The
events leading up to President Harry Truman's decision to use weapons
of unprecedented mass destruction against Japan are even now, controversial.
No doubt, 6 August 1945 began as any other day. Before it ended, something
dramatic occurred that would change the way nations dealt with each
other, perhaps for all time. On this day at 8:15 a.m., the Enola Gay
- a B-29 Superfortress named after its pilot's mother - opened its
bomb-bay doors over Hiroshima - at the time, a military centre and
the seventh largest city in Japan, and dropped a single weapon with
a destructive capacity of biblical proportions. The crew on board
and the team of scientists who developed the bomb were not sure whether
the weapon would detonate. Nor were they sure what would happen if
it did. In the split second in which a blinding flash of light told
the crew of its success, approximately 70,000 souls who, until that
fateful moment, had been going about their normal, everyday lives,
perished, and the world changed.
It was a kind of hell on earth, and those who died instantly were
among the more fortunate. Thousands died - vaporized, crushed, or
burned. But there were tens of thousands more who were still alive
and those who could move began to mill about the city, seeking relief
from shock, fire, and pain. Thousands threw themselves into the Ota
River, which would be awash with corpses by the end of the day.
The bomb dropped that day had been in the making at top-secret laboratories,
by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, since December 1941,
before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour. This $2 billion crash program,
code-named Manhattan Project, began in the United States at the suggestion
of physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, refugees from Nazi
Germany. The scientific community feared that Nazi scientists were
mastering new technology in physics necessary to manufacture such
a weapon.
The single weapon ultimately dropped on Hiroshima, nicknamed Little
Boy, produced a yield of approximately 20,000 tons of TNT, roughly
seven times greater than all of the bombs dropped by all of the Allies
on all of Germany in 1942. It produced an airburst approximately 1,000
feet above the city, creating a fireball with a diameter greater than
the length of three football fields. The temperature at ground zero
reached 5,000 degrees centigrade. The shock wave and its reverse effect
reached speeds close to the speed of sound. A mushroom cloud rose
to 20,000 feet in the air, and 60 percent of the city was destroyed.
Three
days later, on 9 August, the United States dropped a second atomic
bomb. Its target, Nagasaki, a port city in southern Japan, was 30
percent destroyed, and approximately 40,000 of its citizens were killed.
Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since the first two atomic
bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, but the threat to use them has
been made many times, mostly by the U.S.
Presidential
decrees recently legitimized the first use of tactical nuclear weapons.
What have we learned in 50 years?
