A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Conclusion 1101

islands of Japan itself. With the American fleet off Okinawa confronting
suicide missions by Japanese pilots, it was clear that such an invasion would
cost many lives.
Meanwhile, the United States was readying a new weapon hitherto
unimaginable. The development of the atomic bomb (and its more lethal
successor, the hydrogen bomb, first tested by the U.S. in 1954) had its ori­
gins in theories developed by Albert Einstein (see Chapter 19). In 1938, a
German scientist in Berlin had achieved nuclear fission, splitting the atom
and releasing tremendous energy. This meant that if a means could be found
to split the nucleus of the atom, setting off a nuclear chain reaction, a bomb
of enormous destructive power could be built. During the first years of the
war, British and American scientists had worked separately on the project.
German scientists, too, were working in the same direction. In the United
States, German scientists who had fled the Nazis first discovered that an iso­
tope of uranium could set off the anticipated chain reaction. At the same
time, Soviet scientists were frantically trying to come up with the atomic
bomb, but they were several crucial years behind American scientists.
In 1945, nuclear theory became reality, and the United States exploded the
first atomic bomb in a desert in New Mexico on July 16. President Harry
Truman (1884-1972; Roosevelt had died in April 1945) learned of this the
day before the opening of the Potsdam Conference in the Berlin suburb in
July 1945. He informed Stalin of the new weapon the United States now
had at its disposal. The Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945, warned
Japan that it risked “prompt and utter destruction” if it did not agree to
unconditional surrender. When Japanese resistance continued, a U.S. plane
dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese port city of Hiroshima on August
6, 1945, engulfing the city in a mushroom cloud of fire and radiation that
killed 80,000 people. The Soviet Union then declared war on Japan and
Soviet troops moved into Manchuria. On August 9, a U.S. plane dropped a
second atomic bomb that destroyed much of Nagasaki, killing 36,000 peo­
ple in a storm of fire. Thousands more would die of radiation sickness in the
days, months, and years to follow.
On September 2, 1945, Japanese representatives signed documents of
unconditional surrender on the battleship Missouri. The Second World
War was over. But a new and potentially even more dangerous atomic age
had begun.

Conclusion

The first Soviet troops arriving at the Nazi death camps discovered night­

marish horrors. Technology harnessed to the task of genocide had created

factories of death. They came upon piles of corpses and of children’s shoes;

and the few lucky survivors—the living dead—barefoot human skeletons for­

tunate enough to have been liberated before their turn to be exterminated