What could the AEC, or the military, tell Truman, of all people, about questions of broad atomic policy? It would be, he quipped, “like trying to teach grandmother how to spin.”
Truman chuckled audibly; Lilienthal’s tactic was working.
Lilienthal wound up with a brief recap of the same arguments: The AEC alone had the expertise to safely handle atomic bombs at this point, and more generally, this was a fundamental question of civilian versus military control. It would be up to Truman to decide what to do.
The military’s rebuttal was, in Lilienthal’s mind, “simply beyond belief,” given the gravity of the times and the obvious disinclination of Truman toward their position. Instead of reacting to anything specific Lilienthal had said, the secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, related a visit he had recently made to Los Alamos, attempting to compare the atomic bomb to more mundane commercial items. Lilienthal recorded Symington as saying:
Mr. President, it is just like having some goods you manufactured, well, when the salesmen go out on the road with it, they learn about the troubles the customer is griping about, and that way you make it better. . . . I talked to some scientists at Los Alamos, and one fellow, I forgot his name, he said he didn’t believe the law permitted the military to have the bomb, and I don’t believe he thought we ought to use it anyway.
Lilienthal’s diary account of Truman’s reply is worth repeating in its entirety:
The President was giving this line of irrelevant talk a very fishy eye; at this point he said, poker-face, “I don’t either. I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that” (here he looked down at his desk, rather reflectively) “that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon.” (I shall never forget this particular expression.) “It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”