Revisionist historians of the nuclear age have long argued that it was not necessary to have used the atomic bombs in August 1945 to bring the Second World War to an end, and that a more conciliatory approach by the Truman administration towards the Soviet Union—being franker with Stalin about the bomb and giving him an assurance that it would not be used—would have created a better chance of achieving a less confrontational postwar relationship between the two powers. They have (...) also challenged the “myth” that the reason for using the bombs was to save American lives. (shrink)