In March 1944, a Missouri Senator uncovered a troubling discrepancy in America’s defence spending. Millions of dollars were being funnelled into a mysterious project simply labelled ‘expediting production’. Determined to get to the bottom of things, the senator approached Henry Stimson, the US secretary for war, who urged him to drop his investigation immediately as a matter of national security.
It was not until a year later, when he had ascended to the Presidency, that Harry Truman would learn those millions had gone into The Manhattan Project, which successfully tested a nuclear bomb only a few months later. Now, President Truman was faced with a terrible decision – but he didn’t hesitate to make it. In the space of just 3 days, the world’s first -and last- Atomic Bombs used in war, decimated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is, by any estimation, a defining moment, not just in the history of the 20th century, but in the history of humanity. From this moment onwards and for the future of humanity, there will always be: the bomb. The Atomic bombings of Japan are widely credited as the single event that ended the war.
But is this the only reason Japan decided to surrender? How was the decision made to drop the bombs, and where? And did they really need to do it twice? In July 1945 the war in Europe was well and truly over, but the war in the Pacific raged on. At the Potsdam conference that same month, Allied leaders demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan. The reality is the war in Japan has been enormously challenging, enormously costly from the American perspective.
And they know that if they have to mount the full scale invasion of the home islands, which they’re anticipating, it will come at a massive cost. They expected to take enormous casualties, and they saw the bomb as a potential means of breaking the Japanese will, and thus avoiding having to embark on this enormously costly invasion. However, this plan hinged entirely on the successful development of a Nuclear Bomb – which was made possible on July 16th, when the Trinity Test successfully triggered the world’s first nuclear explosion.
The Trinity test proved that the bomb works. What it didn’t do is prove that the delivery system works. So I’m standing here next to a casing that was made for the type of bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th of August, 1945. That bomb was called Little Boy. But, the type of bomb that little boy was not being tested before it was dropped on Hiroshima.
It was a different type of device to the one that was tested as part of the Manhattan Project. That device, known as gadget, was an implosion device, so it had lots of different elements around the edges that imploded on the core in the centre and created a far more efficient explosion than this type of device did.
This was called a gun device that essentially fired uranium at uranium to create the explosion. At the Trinity test, the bomb was just put on a huge structure in the middle of the desert. It wasn’t loaded onto a plane, and that’s something which had never been tested because it couldn’t be tested, because it could only be done when it was being done for the first time. So there was this additional challenge to confront.
How do you get this thing? Take it to where you want it to go, and ensure that it does what it’s supposed to do without endangering the crew who get it there in the first place and allows them to get home as well. The answer was this: the B-29 Superfortress. So the B-29 had only recently come into service, and it afforded America the ability to get across to Japan and to deploy weapons on the Japanese home islands.
Of course, from the perspective of the Japanese population, this was a really serious escalation, and it made them vulnerable to a series of air raids that preceded the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These raids were devastating in their own right, particularly the firebombing of Tokyo, which had enormous levels of casualties and enormous levels of suffering.
So Japanese civilians are made to feel vulnerable under the weight of this device, which is allowing America to bring the war literally right to their door. The B-29 was a pressurised aircraft, which allowed it to comfortably reach altitudes that were barely attainable by Japanese fighters, meaning it was extremely hard to defend against.
This made it the obvious choice to carry the Atomic Bombs, and several B-29s were modified to accommodate the extra weight. But the question remained of where they would deliver their catastrophic payload. So when identifying various potential targets for the use of the bomb, there’s a range of considerations involved.
They want somewhere that hasn’t been subject to extensive bombing previously because they need to be able to, observe the full capacity of the bomb to destroy what it’s been directed towards. So that’s a really important thing. It has to be a target which has legitimate military credentials. It has to have military infrastructure.
It also has to have domestic infrastructure as well, because that’s again an important metric from that perspective in terms of identifying and observing how destructive the bomb is in in real world conditions, in many respects in Japan, it’s that’s a kind of a moot issue because, it tends to be the case that military infrastructure is surrounded by civilian infrastructure. So that’s the case for most of the places they target.
They have a shortlist of places that they’re looking at, Hiroshima is, of course, one of the places that’s on the list, because it fits all of the different considerations that have been determined for a potential target. And so Hiroshima becomes ultimately and eventually target number one. At 2:45 am on the 6th of August 1945, Enola Gay took off from the Mariana Islands carrying Little Boy, accompanied by 2 other observation aircraft.
After around 6 hours of flying, the 12-man crew arrived over Hiroshima, and at 8:15 am local time the worlds first nuclear weapon was released. On the ground, an air raid alert had been given an hour earlier, but it was withdrawn due to the low perceived threat of only 3 approaching aircraft. So when the bomb was released 30,000 feet above the city, the majority of Hiroshima’s roughly 350,000 residents were going about their daily lives. After falling for 43 seconds, Little Boy detonated 2000 feet above Hiroshima.
The first thing that those on the ground would have been aware of is a blinding flash of light. And that was followed by an eviscerating wave of heat which evaporated anything and anyone within its direct range. Closely behind that was a catastrophically destructive pressure wave that blasted everything in its path to pieces.
It was, in any meaningful sense, the apocalypse made real in that moment. The aftermath was a scene of utter devastation on a level never before seen. Two-thirds of Hiroshima’s buildings had been completely flattened. Between 60-80,000 people had died within seconds of the blast, many of whom were instantly vaporised.
Survivors had grievous burns, and those who were able were running for their lives, fearing another attack. No one in that moment understood what had just happened. And yet, the suffering had only just begun. In the days that follow a new phenomenon begins to emerge as well, something which nobody’s encountered before. A range of symptoms that become described as a as an atomic sickness.
These are all manifest in various different ways, but they have devastating consequences for those affected. And people are dying from these things which aren’t directly related to their injuries as such, it’s something else. And of course, this is radiation poisoning.
This is something which nobody knows how to deal with in the moment, because they’re not exactly sure what it is and how it’s going to, develop. And in the days that follow, it leads to another wave of deaths. And in the weeks that follow, there are more. And of course, the long term consequences of something which we’re still trying to figure out today.
There’s continuing debate amongst scientists to medical professionals about exactly what the long term repercussions of this exposure to radiation have been for those that encountered it, and in some respects, for the generations that followed as well. The scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project had known radiation would be an issue following the blast, and even took steps to mitigate the fallout where possible, for example by detonating the bomb in the air rather than on the ground.
The main focus had been on the pure, explosive power of the bomb, but the full impact of radiation sickness, particularly it’s long-term effects, would prove to be another weapon entirely. More people would die in the weeks and months that followed, than the initial blast. Japanese doctors who arrived later initially struggled to understand that their patients were suffering from radiation sickness.
Allied doctors would later arrive to treat survivors, along with scientists and military personnel who would study the effects of the blast over the following months. So there are various different estimates as to how many people died in the immediate aftermath of the bombing in the weeks and months that followed. But the toll is catastrophic by any metric, could be up to about 120,000 people.
That is, despite its catastrophic nature, relatively comparable to some of the firebombing, particularly in Tokyo, that preceded the dropping of the bomb. What’s different here is that it’s not enormous waves of bombs that are doing this drop ring an enormous number of different devices across a large area. This is ultimately one plane with one device dropped at one time. In one instance, doing all of this destruction in a matter of seconds.
Initially the Japanese leadership did not understand what had just happened. But 16 hours after the bomb had levelled Hiroshima, President Truman made an announcement to the world. He revealed not only that Atomic Bombs existed, but that they had used one to destroy an entire city. Whilst the Japanese are still trying to figure out exactly what’s happened to Hiroshima and how to deal with it, the Americans drop a second device at Nagasaki.
So the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was a gun type device. The bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was an implosion device. So theoretically, it’s far more efficient and has the potential to be somewhat destructive. As it happens, whilst the raid on Hiroshima went perfectly according to plan, the raid on Nagasaki didn’t.
That means that the bomb wasn’t dropped where it had been intended to be dropped, and that it had actually less destruction that it could have done. Fat man exploded 2 miles short of Nagasaki’s centre, instantly killing around 38,000 people, far less than the estimated 100,000 had it hit its mark.
However, Nagasaki was not the initial target at all. Kokura was the planned site for the second atomic bomb, and the crew of Bockscar made 3 passes over the city, but cloudy weather obstructed the target. Truman had given explicit orders for the atomic bombs to be dropped manually, without using radar, which forced the crew of Bockscar to move onto their secondary target of Nagasaki.
Once they arrived, with only enough fuel for one run, cloud cover posed more problems – that was until the bombardier reported a gap in the clouds, just large enough to make the drop. Official reports reference this as the reason Fat Man was so far off target, but others weren’t as convinced.
One observer from the earlier Hiroshima missions said he took the story of the gap in the clouds “with a grain of salt,” as the miss was similar to that of radar bombing. It wasn’t even necessarily the plan that it should be dropped on the 9th of August. It was initially planned to be dropped on the 11th of August, but weather conditions meant that the date was brought forward because they were considered more favourable on the ninth.
So when the second bomb was dropped, Japan really hadn’t had too much time to react to what had happened. It’s not necessarily the case that it was kind of a strategic decision from America’s perspective to, to put another bomb in behind the one on Hiroshima, to sort of reinforce the point in the way that it might appear it was to do with climactic conditions and circumstance, since as much as anything else.
But it’s certainly the case that that when the second bomb was dropped, anything that Japan was thinking about doing was, by necessity, already in motion. They hadn’t had time to really meaningfully, properly process what had already happened on the 6th of August, only a few days prior.
The fact that the two arrived so close together did suggest, on some level that there could be a series more. The only people who knew that there were only two usable bombs at the time were those were very closely connected to the project and the president and those around him. From a global perspective, and certainly from Japan’s perspective, there was a real possibility that they had a whole succession of these things lined up.
And in fact, that was America’s intention to they just hadn’t been able to get to the point, but they had them ready at that stage. On the 9th of August what also happened, is the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, and in doing so they declared war on Japan. So now Japan are confronted with two separate issues. Japan has just suffered 2 separate devastating attacks, and Truman has promised to continue until they surrender.
The soviets – who some Japanese officials had been hoping could mediate more favourable terms – were now at war with them as well, and if the war continues, a full scale invasion of mainland Japan was imminent. The choice was seemingly obvious. Emperor Hirohito officially announced Japan’s surrender on the 15th of August 1945. Despite many military leaders being opposed, and even a failed coup trying to prevent it, Japan had agreed to the Allies’ unconditional terms – bar one thing: the emperor was to remain in post.
In Truman’s mind. Whilst he knew this was a weapon of unprecedented destructive capacity, he was essentially ultimately treating it like another weapon in the context of the war. And so when he allowed for its use in Japan, he didn’t give explicit instructions as to what dates it should be dropped, other than saying it shouldn’t be dropped before the 3rd of August.
He didn’t give explicit dates as to where it should be dropped. He didn’t give explicit instructions as to when it should be dropped. After the bombing of Nagasaki that changed. After the bombing of Nagasaki, he issued an explicit order saying that no more atomic bombs should be dropped without his explicit instruction.
So of course, we ask ourselves why that might be, and it seems pretty clear from what he said and what he wrote at the time that he realised, as did the world, that this was something different and that he couldn’t contemplate the human cost of using these devices again, unless he considered that there were extraordinarily good reasons for doing so.
The decision to drop the bombs on Japan at the end of the Second World War remains extraordinarily controversial. Right up until the present day, there were those who maintain that the war would have ended without having to use them. There are those who maintain that, even if it did ultimately have a significant role in forcing Japan’s hand, that simply cannot be justified by the human cost involved. But that is something which is unjustifiable under any circumstances.
There are those who maintain elsewhere that it wasn’t, in fact, the bombs that ended the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. It was the Soviet Union’s decision to declare war on Japan and to invade Manchuria. These are the subjects of ongoing discussion, and ultimately, the likelihood is we’ll never arrive at a consensus answer on them.
The other really significant thing about the decision to drop the bomb, of course, is that it introduced humanity to the nuclear age. It meant that from that moment onwards, all of us would live in various ways under the shadow of the bomb. Because of course, whilst the decision to drop the bomb might have played some role in the end of the Second World War, it certainly had a critical role in the war that followed. It became the central and defining part of the cold war.
As the only country in the world who has suffered a Nuclear attack, Japan remains to this day strictly an anti-nuclear state; maintaining the three non-nuclear principles of not producing, not possessing and not permitting nuclear weapons on their land. Today, where the world’s first Nuclear weapon was detonated 80 years ago stands Peace Memorial Park, dedicated to the legacy of Hiroshima, and the memories of the bomb’s victims.
