The release of the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer in July 2023 prompted renewed discussion over the development of the nuclear bomb and its deployment in August 1945. That discussion would have been enriched if more of the participants in it had taken the time to read Evan Thomas's Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.
Thomas, one-time editor of Newsweek and renowned biographer of such notable figures as Robert F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, and Sandra Day O'Connor, sets out to provide “a narrative of how the most destructive war in history ended—and very nearly did not” (p. xiii). His subject is the endgame of the war in the Pacific and he tells dramatic parallel stories tracking the concurrent deliberations and decisions in both the United States and Japan as the two countries moved toward the denouement of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To...