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    Three days later, another B-29 dropped the second atomic bomb in history. This bomb exploded over the city of Nagasaki and took the lives of approximately 36,000, a death toll that also climbed steadily in the following weeks. All told, both cities experienced death rates of 54 percent. 25 On August 14, Japan surrendered, and Americans celebrated with abandon. Speculation about how atomic weapons would change the world was already underway, but it was overshadowed by the war’s end. 26 Celebrants took to the streets of Washington. Firecrackers exploded, alcohol flowed freely, a conga line formed in Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Truman stepped out on the White House lawn and spoke briefly to a gathering crowd. “This is the great day,” he said, “the day we have been looking for since December 7, 1941.” 27 And in the days to come, Washingtonians eagerly looked forward to an easing of wartime hardships. Although new cars and housing starts soon appeared, one wartime development remained in Washington: an expanding military and national security establishment.
    Washington and the Postwar National Security State
    In 1940, the War and Navy Departments shared a problem with District residents—crowding. The military’s lack of space wasn’t new, though; the services had outgrown their shared headquarters by the early twentieth century. Completed in 1888, the State, War, and Navy Building (also called the Old Executive Office Building) was a granite structure with pitched mansard roofs and carved marble fireplaces. 28 The building seemed better suited to an era when diplomats used hand-carved pens and naval vessels fired grapeshot. By 1917, the building was too small for all three departments, resulting in the construction on the Mall of “temporary” wartime buildings. Along Constitution Avenue, stretching between 17th and 21st Streets, stood the Munitions and Navy Buildings, comb-shaped, three-story structures of steel and concrete. Both “tempos” still stood 25 years after they were built, and World War II forced the construction of additional tempos. Clustered around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, these wood and stucco structures consumed the Mall’s verdant lawns and were connected by two covered pas sageways spanning the pool. As if unworthy of names, mere letters identified the buildings: W and N, J and K.
    Yet the military needed more space. Even before the United States entered the war, the Army’s Chief of Construction, Brigadier General Brehon Somervell, wanted to end the wasted man-hours resulting from the scattering of 24,000 War Department personnel to 17 different buildings. Somervell envisioned a single headquarters capable of administering the duties of the entire military, but this sensible goal faced stiff opposition. Some brass feared centralization would erode their authority. Members of Congress fretted over the cost, while others questioned the need for a huge military headquarters in a nation seeking to avoid war. Though Roosevelt supported Somervell, he balked at the proposed site next to Arlington National Cemetery. The idea of the military’s headquarters and a veterans’ cemetery bordering one another unsettled the President, who also disliked the five-sided design. Somervell moved the site farther south, away from Arlington, but the blueprints remained unchanged. Without waiting for final presidential approval, the headstrong general ordered contractors to begin work as soon as Congress appropriated funds. On September 11, 1941, bulldozers began grading the site. By the time someone told Roosevelt, a month had passed. 29
    The Pentagon. The name came even before the structure’s trademark gray limestone walls, each more than 900 feet long, rose from the flat plain formerly known as Hell’s Bottoms, a hardscrabble neighborhood of small houses, pawnshops, and garbage dumps—all of it razed. Finished in January 1943, “the world’s largest office building”