Kenneth D. Nichols and Stafford L. Warren

Major General Kenneth D. Nichols, one of the top-level commanders of the Manhattan Project, recounts the events just before and after the Japanese surrender. He states that even after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Nichols’s superior, Brigadier General Groves, ordered the Manhattan Project to prepare a third bomb to be used against the Japanese homeland. But within days, the Japanese did surrender, and the U.S. military turned their attention to learning the specific effects these bombs had on people and the environment of the two devastated cities.

Nichols sent various groups to Japan to assess the damage. One of these groups was a survey team under Stafford L. Warren. They left San Francisco, California, on August 14, 1945, and surveyed Hiroshima on September 8 and Nagasaki on October 8. Warren found...