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.
Harry Truman, 1945
Today, 78 years ago, Hiroshima was bombed in one of the final two acts to seal the Allied victory in World War 2. It was a project whose development history was long and turbulent but incredibly interesting nonetheless.
Los Alamos
The new weapons development began in 1939 when Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt about its feasibility1 and the worry that the Nazis were already developing such a weapon that could effectively place the world under the Third Reich’s subjugation. After years of organizing and struggling to find a program director, in 1942 official commencement of development on the bomb finally began. The situation was dire; the European continent was under Nazi submission, genocide in concentration camps, and millions of casualties as the first mass usage of civilian targeting in war was employed. To make matters even worse, the Nazis had an 18-month head start on the Americans; time was paramount. Under the appointment of J. Robert Oppenheimer as the head of the program to develop this new weapon (whose communist past worried those in high command even before the war started), all of America’s scientific prowess was tapped into the desperate race against the Nazis. All of American genius converged at a point where most of the research would be conducted, a desolate location in the mountain of northern New Mexico, Los Alamos.
Trinity
After the scientists at Alamos bickered over the design of the bomb, a design that needed to hold the fissile material (either uranium or plutonium) and ensure an assembly of the material into a critical mass that would produce the devastating effect, an implosion mechanism was decided upon. The “implosion” mechanism2 lined conventional explosives outside of the bomb’s core whose explosions would create a sufficient shock wave to produce the critical mass and, thus, explosion. On July 16th, 1945, the first nuclear explosion was detonated 210 miles from the Los Alamos camp, to the great delight of President Truman, whose unholy alliance with the Soviets started to show significant fissures in its foundation. The test, surrounded by uncertainty as to its outcome, worked as planned, and the remote possibility of atmospheric ignition (the far-off potential that the chain reaction of the explosion would not stop and, in turn, engulf the atmosphere, destroying the world) did not occur.
Potential Test Sights
After the suicide of Hitler on April 30th, 1945, the death of Mussolini, and the success of D-Day, it looked like the dire option of these weapons would not need to be used after all but Japan through a significant wrench in this possibility. In its traditional Japanese custom, which dictates surrender as the highest form of dishonor, Japan refused to surrender, and the Allies prepared to invade. An operation that yielded estimated casualty counts of over a million, estimates so significant that Purple Hearts created in 1945 in preparation for invasion are still used today.3 The atomic weapons provided a swift avenue to prevent further warfare, and a list of potential targets was drawn up; Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Nagasaki, and even the Emperor’s palace were discussed. On August 6th, 1945, the “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima and “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, which resulted in a combined total of 110,000 dead.4
And now I have become death, destroyer of worlds
J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Vishnu
The New Age
Three years, 2 billion dollars, Soviet spying at Los Alamos, and numerous other problems yielded the ultimate weapon. Years of development in Physics resulted in a bomb with more explosive power than 20,000 tons of TNT. A bomb, one that harnessed the basic building block of the universe of which everything is composed used upon civilians ending WW2 with the culmination of humankind’s long struggle against itself. In an instant, thousands vaporized, there and then not, alive then erased, two cities reduced to rubble and the old world order gone in the towering mushroom cloud. These two events gave us a peephole view of what this new age could give us. In our hands now is the power to destroy ourselves with weapons that make those of 1945 look like a puddle to a vast ocean, with a quantity that could destroy hundreds of earths and all 8 billion of us. These weapons have given humanity what it has wanted, the most efficient way to vanquish an enemy in an instant, to end them in a terrifying show of might. It is not my place to lay judgment upon these weapons, see them as a danger in the hands of madmen like Putin, or deterrents to stop further conflict; one fact remains true. The weapons utilized on August 6th and 9th brought the world a box, one whose contents have yet to be distinguished and whose course is yet to be seen; this box, be it a Pandora’s box or something else, has forever changed the history of the world.
Sources
- https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1939-1942/einstein_letter.htm ↩︎
- https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Science/BombDesign/bomb-design.html ↩︎
- https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176762 ↩︎
- https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ ↩︎
Leave a Reply