Captain Frank January and his fellow soldiers are on an island in the North Pacific in 1945. The 509th regiment has been given a special mission, but a General named Le May wants to take it from them. Their commander Colonel Tibbets does a test flight with one of the General's men and the whole first team of the regiment. January and other soldiers, who are part of the second team, watch the test flight. Tibbets does tricks to impress the General's man, but there is a malfunction with an engine and the plane crashes, killing everyone inside. January is selected for the mission, because he is the best bombardier left. He is hesitant, but agrees. There is a meeting, and Captain Shepard explains that their target cities are Hiroshima, Kokura, and Nagasaki, and the plane that January is on will carry the bomb. They then show a testing video of a new bomb called the atomic bomb, and all of the soldiers who see the videos are horrified. January starts having dreams about people being melted and screaming from the bomb, and he hardly sleeps anymore. Their plane, called the Lucky Strike, soon departs for its mission. As they get closer and closer to Hiroshima, January dreads the mission more. He tries to think of ways to stop the mission but he knows that none of them will work. They are finally within bombing distance of Hiroshima. January sees the city, and deliberately waits a moment. He says into his radio that the switch is not working, and then when he sees green forest under him he flips the switch. The bomb lands in the forest, and Hiroshima is left untouched. The other soldiers are furious at January, but he insists that he did not do it on purpose. They return to the island, where there is an investigation. January comes up with a plan, and tells the questioners that he needs to speak with a scientist because of something he saw on the bomb. He also says that maybe they should tell Japan it was a warning, which makes everyone think that he did miss on purpose. He is kept in a cell. January is assigned a man named Colonel Dray as a defense council, and Dray arranges a meeting with him and one of the high-up scientists. January tells the scientist that there was no malfunction, but the bombing was not necessary, and that he did what any of the scientists would have done if they were there. He wants the scientists to back him up and defend him. The scientist is furious, and says that they did consider the consequences of the bomb. January is sentenced to death by firing squad. He starts talking to a young Catholic priest, and they become friends. January's presidential pardon is denied, but the priest tells him that there was an equipment failure for the second strike, and they also missed Hiroshima. The U.S. sent a message to Japan that the two bobs were warnings, and if they did not surrender they would bomb a city; the Emperor of Japan is said to have ordered a surrender. The priest admires January for his decision. January can sense the impact he has had on history, although he does not know that in the future, many people will join the January Society, including the young priest, and that the Society would campaign successfully for the end of atomic bombs. When the day comes for January to stand in front of the firing squad, he is at peace and relaxed.