Roosevelt was privately meditating on the race against the Germans to build an atomic bomb. On Saturday, December 9, he confided to Margaret Suckley over dinner, as she recorded in her diary, that he had just gotten “a secret report from a German source” that the Germans had developed a “bomb which will kill by concussion everything within a mile. They are planning to use it on New York [to break American] morale… not seeming to realize that it will have the exact opposite effect… He said that in the next war, the side which first uses these new explosives will undoubtedly win.”
The President inaccurately told his friend that “the Germans are way ahead of us in that direction, though we are doing a lot of research trying to catch [up] to them.”
In a premonition of the postwar world, Suckley wrote in her diary that “the human race is out to destroy itself. Only the few who live in isolated places may survive.”
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “Lord Give the President Strength.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 171. Print.
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