When the test bomb, code-named Trinity, was detonated in the New Mexico desert, physicist Richard Feynman did a victory dance with his bongo drums. And when Dorothy McKibben, the office manager who served as a kind of gatekeeper at Los Alamos, heard that a nuclear device had been exploded at Hiroshima, she turned to her son and exclaimed, “That’s our Bomb.’’ President Truman agreed, calling it “the greatest thing in history.’’
And yet, as Garry Wills, the provocative, prolific, and polymath professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University, reminds us, the bomb proved to be “a fatal miracle.’’ Fatal as a weapon - and fatal to the delicate system of checks and balances over the power of the presidency. In “Bomb Power,’’ Wills argues that the Manhattan Project, which proceeded without authorization, funding, or oversight by Congress, planted the seeds of a massive shift of power to the executive branch. From World War II to the Cold War and later the War on Terror, “the permanent emergency’’ initially claimed by Truman was used to justify a monopoly by the executive branch on the use of nuclear weapons, the establishment of military bases around the world, the formation of intelligence agencies, the launching of covert operations, and a vast expansion of state secrets. For seven decades, he concludes, what Wills refers to as the National Security State “has made the abnormal normal and constitutional diminishment the settled order.’’
