In the eight decades since the United States deployed the most destructive weapon ever used, conventional wisdom has held that American leaders were faced with a difficult choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Japanese and Allied lives in bloody combat, or use the fearsome atom bomb in the hopes of convincing the Japanese emperor to surrender. President Truman—in what many have come to regard as an immoral decision—ordered the military to drop the bomb. Now, historian Alex Wellerstein offers a revisionist narrative of what happened in the spring of 1945, uncovering new research that points to a very different chain of events. Wellerstein reveals a much more complex situation in which American leaders, limited by time, knowledge, and authority, and under great secrecy, each jockeyed to influence if and how the bomb would be used. Refuting previous accounts, Wellerstein explains how there was no official decision to use the bomb, nor did President Truman likely know tha