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On the afternoon of Monday 5 August 1945 a 10 ft long, 4,440 kg cylinder was loaded into the bomb bay of a modified B-29 bomber named Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). The first bombing target was selected as Hiroshima, a port and manufacturing city of just over 350,000 people and also the site of a major military headquarters. Robert Oppenheimer, on witnessing the Trinity bomb test I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture.‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” A few people laughed, a few people cried. “We knew the world would not be the same. In the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end, Truman decided the bomb was the only option. Truman was faced with an unenviable decision that would alter not only the future of the war, but possibly the whole future of warfare.
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On the other, casualties among the Japanese civilian population would be huge. On one hand, using an atom bomb would force Japan to surrender bringing an end to the war, especially as the alternative, an Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland, risked the loss of possibly a million or more Allied servicemen. Six months of strategic and intense fire-bombing in 37 Japanese cities had done little to break Emperor Hirohito’s regime and Japan resolutely ignored the demands for unconditional surrender. Although the New Mexico bomb had worked, the consequences of exploding a nuclear device were unknown and there were still scientists who believed in the possibility of an unstoppable chain reaction in the atmosphere, not to mention that the dangers of the after-effects of radiation remained a mystery.īy the time of the Trinity test, Germany had already been defeated by the allies in Europe, but Japan vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific. Whilst negotiating the post-war settlement at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, President Truman was informed of the success of ‘Operation Trinity’, the successful detonation of the first atom bomb in the desert at Alamogordo. The project was so top secret that Roosevelt had not informed Truman, then Vice-President, that it existed and the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson only informed Truman about the new devastating weapon being developed by physicists in New Mexico after he was sworn in.
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Truman, the new president knew nothing of the ‘Manhattan Project’, the hugely expensive and highly secret American-led programme to develop a nuclear bomb. Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945 and was succeeded by Harry S. They remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history. In the months following the attack hundreds of thousands more would die slow, painful deaths as a result of burns and radiation poisoning, further compounded by illness and malnutrition due to survivors being left without the necessary resources for farmland and food.Īlthough Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on August 15 1945, the bombings’ role in the surrender and their ethical justification are still debated today. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, causing the deaths of approximately 40,000.
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On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of the Second World War, the United States (with the consent of the United Kingdom as laid out in the Quebec Agreement) dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly killing over 80,000 people and wounding, disfiguring and poisoning tens of thousands more.