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To be fair, many politicians and military leaders did not fully appreciate quite what they had created.
Did the crew of the enola gay die series#
Perhaps Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be viewed not as some isolated aberration, but as an extension of the series of pulverising air attacks on Japan – from B-29 to atom bomb at the stroke of a pen. All the time and dollars spent on Manhattan were not going to be wasted in a last-minute attack of moral scruples. Max Hastings argues that once the US had the technology, it was bound to use it, seeing it as just another weapon in its arsenal. To ram the point home – and, in effect, to carry out a weapons test – it was necessary to attack a live target. Nor was it enough to demonstrate its existence and potential. To use the weapon was to demonstrate US power, not only to the defeated Japanese, but also to the world at large, and in particular to the new great rival, the Soviet Union. Mark Arnold-Forster believes Truman’s motives were sincere – a genuine desire to save American lives. How true is this picture of a President agonising over the ultimate life-and-death decision? What was the best way to end WWII? To fight the Japanese to a finish, at an immense cost in American service lives (some estimates say as many as half a million), or to use the bomb? He has been portrayed as a man facing a conundrum of the first order. ‘I am become death.’ J Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), nuclear physicist and head of the Manhattan Project. Elected Vice-President only in 1944, and becoming President in April 1945 on Roosevelt’s death, Truman was immediately thrust into the maelstrom of tough decision-making, in spite of his short apprenticeship. The Allies were conscious they could be in a race with the Germans to be the first to achieve the new technology – hence commando raids on Norway during 19, to take out ‘heavy water’ installations, an element in one of the possible processes involved in creating a bomb.Ĭome 1945, the man with his finger on the button was US President Harry Truman. Political responsibility fell to US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who had firmly stated US opposition to Japanese expansion in Asia as early as 1932 – the so-called ‘Stimson Doctrine’. The US came to regard the monster as its ‘baby’, with Oppenheimer appointed scientific director of the Manhattan Project in June 1942. Henceforward, though, it proceeded as an American project, and the British were sidelined.
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In fact, they probably had greater knowledge than their American counterparts up to the point when the project moved across the water. These would be constructed in America Britain not an option because of the bombing risk.īritish scientists had made good progress on ‘the bomb’. By the summer of 1942, it was evident the work was getting somewhere and large-scale production plants were needed. In October 1941, Roosevelt suggested US and British efforts be pooled, which saw Brits deployed to the States to work on the top-secret project. The potential was great, and the Government felt it worth the investment of time and money to develop a weapon, even though the war imposed many other demands on scientists, and there was no guarantee that an atomic bomb could be designed, built, and used before the war ended. In a pre-prepared statement issued on the day of Hiroshima, Churchill confirmed that the technology had been known about since 1939, it being ‘widely recognised among scientists of many nations that the release of energy by atomic fission was a possibility’. The ‘bomb’ had been coming for some years. As World War II drew to a close, the world entered a new, frightening era of warfare: that of WMDs, ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. Two-thirds of the city was destroyed, with as many as 140,000 civilians killed (estimates vary).įew people in the immediate vicinity of the epicentre were thought to have survived, as four square miles of homes and factories were levelled. The detonation generated the power of 12,500 tons of conventional explosive, and created injuries of a kind never previously seen.
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On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb, given the inappropriate name of ‘Little Boy’, was released by the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress of the US Air Force, over the central Japanese city of Hiroshima, the country’s eighth largest. Atomic desert: the view across Hiroshima after the bombing’