A diary kept by a U.S. official has shown that two months after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Dwight Eisenhower, then an Army general, expressed misgivings about what had happened, a U.S. think tank said Tuesday.
It is already known that before the atomic bombings Eisenhower asked then President Harry Truman not to use nuclear arms, and the diary underlines that position. It was kept by an aide to U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman.
During a dinner meeting at his residence in a Frankfurt suburb with Harriman on Oct. 4, 1945, Eisenhower mentioned how he "had hoped that the war might have ended without our having to use the atomic bomb."
Eisenhower at that time was the Frankfurt-based military governor of the U.S. Occupied Zone. He succeeded Truman as U.S. president in 1953 and served two terms until 1961.
The National Security Archive, a think tank under the George Washington University in the U.S. capital, released Eisenhower's comment as part of a diary kept by Robert Mieklejohn, an assistant to Harriman.
