence. A graduate of Andover and Yale, he was a famed lawyer, the governor general of the Philippines, secretary of war and secretary of state, and was, by any standard, among the cream of political life in the United States. Yet four years before his death in 1950, he wrote a letter to James B. Conant ’14 that suggested something less than satisfaction...
...mathematicians and cryptographers, clerks and military analysts, often with the most trivial-seeming tasks. Yet it is work that no major nation feels it can afford to halt ... In the U.S., espionage was grossly neglected until the advent of the cold war. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was shocked to learn that the State Department had a cryptographic bureau. He fired the founder of the code-breaking agency, observing: "Gentlemen do not read other people's mail." But since then, the U.S. has overcome these and other scruples. TIME...
...April 12, 1945. It was an extra 13 days before he received his first substantial briefing on the U.S. effort to develop an atomic weapon--a process fast approaching its climactic stage after more than three years of colossal expense, toil and urgency. Neither Secretary of War Henry Stimson nor Leslie Groves, overseer of the vast atomic project, was in a particular hurry to get the new President's ear because they knew that all the important choices about the Bomb had already been settled. Their conversation with the President on April 25 proceeded accordingly. "Within four months we shall...
...happened, the war in Europe ended before the bomb was built. Stimson appointed the so-called Interim Committee on May 1, 1945, to give advice on the Bomb's use against Japan. Scholars have probed the record of the committee's month-long existence in vain for evidence of the kind of deliberative decision-making process that the resort to nuclear weaponry might seem to have warranted. Stimson asked the committee primarily for recommendations about how, not whether, to use the new weapon. Members spent only about 10 minutes of a lunch break discussing a possible demonstration of the Bomb...
...creation might unleash radioactive fallout that would make the Bomb a more sinister weapon than even chemical warfare. Truman and his advisers knew that the explosion would be phenomenally large, but considered it no more morally repulsive than the massive fire-bombing raids that had cremated much of Tokyo. Stimson, the man who wrestled most with these imponderables, called the Bomb "the most terrible weapon ever known," but even he considered it "as legitimate as any other of the deadly explosive weapons of modern...