Dreading the unthinkable was underscored by knowing the real.
Everyone was taught about the historic shock-and-awe displays launched
respectively on August 6 and 9, 1945, when two A-bombs destroyed the
Japanese cities and incinerated citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This
was not some H. G. Wellsian prediction or pulp science fiction apparition.
The furies unleashed by these weapons left indelible scars on conscience
and consciousness just as the blast’s scorching heat literally etched dark
shadows of vaporized humans onto the naked ground.
Paradoxically, though, the world’s first atomic bomb, christened
Little Boy, was as unprepossessing as its name was innocuous. It looked
like an “elongated trash can with fins,” said a crewmember of the Enola
Gay, the b-29that carried the Hiroshima bomb. To force Japan into
accepting unconditional surrender, Little Boy and Fat Man (the plutonium
implosion bomb dropped on Nagasaki) each deposited the power of over
12,500tons of TNT and left a residue of radiation for years to follow.
The Hiroshima mushroom, small when compared to subsequent
hydrogen blasts, looms large in the litany of terror because it was the first.
“The city was hidden by that awful cloud, boiling up, mushrooming, terrible
and incredibly tall,” recalled Col. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay.“If
you want to describe it as something you are familiar with, a pot of boiling
black oil,” related one of his crew. “The mushroom itself was a spectacular
sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke, and you could see it had a red
core in it and everything was burning inside,” said the tail gunner, Robert
Caron. “As we got farther away, we could see the base of the mushroom, and
below we could see what looked like a few-hundred-foot layer of debris and
smoke.” And still another witness said the mushroom was “this turbulent
mass. I saw fires springing up in different places like flames shooting up
on a bed of coals. It looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city.”
Japanese accounts from the ground told of a blinding flash of light (pikain
Japanese) and a deafening roar of sound (pika-don,or flash boom), yet
outside the city limits, the sky was a beautiful golden yellow.
Americans greeted the bombings as a necessary means toward
an inevitable end. Notwithstanding, when told of the bombing, Dr. J.
Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist directly responsible for the Los Alamos
A-bomb development teams, expressed guarded satisfaction, for he
understood the power of what had been unleashed. A month earlier, after
watching the triumphal first blast at the Trinity Site, he quoted from the
Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.. .”He was
plagued by guilt until his death in 1964. Nonetheless, the bombs were
made, the atom was weaponized, and uranium and plutonium were
stockpiled. Days after the first blasts, an additional Fat Man was being
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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