Often the moments that change the course of human history aren't understood until the consequences of such actions are already realized. That wasn't so with the atomic bomb — President Harry Truman knew the invention was going to change the world forever when he authorized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
Truman recalled the moment he told Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin about the plan to drop the bomb — a memory he scrawled on the back of a photograph rediscovered by presidential historian Michael Beschloss:
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