In Potsdam, amid the ruins of a vanquished Germany, the new American President, Harry Truman, matches wits and wills with the aging Winston Churchill (soon to be voted out of office) and a cynical Joseph Stalin. The boundary lines of the new Europe and the future of the bloody end of the war against Japan are both at stake.

In the Pacific, Americans closing in on Japan's home islands fend off waves of kamikaze attacks, even as a massive U.S. buildup for the final assault on the Japanese homeland (code name "Olympic")is being readied, with plans that calculate appalling casualties. And, in complete secrecy, a new kind of weapon known as an atomic bomb is being shipped by sea from the U.S. mainland to a far Pacific atoll within air-strike distance of Japan....