There were certainly a number of cautionary flags waved at the Executive Branch in the period just before the atomic bomb was first used against a Japanese target. As I wrote in an earlier post here, Dwight Eisenhower was adamantly opposed to the use of the bomb on a city, preferring an example to be made of the thing on an unpopulated area; in his memoirs, General Spaatz (who had received the only written communication authorizing the use of the bomb) was privately against using the weapon on a city. As early as 1939 Albert Einstein famously communicated with Franklin Roosevelt his concerns on the possibility of the terrifying nature of a bomb produced by the efforts (of Fermi and Szilard and many others). In all Einstein wrote four letters to the President, the first and fourth of which we reproduce here.

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