The Age of Radiance (39 page)

One particularly ironic victim was the Riken Institute in Saitama, just north of Tokyo, where one of Bohr’s longtime associates, Yoshio Nishina, had a sixty-inch cyclotron, chaired meetings of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, and was trying to produce fissile uranium with thermal diffusion. In April 1945, Japan’s own quest for nuclear power and atomic bombs came to an end when the Riken building was leveled.

The firebombing of sixty-three cities, LeMay claimed,
“scorched, boiled, and baked to death” over eight hundred thousand people. The heat was so immense that buildings, and people, would spontaneously erupt in flames. Radio Tokyo called it “slaughter bombing,” and Secretary of War Henry Stimson told Oppenheimer he thought it was appalling that no one in
America protested this gruesome carnage. At the time of his Interim Committee, Stimson wrote in his diary,
“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.”

Comparing Tokyo’s fire with Hiroshima’s uranium proves nuclear’s myth. Besides the iconic multicolored mushroom cloud and the aftereffects of fallout, there is no significant difference except for grandeur. LeMay could’ve inflicted the same damage to Hiroshima as Little Boy with 210 conventional firebomb strikes, and to Nagasaki as Fat Man with 120 . . . and if LeMay didn’t need to show off the country’s revolutionary, powerful, and expensive new weapon, that is just what he would have done.

One of those involved in incendiary planning, Robert McNamara—who would become secretary of defense for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—remembered,
“LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not if you win?” After the birth of thermonuclear arms, nuclear physicists from Leo Szilard to Andrei Sakharov would ask the same questions of themselves.

On July 26, 1945, in a Hohenzollern palace outside Berlin, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek demanded “the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces.” Japan answered with
mokusatsu
, which means both “no comment” and “silent contempt.” That same day, the USS
Indianapolis
arrived at Tinian Island in the Marianas (due east of the Philippines and south of Tokyo) with a three-hundred-pound lead bucket welded to its deck—the heart of Little Boy.

From the air, Tinian looks like Manhattan Island in New York, so the Seabees who built the biggest air base in the world there for 265 of LeMay’s B-29s (with six eighty-five-hundred-foot runways and forty thousand employees) gave the roads such names as Forty-Second Street, Wall Street, and Broadway. A herd of cattle for fresh meat was grazed in Central Park, and the headquarters for the 509th Composite Group was on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 112th—in honor of Columbia University. The 509th were given the best of everything—housing, food, liquor, a thousand-seat movie theater, and tubs of ice cream that had been flown to thirty thousand feet for a quick deep-freeze at a cost of $25,000. The only man who knew why they were here and what they were going to do was Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets:
“The people from Trinity had arrived in the Marianas, and they had
with them at that particular time color photographs of the Trinity explosion. So we got the gang together and we showed them. We did not use the word ‘atomic bomb,’ we did not use that, but we said, ‘OK, this is the bomb, this is what will happen when we make our flight tomorrow and release it. This is what we’re gonna see.’ ” Tibbets’s mother had an unusual name—Enola Gay—which her son’s loving intentions would make infamous on August 6 when Superfortress
Enola Gay
rendezvoused at dawn with the squadron’s instrument and camera planes. Bombardier Deke Parsons crawled into the bomb bay, pulled out a green plug in Little Boy’s innards, and replaced it with a red one. Now the uranium gun was armed.

One of those attending the drop from Los Alamos was Luis Alvarez, who had designed an instrument to measure Little Boy’s yield when it was detonated two thousand feet over Hiroshima—the altitude that maximizes the destructive force of a uranium bomb. A set of these instruments were parachuted in advance of the drop; they then radioed their results back to Luis while he flew nearby in one of the instrument planes, the
Great Artiste
.

Enola Gay
rose to thirty-one thousand feet. A coded message arrived from the weather plane with the final report: less than three-tenths of a mile of cloud cover obscured the primary, meaning it should be targeted. Tibbets told his men the mission was go. A fan-shaped town nesting on the six estuarial islands of the Ota River, Hiroshima was the home of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, shipyards, the Second Army headquarters, an ordnance depot, and around 245,000 people. Paul Tibbets: “As we came in from our initial point to the bomb-release point, it was again routine. We were bothered not in the least by any type of fighter opposition, no flak, we didn’t see anything to cause us any concern so we were able to concentrate strictly on the bombing problem.”

At 8:11 a.m., bombardier Tom Ferraby flipped back his baseball cap so he could peer into his state-of-the-art Norden bombsight. He focused on the designated landmark—a T-shaped river bridge—and the Norden’s analog computer directed the plane and opened its bay. The radio emitted a constant whine to alert nearby American aircraft that a bomb was about to fall.

At 8:15:17, Little Boy was dropped. Tibbets sheared across a 158-degree dive-turn to pull away. Just like at Trinity, the crew had been given welder’s goggles to protect their eyes, but Tibbets discovered they were so dark he couldn’t read his craft’s instruments and dropped them to the floor.

On August 6, 1945, at 8:16 a.m., forty-three seconds after release and 1,850 feet over the town, Little Boy’s inner gun fired and detonated.

None of the photographers working the film plane were able to capture the blast. Hiroshima’s survivors called it the
pika-don
—the “flash-boom.”

At the moment of explosion, the air registered 100 million degrees F. In the city below, 5400°F temperatures melted granite, clay roofing tiles, and even the mica of gravestones, for three-fourths of a mile. The flash burned paint but was deflected by foreground objects, leaving atomic shadows on the walls. A blast wave of eleven hundred feet per second (the speed of sound) erupted. Within a one-mile radius, the only structures that survived were of reinforced concrete—rare in Japan. Hiroshima had seventy-six thousand buildings. Now, seventy thousand were gone.

At seventeen thousand spots the water mains cracked apart, leaving firemen helpless against the hurricane of conflagration. There were 150 doctors, but most were dead or injured, and 1,780 nurses, but 1,654 of these were either dead or injured. Then the fire in the sky of ten suns was replaced by an ever-growing darkness, as dust thrown up by the blast combined with smoke from the hurricane of fire. Journalist William Langewiesche:
“There is a moment of calm. The fireball is no longer visible, but it is still extremely hot, and it is vigorously rising into the atmosphere. [From this] displacement of air, a result of its rise, the winds now reverse and begin to flow back towards the epicenter at speeds up to 200 miles an hour, ripping apart damaged structures that somehow so far remained standing. These ‘afterwinds’ raise dirt and debris into the base of the telltale mushroom cloud now beginning to form. The broken city lies like kindling, and whether because of electrical shorts or gas pilot lights, it begins to burn.”

Paul Tibbets: “The bomb blast hit us. It hit us in two different shock waves, the first being the stronger. This as I say was a perfectly unexciting and routine thing up to the point of taking a look at the damage that had been done, and then it was a little bit hard to realize, it was kind of inconceivable, as to what we were looking at there. We passed comments back and forth in the airplane, we took pictures, and by the time we had done that I became concerned that we better quit being sightseers and get out of there.” He felt a fizziness on his tongue from the radiation, and then a taste of lead.

Enola Gay
’s copilot, Robert Lewis, wrote in his journal,
“My God, what have we done?”

Haruko Ogasawara:
“I found that there was nothing around me. My house, the next-door neighbor’s house, and the next had all vanished. I was standing amid the ruins of my house. No one was around. It was quiet, very quiet—an eerie moment. . . . I wonder how much time had passed when there were cries of searches. Children were calling their parents’ names,
and parents were calling the names of their children. . . . A mother, driven half-mad while looking for her child, was calling his name. At last she found him. His head look like a boiled octopus. His eyes were half-closed, and his mouth was white, pursed, and swollen.”

Dr. Hiroshi Sawachika: “We heard the strange noise. It sounded as if a large flock of mosquitoes were coming from a distance. We looked out of the window to find out what was happening. We saw that citizens from the town were marching towards us. They looked unusual. . . . Soon afterwards, we learned that many of them had been badly burned. As they came to us, they held their hands aloft. They looked like they were ghosts. . . . When I stepped inside, I found the room filled with the smell that was quite similar to the smell of dried squid when it has been grilled. The smell was quite strong. It’s a sad reality that the smell human beings produce when they are burned is the same as that of the dried squid when it is grilled.”

Kikuno Segawa: “A woman who looked like an expectant mother was dead. At her side, a girl of about three years of age brought some water in an empty can she had found. She was trying to let her mother drink from it.”

Journalist Wilfred Graham Burchett:
“Hundreds upon hundreds of the dead were so badly burned by the terrific heat generated by the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or young. Of thousands of others, nearer the center of the explosion, there was no trace. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes—except that there were no ashes.”

The immediate aftermath: 78,150 people killed, 13,983 missing, and 37,425 injured. Most of them died from the 85 percent of a nuclear weapon’s power: blast and heat. One particularly horrifying group of victims looked directly at the blast. The heat melted their eyeballs, and they survived for a dozen hours or so with hollow sockets.

The doctors and nurses of Hiroshima still alive and able to work now found they were dealing with a strange new disease in those who did not die of injuries from blast or fire. Wilfred Graham Burchett: “I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny aftereffects. For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And then bleeding began from the ears, nose, and mouth. At first, the doctors told me, they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle. And in every case the victim died.”

The “uncanny” had been struck with alpha particles (helium nuclei), beta particles (electrons), and gamma rays (similar to but more powerful than X-rays)—the three forms of radiation produced by nuclear weapons and power-plant meltdowns. The first two do little damage to human bodies—beta particles can burn the skin if they remain in contact for an extended period, and can be dangerous if swallowed, such as with iodine-131, which afflicts the thyroids of children—but gamma rays, the most energetic waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, ionize everything they touch, ripping off electrons and leaving behind ions. A strong gamma dose means radiation sickness (nausea, diarrhea, fever, headache, hair falling out, bleeding gums, and dropping white and red blood cell counts), malnutrition from intestinal damage, immune-system collapse from bone marrow damage, lack of blood flow to the brain from vascular damage, and cancer. Today, acute radiation syndrome can be treated with blood transfusions and antibiotics, but these remedies were unknown in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Women who were pregnant at the time of the attack found some of their babies had heads that were smaller than normal . . . an outcome that Ukrainian naturalists would discover, in recent years, with the birds of Chernobyl.

Luis Alvarez wrote to his son:
“What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect, by making wars too terrible, but unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse that it may realize Nobel’s dreams.”

Hearing about the mission’s success, Harry Truman said,
“This is the greatest thing in history.” On August 6, the president gave a radio broadcast:
“The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. . . . We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won. . . . [The enemy] may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. . . . It is an awful responsibility that has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us instead of our enemies, and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”

Author John Hersey:
“A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much about what it was like. Mrs. Nakamura’s
conception of it—and awe of it—was typical. ‘The atom bomb,’ she would say when asked about it, ‘is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it is six thousand times that of the sun. It exploded in the air. There is some radium in it. I don’t know just how it works, but when the radium is put together, it explodes.’ As for the use of the bomb, she would say, ‘It was war and we had to expect it.’ And then she would add,
‘Shikata ga nai,’
a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word
nichevo
: ‘It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.’ . . . Many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could possibly erase. ‘I see,’ Dr. Sasaki once said, ‘that they are holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo just now. I think they ought to try the men who decided to use the bomb and they should hang them all.’ ”