Twenty-two million Japanese were now homeless, almost a third of the country's population. Already some 178 square miles of Japanese cities had been razed to the ground by American bombs. Part of the problem was that there was little left in Japan to be bombed. Choosing a target for the atomic bomb had been difficult. No American bomber was allowed to touch it. Hiroshima had been deliberately reserved by the Americans for atomic destruction. Stationed there were 43,000 troops 43,000 Koreans were also working there, mainly in forced labor. The pilot, Paul Tibbets, and crew on Tinian Island had already been selected to carry the first atomic bomb to Japan, and Tibbets had already been briefed at Los Alamos on what the mission was about.īy mid 1945, almost every major Japanese city except Hiroshima, the country's seventh-largest city, had been obliterated by Allied bombers. Just 3½ hours after Trinity blew its great hole in the ground, the USS Indianapolis set sail from California carrying another atomic bomb to Tinian Island, a dot in the Pacific Ocean 1500 miles south of Japan and now the biggest air base in the world with 4 parallel runways, each 8500 feet long. Later that day, Truman heard the news of the “successful” explosion in New Mexico. Truman from his car saw only a few survivors, and the spectacle haunted him. Although 4 million people had once lived there, now barely a house or building was intact. For >5 years, Allied bombs had rained down on the city, and in the last weeks of the war the Russians had poured a never-ending rain of shells and rockets into the city. Meanwhile, President Truman was touring nearby Berlin with his secretary of state. It raced past the bomber's altitude of 25,000 feet until it reached >40,000 feet (8 miles). Within seconds of the explosion, the B-29 observation plane flying 25 miles from the tower saw the sky become a violent orange-red color and saw a red ball of fire burst through lower clouds. Along with the sound came the shockwave, a hundred billion atmospheres of pressure ripping outward from the core like a hurricane-except this hurricane moved initially at several hundred miles per hour, battering and blasting everything in its path. The mountain ranges bounced the sound back and forth across the desert, and the ground trembled. Behind the light, after a short eerie silence, came the doomsday-like sound, tearing through the desert at 12 miles a minute. Within seconds, the explosion had sucked thousands of tons of sand, dust, sagebrush, juniper bushes, rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, mating frogs, bits of the pulverized steel tower, and every kind of organic and inorganic matter from the earth into a mammoth, rapidly expanding and rising (at 5000 feet/minute) radioactive cloud. Within a millisecond, the temperature at the core of the explosion was 60 million degrees Celsius, 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun, and its blinding flash was far brighter. On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 am, the bomb fell from the tower and exploded. If the bomb did go off, there was some discussion about whether or not it would set fire to the entire atmosphere of the earth and kill everyone on this planet. However, on July 15, neither Truman nor Churchill nor Groves nor Oppenheimer nor any others working on the Manhattan Project knew for certain whether the bomb sitting on the tower in the desert would go off or not. Both Truman and Churchill knew that Stalin was anxious to declare war on Japan, but neither wanted that. The war in Europe had been over for 2 months. While Groves and Oppenheimer were waiting for the storm in the New Mexico desert to clear on July 15, 1945, President Truman was meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and was soon to meet with Premier Joseph Stalin in Potsdam. All of this information and that which follows comes from Stephen Walker's splendid new book, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, which commemorates the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the 2 atomic bombs in Japan in August 1945 ( 1). Groves crushed any obstacles in his path to producing a workable, deliverable atomic bomb.
Groves chose Oppenheimer to direct his top-secret laboratory, a choice that proved correct. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project, who smoked about 100 cigarettes a day, loved martinis, and weighed 100,000 men and women, with an iron fist.
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When it exploded about 150 miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico, where it was developed, the federal government had already spent nearly $2 billion to make this event happen, and $2 billion in 1940–1945 was real money! The code name given for the test was Trinity, after a John Donne Holy Sonnet. They called it “the beast,” “the gadget,” “the thing,” “the device.” Sometimes they just called it “it.” The one thing nobody called it was what it actually was-the world's first atomic bomb.