Tomorrow is a very important day. I know, most of you are thinking that it’s my birthday — and I must admit that my birth is certainly a significant event to be celebrated on August 6th.
But, if you can imagine, there is an even more significant event whose anniversary comes up on August 6 every year.
On August 6, 1945 an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people — tens of thousands more died later of radiation exposure.
Since one of the current movie hits is “Oppenheimer,” I though it might be an appropriate time to discuss “The Manhattan Project.”
Before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists — many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe — became concerned with the nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. In 1940, the U.S. government began running its own atomic weapons development program. After the U.S. entry into World War II, the program came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with overseeing the construction of the the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program (The project was codenamed “The Manhattan Project” after the engineering corps’ Manhattan district.)
During the next several years, the program’s scientists worked to produce the key materials for nuclear fission — uranium-235 and plutonium (Pu-239.) Those materials were sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer had the job of turning these materials into a workable atomic bomb. Early in the morning of July 16, 1945, the program conducted its first successful test of an atomic device — a plutonium bomb — at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
By the time the plutonium bomb had been tested, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. However, Japan vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific. It became apparent to the Allied leaders that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In Late July of 1945, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused.
General Douglas Mac Arthur, and other top military commanders, favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already underway and following up with a massive invasion. He advised President Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists had moral reservations against the use of the atomic bomb. Proponents of the A-bomb, including Truman’s Secretary of State believed that the bomb’s devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world.
In the end, President Truman decided to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of reducing American casualties and bringing the war to a quick end.
Hiroshima, a manufacturing center, home to about 35,000 people and located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. The bomb, known as “Little Boy” was dropped by parachute at 8:15 in the morning and exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima.
Hiroshima’s devastation failed to obtain immediate Japanese surrender. So on August 9, it was decided to drop the second bomb on Kokura, but that city was cloud covered, and it was dropped on Nagasaki — the bomb, named “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning.
At noon on August 15, 1945 (Japanese time) Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender in a radio broadcast. The formal surrender agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.
Because of the extent of the devastation, exact death tolls from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unknown.
So not only tomorrow, but every day, we should remember that we have the power to destroy the Earth as we know it. We should think about that every day — and maybe, especially, on election day.
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