Forty years have passed since the first atomic bomb took the lives of 90,000 in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It was an act of destruction deliberately calculated to be of such unprecedented frightfulness that it would shock the fanatical military rulers of Japan, with their policies of fighting to the last man, into immediate surrender. In fact, the Japanese powers dismissed the world's first atomic attack as being less effective than earlier fire-bomb raids on Tokyo, and they continued, even after a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, to demand that national honour required the entire population to fight to the death. Miracle of Deliverance tells what a close thing Japan's surrender was, and how it fell to the Emperor Hirohito, regarded there as a near-deity, to take upon himself alone the decision 'to accept the unacceptable,' and surrender. The survival of the many Allied fighting men - and the Japanese who must otherwise have died in millions - provides the phrase miracle of deliverance, taken from Winston Churchill's expression of relief when he heard that an atomic weapon had been successfully developed.