Read this excerpt from an account of President Truman’s decision create and use an atomic bomb during World War II. The epic story of the development of the atomic bomb is well known. It began in 1939 when a small group of eminent scientists in this country called to the attention of the United States Government the vast potentialities of atomic energy for military purposes and warned that the Germans were already carrying on experiments in this field. The program initiated October of that year with a very modest appropriation and later expanded into the two-billion-dollar Manhattan Project, which had only one purpose--to harness the energy of the atom in a chain reaction to produce a bomb that could be carried by aircraft if possible, and to produce it before the Germans could.