Word: weaponize
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...left hand resting on an inexpensive Gideon Bible, Harry S Truman took the presidential oath of office on 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...
...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's effect in an unpopulated area. No other alternatives were brought forward. Without qualifications, the committee recommended "that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible...
...discomforting truth is that Allied leaders strode unhesitantly into the atomic age. "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used," Truman later wrote. "[N]or did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise," Winston Churchill added. Nothing in the record contradicts them. Dropping the Bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, was among history's most notorious foregone conclusions...
...press that logic further, and you arrive at an uncomfortable place. If nuclear weapons are so great at keeping the peace, why shouldn't everyone have them? And what happens when the Bomb falls into the hands of those who don't remember the legacy of Aug. 6--or simply choose not to? Sixty years after Hiroshima, 14 years after the Soviet Union imploded, the great question facing strategists--facing all of us--is less how a nation might array its nuclear forces and more how to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons from spinning out of control. The Bush...
Morris R. Jeppson, 83 Weapon Test Officer on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima...