Ralph Austin Bard 27 June

Ralph Austin Bard was a Chicago financier who served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1941-1945, and as Under Secretary, 1944-1945. He was one of eight members of the Interim Committee appointed to advise President Harry S. Truman on the use of the atomic bomb. Although opinions varied, on June 1, 1945, the Committee: "agreed… that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning." However, on this day, June 27, 1945, Bard, had second thoughts and sent a memo to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson suggesting that the Japanese government be given some warning before the use of the atomic bomb. "The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling," he wrote, adding "that the Japanese government may be searching for some opportunity which they could use as a medium of surrender." On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese City of Hiroshima without the warning. "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds." as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Bhagavad Gita put it.