The Day the World Went Nuclear Read online

  Crews on B-29s average eleven men. Seven aircraft are now being readied for flight. The crewmen, all in lightweight khaki uniforms, sit on hard wooden chairs. Tibbets handpicked these men. All are in their twenties and thirties. They are the best of the best, soon to fly a world-changing mission over what they refer to as “the Empire.”

  Captain William Parsons and Colonel Tibbets on Tinian Island. Parsons said, “The bomb you are about to drop is something new in the history of warfare.” [Los Alamos National Laboratory]

  Tibbets does not mince words. “The moment has arrived. This is what we have all been working towards. Very recently the weapon we are about to deliver was successfully tested in the States. We have received orders to drop it on the enemy.”

  Behind Tibbets are two blackboards covered by thick cloth. Two intelligence officers step forward and remove the drapes, revealing maps of Hiroshima, Kokura, and Nagasaki. Tibbets states that these are the targets. He then breaks down each crew’s responsibilities: Lieutenant Charles McKnight, in the B-29 named Big Stink, will fly to Iwo Jima and remain there as a backup in case of emergency; Captain Ralph Taylor Jr.’s Full House, Captain Claude Eatherly’s Straight Flush, and Captain John Wilson’s Jabit III will fly an hour ahead over the targets to report on the weather; Necessary Evil, piloted by Captain George Marquardt, will photograph the explosion; and Major Charles Sweeney’s The Great Artiste will measure the blast by dropping scientific instruments that will float to the ground by parachute and radio details back to Guam and Tinian.

  Tibbets will pilot the plane containing the A-bomb.

  Since the 509th Composite Group was activated in December 1944, these crews have trained in utter secrecy. They are not popular here in Tinian, where other bomber squadrons mock their many privileges and top secret compound. But they ignore the taunts, knowing they have been training for a high-level mission that could end the war. To prepare, Tibbets was given fifteen B-29s and a top secret training location in the Utah desert. Once the crews Tibbets handpicked flew to Tinian a month ago, they began simulating a unique sort of bombing mission: instead of dozens of bombs, they practiced dropping just one rotund “pumpkin bomb.” At five tons, nearly eleven feet in length, and five feet in diameter, the pumpkin bomb approximated the size of the atomic bomb known as Fat Man. This allowed pilots to get a feel for how the actual bomb would fall as it is deployed from their forward bomb bay.

  An aerial view of the North Field at the air base on Tinian, where B-29s are ready to fly. [National Archives]

  Little Boy just before being lifted into Enola Gay. [Los Alamos National Laboratory]

  Little Boy is a different shape from Fat Man, measuring ten feet long and just a bit more than two feet in diameter. The men of the 509th successfully drop-tested a nonatomic replica of Little Boy on July 23.

  Tibbets calls forty-three-year-old navy officer William S. “Deak” Parsons to the platform. An ordnance expert by training, Captain Parsons has served in a most unique capacity during the war, spending much of his time at Los Alamos, where he worked not only with Robert Oppenheimer on the design and development of Little Boy but also with General Groves on the Target Committee. He even observed the Trinity explosion less than a month ago.

  Parsons organized all the preparations for Little Boy’s delivery to Tinian. It was Parsons who personally met with Captain Charles McVay of the USS Indianapolis in San Francisco to convey the order that his ship “will sail at high speed to Tinian.”

  Throughout his two years in Los Alamos, Captain Parsons’s primary motivation for designing the bomb has been to end the war. This ambition became personal shortly after the Indianapolis set sail from San Francisco, when Parsons made a rapid detour to see his young half brother in a San Diego naval hospital.

  Bob Parsons was among the twenty thousand American casualties during the fierce fighting on Iwo Jima. Once handsome, the Marine Corps private’s face is now permanently disfigured: the right side caved in, his jaw gone, a pink prosthesis in the socket where his right eye once rested.

  Deak Parsons knows he can do little to help his younger brother, but believes dropping the A-bomb will prevent the same thing from happening to other young American men.

  At the podium, Captain Parsons looks at the faces of the aviators gathered in this stuffy Quonset hut and tells them all about the weapon that will win the war.

  “The bomb you are about to drop is something new in the history of warfare,” Parsons begins. “It is the most destructive weapon ever produced.”

  Following orders to keep the source of the detonation a secret, he does not use the words “atomic” or “nuclear.” Instead, he draws a picture of the enormous mushroom cloud in chalk on a blackboard, describing how the cloud vacuumed sand off the desert floor and carried it thousands of feet into the air.

  “We think it will knock out everything within a three-mile area,” Parsons tells the men, adding that Little Boy might be even more powerful than the Trinity explosion: “No one knows what will happen when the bomb is dropped from the air.”

  The B-29 crewmen are stunned. Such a weapon is beyond their comprehension.

  Tibbets once again takes his place on the briefing platform.

  “Whatever any of us, including myself, has done until now is small potatoes compared to what we are going to do,” he is remembered as saying. “I’m proud to be associated with you. Your morale has been high, even though it was difficult not knowing what you were doing, thinking that maybe you were wasting your time, and that the ‘gimmick’ was just somebody’s wild dream.

  “I am personally honored—and I’m sure all of you are, too—to take part in this raid which will shorten the war by at least six months.”

  Tibbets gazes out over the room one last time.

  “Depending on the weather, this mission will go off on August sixth.”

  CHAPTER 30

  HIROSHIMA, JAPAN

  August 5, 1945

  AFTER THE TRINITY A-BOMB test took place in the New Mexico desert three weeks ago, British physicist William Penney of the Manhattan Project measured the blast and reported that another such explosion “would reduce a city of three or four hundred thousand people to nothing but a sink for disaster relief, bandages and hospitals.”

  The force of the test explosion was equivalent to ten thousand tons of dynamite. A brilliant fireball was followed by a purple cloud glowing with radioactivity that soared into the stratosphere. Everything within the blast zone was vaporized.

  If a man had been standing within that zone, he would have died in a fraction of a second, but not before his bone marrow boiled and his flesh literally exploded from his skeleton. In the next millisecond, nothing of that person would remain except compressed gas, which would be instantly sucked up into that great purple cloud racing high into the sky.

  The Trinity A-bomb test killed no one. But now a new chapter of warfare is about to begin.

  * * *

  Tonight, 588 B-29s are attacking four cities throughout Japan, though Hiroshima will not be one of them. Not a single plane will be shot down. The Americans, it seems, can bomb wherever they want, whenever they want, and whatever they want.

  CHAPTER 31

  NORTH FIELD TINIAN, MARIANA ISLANDS

  August 5, 1945 • 2:30 P.M.

  PREPARATION HAS BEEN INTENSE. At 2:00 P.M., Little Boy was pulled by tractor to a special loading pit. Due to its size, it cannot fit beneath the B-29’s fuselage for loading like normal bombs, so a concrete-lined pit has been dug into the earth. At 2:15, the Hiroshima strike plane was backed over the pit before the atomic weapon was loaded into the bomb bay with a hydraulic lift. Captain Deak Parsons entered the bay to practice the eleven steps necessary to arm the bomb midflight, which he has never done before. He is well aware that four B-29s rolling out for standard bombing missions have crashed on takeoff, detonating all their explosives. Parsons is openly fearful that a similar crash will wipe Tinian off the map.

  Tibbets finally decides on a n
ickname for the B-29 with the number 82 painted on the rear of the fuselage. He writes the words on a scrap of paper and hands it to a sign painter in midafternoon. In the past, he has favored aggressive names such as Butcher Shop and Red Gremlin for his aircraft. But the plane he will fly tonight will hold a special place in history, so he indulges in a rare display of sentiment.

  By 4:00 P.M. the aircraft is formally christened Enola Gay, in honor of Tibbets’s fifty-four-year-old mother. Years ago, when the colonel angered his father by quitting his job as a physician’s assistant at a venereal disease clinic to pursue a flying career, it was Enola Gay who calmed the waters. “If you want to go kill yourself,” his father had said angrily, “I don’t give a damn.”

  Enola Gay at rest. [Los Alamos National Laboratory]

  To which his mother added quietly, “Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you’re going to be all right.”

  Now, with ENOLA GAY painted in block letters just beneath the cockpit, she and her son will forever be linked in history.

  By 5:30, the B-29 is ready for preflight testing, which goes off without incident.

  At 8:00 P.M., Colonel Tibbets conducts another briefing. In addition to flight routes, altitudes, and departure times, he pinpoints the location of rescue ships and submarines that will be in the area in case a plane must ditch in the ocean. This information is particularly vital because the U.S. Navy has just issued a warning for all ships to stay at least fifty miles away from Hiroshima. This reduces the potential number of rescue vessels, meaning that only a precise water landing will save Tibbets and his crew in an emergency.

  Catholic Mass is prayed at 10:00 P.M. A Protestant service follows immediately at 10:30. Almost every man attends one or the other. Tibbets, whose only faith is in the physics of aviation, attends neither. The men are loose but pensive—trained professionals who have flown scores of combat missions. However, during the final preflight meal of sausage, blueberry pancakes, and real eggs in the mess hall after midnight, Tibbets is nervous, though trying not to show it. He eats little, preferring to drink black coffee and smoke his pipe. His time has almost come.

  CHAPTER 32

  NORTH FIELD TINIAN, MARIANA ISLANDS

  August 6, 1945 • 1:30 A.M.

  COLONEL PAUL TIBBETS SITS in the front seat of a six-by-six army truck. Approaching the B-29 he personally selected for this mission, Tibbets wears a one-piece tan flight suit and a billed cap. In preparation for the coming twelve-hour mission, he carries cigars, cigarettes, loose tobacco, and a pipe. Should his plane be shot down, Tibbets also has a handgun. And, should capture become a possibility, he also carries twelve cyanide pills, one for each member of his crew. Better to end their lives than be tortured into giving away A-bomb secrets.

  Tibbets knew there would be commotion about tonight’s mission. But he never expected the sight before him: Floodlights turn the black tropical night into day. Flashbulbs pop as Tibbets and his crew arrive at the flight line. Scientists and technicians flit around the bomber, fussing over last-minute details. Inside the forward bomb bay, safely concealed from view, is the bulbous, 9,700-pound Little Boy, soon to be dropped from a height of five miles onto Hiroshima. The target point is the concrete-and-steel Aioi Bridge, its T shape easily visible from the air.

  “There stood the Enola Gay,” Tibbets will later write, “bathed in floodlights like the star of a Hollywood movie. Motion picture cameras were set up and still photographers were standing by with their equipment. Any Japanese lurking in the surrounding hills—and there were still some who had escaped capture—had to know that something very special was going on.”

  Soon, the thrum of the 2,200 horsepower B-29 engines fills the air as the advance weather planes Jabit III, Full House, and Straight Flush lumber down the 8,500-foot east-west Runway Able, which has been nicknamed the Hirohito Highway. One by one, the planes take off and ascend into the night for the twelve-hour round-trip flight to the Empire.

  The time is 1:37 A.M.

  Colonel Tibbets makes one last walk around Enola Gay, looking closely for signs of trouble. With seven thousand gallons of fuel and an almost five-ton bomb, she is nearly seven tons overweight, so even the slightest malfunction could be deadly.

  “I made sure there were no open pieces of cowling, no pitot covers left hanging, and that the tires were inflated and in good condition. I also checked the pavement for telltale evidence of hydraulic leaks and looked into the bottom of the engine cowlings with a flashlight to be sure there was no excessive oil drip.”

  At 2:20 A.M., the crew photograph is taken. Then Tibbets enters the cockpit through a ladder at the front end of the nose gear. The other eleven members of the crew also get on the plane, find their seats, and arrange themselves for the long flight.

  Tibbets sits in the seat on the left reserved for the aircraft commander. Captain Bob Lewis takes the copilot seat. There is tension between the two men, for Enola Gay was Lewis’s aircraft before Tibbets chose to change the name and fly it on this mission. Outside, spectators wait patiently on the tarmac for Enola Gay to take flight. Tibbets is in no hurry, unworried about his audience or the bruised feelings of Captain Lewis as he runs through yet another preflight check of instruments and systems.

  At 2:27 A.M. Enola Gay’s engines are started. Once all four engines are running, Tibbets does a final check of the oil pressure, fuel pressure, and RPMs. The thrum of the propellers causes Enola Gay to shake; only when she takes flight will the vibration cease. “The entire checkout and starting procedure required about thirty-five minutes, and it was now 2:30,” Tibbets will remember.

  “Waving to the crowd of almost one hundred well-wishers who were standing by, I gunned the engines and began our taxi.…

  “Destination: Hiroshima.”

  CHAPTER 33

  HIROSHIMA, JAPAN

  August 6, 1945 • 7:10 A.M.

  THE HUMID AIR is filled with warning. Air-raid sirens again awaken the citizens of Hiroshima. The morning has dawned warm and clear, with just a few wispy clouds in the sky. A single American B-29 has been seen flying toward the city, causing the alert to sound and disrupting the start of the business day—a time for cooking the morning meal and boarding the streetcar to work. Air-raid warnings are now a constant nuisance, but at this late point in the war it seems unlikely the Americans will finally bomb the city. So while some residents dutifully flee into bomb shelters, others go about their day.

  In the huge harbor, shrimp fishermen tend to their nets, as their ancestors have done for centuries. They ignore the air-raid warnings, as they have nowhere to go. In the southern section of town near the port, the Ujina fire station is relatively calm, and fireman Yosaku Mikami looks at the clock. He is less than sixty minutes away from the end of his twenty-four-hour shift, but any bombing will cause fires, meaning Yosaku’s services will be needed immediately.

  Despite the evacuation of his family yesterday and the empty house that awaits him, Yosaku is eager to get home. He patiently waits for the sound of the all-clear siren, and at 7:31 A.M. he hears it. The danger has passed—or so it seems.

  A B-25 takes off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. [National Archives]

  CHAPTER 34

  OVER THE PACIFIC

  August 6, 1945 • 7:24 A.M.

  ENOLA GAY FLIES TOWARD Japan at an altitude of 31,000 feet. Weather plane Straight Flush, which caused the air-raid sirens to sound in Hiroshima this morning, has just reported that the weather is fine for visual bombing. With that message, the fate of the city is sealed.

  “It’s Hiroshima,” Colonel Paul Tibbets barks into Enola Gay’s intercom.

  Shortly after taking off from Tinian, Captain Deak Parsons and his assistant, Lieutenant Morris Jeppson, wriggled through the small pressurized opening separating the bomb bay from the rest of the aircraft. Little Boy almost entirely filled the cavernous space.

  A single shackle held Little Boy in place. Braces kept the bomb from swaying side to side. Standing on a small catwalk, Parson
s positioned himself at the rear of the device, and Jeppson, a physicist educated at Harvard, Yale, and MIT, provided some light.

  The captain worked quickly, running through an eleven-step checklist that armed Little Boy. Opening a small panel, he inserted four silk packages of cordite powder. This smokeless propellant will detonate the uranium “bullet” at one end of the bomb’s inner cannon barrel. The small chunk of enriched U-235 uranium will race down the barrel and collide with a separate sphere of uranium known as the nucleus at the opposite end. Within one-trillionth of a second of the bullet striking the nucleus—a picosecond, in technical terms—the splitting of one atom into two smaller atoms will begin the process of nuclear fission. The explosion will follow immediately, releasing deadly heat and radioactive gamma rays.

  As Parsons worked, the sharp, machined edges of the rear panel cut his fingertips. Undaunted, he finished the job in twenty-five minutes. His final act was to insert three green dummy plugs between Little Boy’s battery and its firing mechanism.

  Little Boy is armed, but fragile. Anything that ignites the cordite charges will cause it to explode, killing all the men on Enola Gay; thus, the green plugs placed between the electrical connections. As long as those plugs are secure, Little Boy will not detonate.

  About an hour ago, Parsons sent Jeppson back into the bomb bay one last time. The blond lieutenant replaced the green plugs with three red arming plugs, thus establishing an electrical circuit between the battery and the bomb.

  Little Boy is alive.

  CHAPTER 35

  OVER HIRSOHIMA, JAPAN

  August 6, 1945 • 8:14 A.M.

  ENOLA GAY BOMBARDIER Major Thomas Ferebee is now in control of the plane. He announces, pointing straight out the front bubble window of the aircraft, “I’ve got the bridge.”