The Day the World Went Nuclear Read online

  The Aioi Bridge was chosen as Little Boy’s aiming point because of its location in the center of Hiroshima and its unique T shape, visible from the air.

  Looking down, Colonel Tibbets can see the white buildings of downtown Hiroshima; he can actually see a mass of movement that looks like people walking to work. “My eyes were fixed on the center of the city, which shimmered in the early morning light,” he will later remember.

  Enola Gay flies the last miles to Hiroshima uncontested. No enemy planes or antiaircraft fire greet the Americans. Japanese air defense officials, having already sounded three air-raid warnings during the night, choose to ignore the B-29s’ approach, thinking it to be a simple reconnaissance mission.

  With ninety seconds to go, Ferebee positions his left eye over the Norden bombsight’s viewfinder. If he does his job properly, allowing for Enola Gay’s airspeed of 330 miles per hour and the slight amount of wind that will cause the bomb to drift, Little Boy should fall with pinpoint accuracy.

  “One minute out,” Tibbets announces.

  Ferebee flicks a switch that sends a sharp tone into the headphones of the Enola Gay crew and those of the men in the two scientific planes, reminding them of what is to come. They are to put specially darkened goggles over their eyes to protect their vision. All three planes have been ordered to flee the vicinity as soon as possible to avoid the aftershock of the atomic explosion.

  “Thirty seconds,” says Tibbets.

  “Twenty.”

  The bomb bay doors open at precisely 8:15 A.M.

  “Ten … nine … eight … seven … six … five …

  “Four … three … two … one…”

  At 8:15:17 A.M., Little Boy is set loose from its shackle.

  * * *

  Instantly, Enola Gay lurches upward, finally rid of the extra tons behind its nose. Tibbets wrestles it sharply to the right, almost standing it on a wing as he turns away from Hiroshima. He has less than fifty seconds to distance himself from the blast. If he fails to cover enough ground, Enola Gay will be destroyed by shock waves.

  Despite the sixty-degree bank, a move more suited to a lithe fighter aircraft than a massive bomber, bombardier Ferebee keeps his left eye affixed to his Norden bombsight, allowing him to watch Little Boy plummet to earth. The bomb wobbles after first being dropped, but the four stabilizing fins soon force the nose down, propelling it toward the heart of Hiroshima.

  Ferebee is transfixed, knowing that he is witnessing history. Ten seconds pass. Twenty. Thirty. Almost too late, he remembers that the explosion’s brightness will blind anyone who stares at it. Just in time, Ferebee unglues his eye from the bombsight and turns away from Little Boy’s descent.

  Notes of Robert Lewis on the bombing of Hiroshima. [National Archives]

  CHAPTER 36

  HIROSHIMA, JAPAN

  August 6, 1945 • 8:16 A.M.

  FORTY-THREE SECONDS AFTER its release, at an altitude of 1,968 feet over the Aioi Bridge in downtown Hiroshima, Little Boy’s radar proximity fuse detonates. Within the bomb’s inner cannon, the four cordite charges explode, sending the uranium bullet hurtling the length of the barrel, where it collides with the second mass of U-235. The chain reaction is instantaneous. In the blast that follows, a fireball spreads out over the target zone. It travels at one hundred times the speed of sound, rendering it silent. One millionth of a second later, the people of Hiroshima begin to incinerate.

  Almost twelve miles away, the shock wave slams into the escaping Enola Gay so hard that Tibbets shouts “Flak,” thinking the plane has been hit by ground fire. He feels a strange “tingling sensation” in his mouth, the result of his fillings interacting with the radioactive elements now billowing thousands of feet into the air.

  But Enola Gay is safe. All twelve men on board are alive. In six hours they will celebrate with whiskey and lemonade and spend the night far from the hell they have just created.

  * * *

  Little Boy explodes three hundred yards from its primary target. The temperature inside the bomb at the moment of nuclear fission is more than a million degrees Fahrenheit, which sends out a white flash of light ten times the brightness of the sun. As the surrounding air ignites, the sky erupts into a fireball three hundred yards wide. Millionths of a second later, the heat on the ground directly below spikes to 6,000 degrees.

  Thousands of men, women, and children within a half-mile radius beneath the bomb’s explosion are instantly reduced to lumps of charcoal, their internal organs evaporating inside their charred corpses. Downtown Hiroshima is littered in smoking black piles that were once human bodies.

  But that is just the beginning.

  Then comes the shock wave as the blast rockets outward with the force of sixteen thousand tons of TNT, followed immediately by a billowing mushroom cloud that rises more than fifty thousand feet into the air, sucking up dust and debris along with the vaporized remains of those killed beneath it.

  Within seconds, seventy thousand people are dead.

  Just after the bomb detonates, smoke billows 20,000 feet above Hiroshima and spreads more than 10,000 feet at the base. The photo was taken from the escort plane. [National Archives]

  Almost every person and building within a one-mile radius of the explosion has vanished.

  Pets, birds, rats, ants, cockroaches—gone.

  Homes, fishing boats, telephone poles, the centuries-old Hiroshima Castle—all disappear.

  Day turns into night as the mushroom cloud blots out the sun. Beyond the one-mile radius of the bomb’s explosion, some have survived, though at a horrible cost. Flash burns maim and disfigure thousands, many of whom live miles away.

  No one is spared the suffering. A group of students from the Hiroshima Girls Business School are “covered with blisters the size of balls, on their backs, their faces, their shoulders and their arms. The blisters were starting to burst open and their skin hung down like rugs,” Japanese photojournalist Yoshito Matsushige will remember.

  * * *

  If the designers of Little Boy imagined a single bomb blast would inflict instant death on thousands, they were correct. The truth is that it does not take much imagination to foresee puncture wounds caused by shards of exploded glass and wood hurtling through the air. The atomic blast wave travels at two miles per second, knocking flat anything in its path. Then there is the horror of radiation—radioactive particles of dust that will slowly kill residents of Hiroshima for months and years to come. But there is even more.

  Thousands of Japanese die from fire and water. The flames come first, individual blazes that begin the instant Little Boy explodes. Within five minutes, almost every structure within a two-mile radius of the blast is alight in a raging firestorm that propels a powerful flaming wind. Soon, that wind reaches hurricane strength, reducing much of Hiroshima to cinders.

  The destruction of Hiroshima. [National Archives]

  Many residents are now buried in the rubble of their collapsed homes. Trapped beneath thick wooden beams and tons of ceramic roof tiling, they frantically plead for rescue as the fires burn closer. Their screams echo throughout the streets of Hiroshima.

  To escape the firestorm, or to cool the burns covering their bodies, many Japanese leap into the city’s firefighting cisterns. But what happens next is yet another cruel twist of fate: the explosion has superheated the water, and everyone immersing himself or herself in it immediately boils to death.

  Others try to escape the flames by diving into one of the seven rivers that flow through Hiroshima, only to find the water clogged with dead bodies.

  Hiroshima is chaos. Some confused citizens maintain almost total silence as they endure the horrors of Little Boy. Many wander the streets in a daze, arms held away from their bodies to prevent them from rubbing against their burns, staring at the carbon lumps on the street, picking their way through the debris, and absorbing the surreal nature of what has happened. Others, their homes destroyed, join the long line of Hiroshima’s citizens frantically retreating to th
e safety of the countryside.

  The following three photographs show the charred remains of Hiroshima. [National Archives]

  Part Three

  Unconditional Surrender

  CHAPTER 37

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  August 6, 1945 • 8:17 A.M.

  JUST SECONDS AFTER LITTLE BOY’S detonation, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo notices that its Hiroshima station is off the air. The control operator gets on the phone to see if he can help fix the problem but gets no response.

  Soon it becomes clear that Hiroshima’s train station, telegraph operators, and military garrison have also severed communications. Fearing an American bombing, staff at the Japanese military headquarters in Tokyo dispatch a young officer to investigate. His orders are to fly to Hiroshima immediately and ascertain whether or not the city has been the target of an American attack.

  Two days later, the chilling results of what the young officer saw from the air are reported on Tokyo English-language radio: “Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death.”

  CHAPTER 38

  USS AUGUSTA ATLANTIC OCEAN

  August 6, 1945 • Noon

  HARRY TRUMAN IS FEELING powerful. Holding court just before lunch in the USS Augusta’s enlisted men’s mess hall, he banters with the six sailors at his table, asking about their hometowns and life in the navy. Truman could have flown home after his three-week stay at the Potsdam conference in Germany, but his security agents recommended making the five-day transatlantic journey by sea because they feared an attack in the sky.

  The voyage has been blustery, the windblown Atlantic covered in whitecaps and rolling swells. Yet Truman has risen early each morning for a walk on deck in the open air. The crew have been surprised to see the president wearing a broad smile during these morning constitutionals, despite the ongoing conflict in the Pacific. They cannot possibly know the tremendous feeling of success he feels after holding his own on the world stage at Potsdam, and even more important, they do not know that Truman is awaiting confirmation that an atomic bomb has been dropped on Japan.

  President Truman works at his desk aboard the USS Augusta during his return trip to the United States after the Potsdam conference. [National Archives]

  The president has had a hard time keeping this top secret news to himself. There are a handful of journalists on board the ship, and on the day the Augusta set sail from Plymouth, England, Truman met with them to explain that America possessed the atomic bomb. He shared this staggering news safe in the knowledge that the media are forbidden from using the ship’s radios and have no way of communicating the information. In this particular isolation, the talkative Truman gets to explain the A-bomb on his terms, and yet the weapon maintains its confidential status.

  As Truman now chats with the young sailors prior to eating lunch, Captain Frank H. Graham approaches the table holding a map of Japan and a teletype message. Hiroshima is circled in red pencil on the map. The message reads: “Hiroshima bombed visually.… Results clear cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test. Conditions normal in airplane following delivery.”

  Truman’s face lights up. “This is the greatest thing in history,” he proclaims to Graham, enthusiastically shaking his hand. “It’s time for us to get home.”

  The president then orders Graham to share the secret message with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, sitting just a few tables away. A second teletype arrives moments later from Secretary of War Henry Stimson confirming the previous report. “Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 P.M. Washington time. First reports indicate complete success.”

  Truman can’t help himself. Leaping to his feet, he taps his water glass with a fork. At first, there is confusion. These military men immediately rise to attention, realizing the impropriety of the president standing as they sit. But Truman waves them back down: “Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!”

  Bedlam sweeps through the mess hall. Cheers echo down the ship’s passageways. A grinning Truman holds the teletype message aloft as he races from the mess hall and runs down the corridor to share the news with the Augusta’s officers. “We won the gamble,” he shouts above the jubilant celebration.

  Everyone believes that the end of the war has arrived.

  They are wrong.

  Within moments, dressed in a tan double-breasted suit and dark tie, President Truman films a message to the American people from his stateroom aboard the Augusta. He sits at a desk, a porthole visible over his right shoulder. The text of his speech was prepared long ago but only just released to the national media by the White House. But Truman’s words, which are also being broadcast live on the radio, have a far more powerful effect than a print dispatch. For while this message may seem to be aimed at the American people, it is in fact a warning to the Japanese leadership.

  “Sixteen hours ago an American plane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy,” he begins. Truman’s tone is somber, but there is no doubt he feels justified in his decision. Even as he speaks, more leaflets are being dropped on Japan, encouraging the people to rise up and demand that their leaders surrender.

  “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

  “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

  Truman then tells the history of the bomb’s development, concluding with an unmistakable reminder that the job is not yet done. Only Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration and its terms of unconditional surrender will stop the bombings.

  “We are now prepared to destroy more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: We shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.… If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on earth.”

  Finally, Truman signs off. He does not need to order a second bomb to be dropped on Japan, for that command was given two weeks ago, on the same date he approved the Hiroshima attack. In fact, the order allows for bombings to continue as long there is a supply of atomic bombs.

  The Augusta is just north of Bermuda as Truman completes his speech. The temperature is finally warming. Knowing that a media whirlwind awaits him upon his arrival home tomorrow, the president settles in to enjoy a day of sunshine, hoping for news of a Japanese surrender.

  CHAPTER 39

  IMPERIAL PALACE TOKYO, JAPAN

  August 6, 1945 • 7:50 P.M.

  IT HAS BEEN ELEVEN HOURS and thirty-five minutes since Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Many in the Japanese high command believe that the bomb was atomic, but the generals have withheld this news from their emperor all afternoon.

  It is dusk, and Hirohito takes advantage of the warm August night to stroll the gardens of the Imperial Palace, completely unaware of what has happened in Hiroshima.

  Suddenly, an aide from the Imperial Japanese Army approaches, which can only mean bad news. Such an intrusion on the emperor’s solitude is unheard of except in a time of tragedy. In somber tones, the aide informs Hirohito that Hiroshima has been “attacked with a special bomb from a U.S. bomber.” The aide goes on to state that the Navy Ministry, which has been investigating the attack, believes that “most parts of the city” have ceased to exist.

  A Japanese soldier walks through destroye
d Hiroshima. [National Archives]

  The aide leaves, allowing Emperor Hirohito to ruminate on what he has just heard. Since the fall of Okinawa six weeks ago, he has known that Japan cannot win this war. For a reminder of the Americans’ dominance, Hirohito need only look around the Imperial Palace: despite standing orders by the U.S. military that the emperor’s palace should not be bombed, fires started by B-29 raids on Tokyo have leaped the great stone walls and moats surrounding his fortress and burned Hirohito’s wooden residence to the ground. Hirohito and his family now live in the imperial library, adjacent to the enormous gardens in which the emperor now walks. All of the emperor’s official business is conducted in a bunker sixty feet underground. In that way, he is similar to his deceased ally, the German leader Adolf Hitler.

  Like Hitler, Hirohito has refused to surrender. He has persisted in the belief that the Soviets will help him negotiate peace with America. The emperor still believes that now. However, he is staggered by the news from Hiroshima.

  If the reports from the city are true, Hirohito knows that only unconditional surrender will save Japan from complete destruction. This will mean the end of the twenty-five-hundred-year imperial dynasty—and perhaps the end of Hirohito’s own life, should he be tried and found guilty of war crimes.

  But five hours later, when President Harry Truman once again demands unconditional surrender from Japan, Hirohito’s response will be utter silence.

  While his devastated people suffer and die, the god-man continues his stroll.

  CHAPTER 40

  MANILA, PHILIPPINES

  August 7, 1945 • 12:01 A.M.

  GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR is appalled. It is just after midnight on Tuesday when an aide awakens him with news of the Hiroshima bombing. The general is hypersensitive to slights both perceived and real, and when it comes to the atomic bomb, there have been many. For the past three years, MacArthur has waged war on his terms, attacking when and where he wants. He knows the Japanese culture from his decades living in the Pacific and is confident they are on the verge of surrender.