Five Days In August - How World War II Became A Nuclear War

Abstract

This short book presents a reconsideration of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in the last weeks of World War II. Given the considerable scholarship on the subject, it is difficult to find much new to say. Yet Michael Gordin, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, does. As he notes, diplomatic, military, and scientific historians have explored the dropping of the atomic bomb in different ways and asked different questions.