These Truths: A History of the United States

The bombing of Hiroshima marked the beginning of an unprecedented political era “in which technological change wildly outpaced the human capacity for moral reckoning” (521). Truman found out about the bombing while on board a cruiser. The White House informed the press the next day. Then, several days later, Americans celebrated the Japanese surrender. The Manhattan Project had been classified, as were the computers that the military had been building. ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the first electronic digital computer for general use. It was the size of a room. The Allied Powers had been interested in computers during the war for two reasons: to break secret codes and to calculate weapons trajectories. In 1942, scientists built a computer with vacuum tubes in the interest of making them process faster. During the war, FDR created the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, both of which were led by engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush. Atomic scientists took their message of using scientific knowledge for industrial progress to the public, speaking at churches and synagogues, schools, libraries, and Kiwanis clubs. Others advocated for the federal government to fund the development of computer science.