Two-minute warning!
And we’re off. The entire documentary is premised on the idea that President Truman had to make the decision to “go ahead” with using the atomic bomb on Japan. Trouble is, he never actually made any such decision. At best, Truman did not oppose plans that were already in motion.
Wallace claims Truman was completely in the dark about the Manhattan Project when he suddenly became vice president in April 1945. That’s not exactly true. As a senator, Truman tried to investigate the enormous sums being spent, but was warned off by the secretary of war.
Wallace notes the Manhattan Project ultimately cost about $2 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $30 billion today.
Not-so-fun-fact: the decision to use the atomic bomb (assuming it could be built) on Japan—and only Japan—was made less than nine months after the Manhattan Project was officially created and well before Germany was defeated:
Discussing the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, the documentary strangely chooses to use footage from the underwater Crossroads Baker nuclear test at Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946, before switching to the actual footage of the Trinity test. 
Wallace correctly notes that General Eisenhower and General MacArthur both opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan, convinced Japan was already militarily defeated. There were others in the military who also did not believe the bomb was necessary to win the war against Japan.
The documentary has completely skipped over how Hiroshima came to be on the target list, including how it was “set aside” from attack by conventional firebombs and how Kyoto was first selected and then removed from the list of targets.
Second film faux pas: the color footage of Little Boy exploding over Hiroshima is actually Fat Man exploding over Nagasaki three days later (there is no color footage of the Hiroshima bombing). Still photos and subsequent black-and-white footage is the Little Boy mushroom cloud.
Hibakusha Hideko Tamara Snider’s account of surviving the bombing is very moving, but there are no photographs of any victims. Wallace just notes that Hideko had to walk by dead bodies while searching for her mother. Photographs show the nearly flattened city but no people.
The documentary shows Hiroshima’s ruined “military headquarters,” buttressing Wallace’s claim Hiroshima was a legitimate military target. It notes that 70,000 people were killed (the actual number will never be known, but is likely larger) but, again, doesn’t show any of them.
The documentary also completely fails to mention the Soviet Union’s invasion of Japan on August 9, 1945, which many historians now believe was the cause of Japan’s surrender—not the bombings of Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki.
Coming back from a commercial break to close things out, Wallace does mention “Russia entering the war,” but that’s the entire extent of it. No reference at all to any historical scholarship that the invasion, not the bombings, ultimately ended the war.
Today, intones Wallace, “the future of mankind rests on a hair trigger. But 75 years later, only one country has used the weapon in war. A profound irony: that something so deadly was used to create peace.” This is the standard and very simplistic justification for the bombings.
At Hideko’s request, Wallace takes her to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Virginia to see the refurbished Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb that destroyed her city and killed her 30-year-old mother. She offers a simple prayer for peace in the world.
Wallace closes out, “For all the questions about the morality of dropping the atomic bomb, it’s unrealistic to think Truman would make any other choice. ... And he struggled with the decision, through sleepless nights and fierce headaches. ...”
“But in the end, he believed using his new super weapon would end the war a year sooner and save hundreds of thousands of American lives.”
Addendum — Given his book’s title and the tick-tock tone of the documentary, it’s ironic Wallace misstates the time Hiroshima was obliterated, saying Little Boy was released at 9:15am, which was actually the time on Tinian (where the Enola Gay took off on its fateful mission).
But as anyone who has spent any time studying the history knows, it was 8:15am in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded, a fact immortalized on the faces of watches and clocks recovered later, some of which are now on permanent display at the peace museum there.
