Bomb (22 page)

It was the chill of knowing they had used something they loved—the study of physics—to build the deadliest weapon in human history. Oppenheimer was feeling the chill too.

“It was extremely solemn,” he recalled. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.”

Oppenheimer thought of a line from the ancient Hindu scripture, the
Bhagavad-Gita
, a dramatic moment in which the god Vishnu declares: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

LITTLE BOY

THE TRINITY BLAST WAS HEARD IN EL PASO,
Texas, 150 miles from the explosion. The shock wave rattled windows in Silver City, New Mexico, 200 miles from Trinity. People in Amarillo, Texas, 450 miles away, saw the flash.

Newspapers and radio stations all over the region were flooded with calls demanding information. The reporters, of course, had no idea what had happened. But that morning they received a statement from the army—one General Groves had prepared weeks before.

The news went out: “The explosives dump at the Alamogordo Air Base has blown up. No lives are lost. The explosion is what caused the tremendous sound and the light in the sky. I repeat for the benefit of the many phone calls coming in: the explosive dump at the Alamogordo Air Base has blown up.”

*   *   *

T
HAT MORNING
at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard on San Francisco Bay, sailors on the USS
Indianapolis
watched a crane lower a fifteen-foot wooden crate to the ship's deck. On the side of the crate was stenciled: “Secret—U.S. Government.” Inside was the gun assembly for the uranium bomb.

At the same time, Major Robert Furman and Captain James Nolan carried the uranium onto the ship in their three-hundred-pound lead bucket. They took it to their cabin and locked the door. Then they bolted the bucket to the floor.

Shortly before noon the
Indianapolis
steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge and headed out to sea. The trip to Tinian would take ten days. Furman and Nolan were under strict orders to stay with the U-235 at all times, trading four-hour shifts in the cabin. They flipped a coin to see who got the first shift.

*   *   *

I
T WAS EARLY EVENING IN
P
OTSDAM,
Germany, when news of the Trinity test reached President Truman.

“Operated on this morning,” read the coded telegram. “Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations.… Dr. Groves pleased.”

The meaning was clear: The test had been a success.

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” Truman wrote in his diary.

A few days later, Groves sent a more complete report to Potsdam. Truman sat in stunned silence as Harry Stimson read aloud. The bomb had exploded with the almost unbelievable force of eighteen thousand tons of TNT, an explosive used in regular bombs. The heat of the blast completely vaporized the steel tower holding the bomb. For hundreds of feet in all directions, sand was melted into a greenish glass. Instruments a mile from the blast measured temperatures of 750 degrees Fahrenheit. Not a plant or animal in this radius was left alive.

As Stimson read, he could see that Truman was “tremendously pepped up” by the report. “It gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence.”

It was time to shock Joseph Stalin.

After a long day of meetings, Truman stopped the Soviet premiere as he was leaving the conference room. “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” Truman recalled.

Truman was hoping to see fear on Stalin's face. But the man just nodded politely—his expression never changed.

“Glad to hear it,” Stalin said through an interpreter. “I hope you'll make good use of it against the Japanese.” Then he left the room.

Winston Churchill, equally eager to intimidate Stalin, stepped quickly to Truman.

“How did it go?” he whispered.

Truman shrugged. “He never asked a question.”

Truman assumed Stalin hadn't understood. He never guessed that Stalin already knew all about the American bomb project.

Back in his private room, Stalin told his foreign secretary, “We'll have to have a talk with Kurchatov today about speeding up our work.”

*   *   *

T
HE BOMB WORKED—NOW
Truman had to decide what to do with it.

It all came down to the progress of the war with Japan. In late June, American forces had finally taken the island of Okinawa, 340 miles from the Japanese mainland. More than 12,000 Americans were killed in the 82-day fight, as 100,000 Japanese soldiers defended every inch of the island to the death. Meanwhile, American bombers were pounding Japan night after night, flattening and burning entire cities. One single bombing raid over Japan's capital of Tokyo set off a firestorm that killed 100,000 people. Japan's military had taken such a beating by this point, the country was nearly defenseless against American air raids. And yet Japan refused to surrender.

As a next step, American troops were preparing for an all-out invasion of Japan. The Japanese had an estimated 2.5 million troops ready to defend the islands. Truman asked General George Marshall how many Americans were likely to be killed or wounded. “It was his opinion,” recalled Truman, “that such an invasion would cost at a minimum a quarter of a million American casualties.”

For Truman, that settled it. If the atomic bomb could shock Japan into giving up, it had to be used. “It was a question of saving hundreds of thousands of American lives,” he later explained. “I couldn't worry about what history would say about my personal morality. I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right.”

*   *   *

O
N
J
ULY 26,
the
Indianapolis
arrived at Tinian with the uranium bomb's gun assembly and U-235. That same day Truman and Churchill issued the Potsdam Declaration—a final demand that Japan end the fighting. There was no mention of the atomic bomb, but the document closed with a harsh warning: “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces.… The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

When the message reached Tokyo the next morning, Japanese leaders debated options. Policy decisions were not usually made by Japan's emperor, Hirohito. Instead, a group known as the Big Six—the country's three top political and three top military leaders—met to argue and hammer out decisions. When it came time to consider surrender, the Big Six were split. Political leaders were open to the idea of accepting the Potsdam demand. Military leaders urged immediate rejection. They especially feared unconditional surrender, which would allow foreign soldiers to take over their country with no conditions. This, they felt, was too disgraceful to even consider.

Prime Minister Baron Suzuki called reporters together. “As for the government, it does not find any important value in it,” Suzuki said of the Potsdam Declaration. “There is no other recourse but to ignore it entirely and resolutely fight for the successful conclusion of the war.”

“In the face of this rejection,” Stimson later said, “we could only proceed to demonstrate that the ultimatum had meant exactly what it said.”

The order went out to Colonel Tibbets on Tinian: “The 509 Composite Group, 20th Air Force, will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945.”

*   *   *

R
OBERT
S
ERBER AND A TEAM
of physicists flew from Los Alamos to Tinian. On August 1, in an air-conditioned hut, they assembled the uranium bomb. Ten feet long and painted dark gray, it looked like a small submarine. They nicknamed it Little Boy.

The bomb was ready on August 2. Tibbets was just waiting on the weather.

“The word came Sunday morning, August 5,” he remembered. “After three days of uncertainty, the clouds that hung over the Japanese islands for the past week were beginning to break up. Conditions were ‘go' and tomorrow was the day.”

That afternoon, Little Boy was loaded into Tibbets's plane, which he had named
Enola Gay
, for his mother.

At midnight, Tibbets gathered his crew for a final briefing on the mission. “The usual jesting that takes place before a briefing was missing,” reported William Laurence, who'd come to Tinian to witness the event.

“Tonight is the night we have all been waiting for,” Tibbets began. “We are going on a mission to drop a bomb different from any you have ever seen or heard about. This bomb contains a destructive force equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT.”

“He paused, expecting questions,” Laurence reported. “But there was silence in the room, a look of amazement and incredulity on every face.”

*   *   *

A
T 1:37 A.M.,
three B-29s rumbled down the runway on Tinian, took off, and headed for Japan. Each would check the weather over a specific Japanese city—potential targets approved by President Truman. The planes would radio the reports to Tibbets, who, based on weather conditions and visibility, would choose from the list of targets.

“Our orders were for a visual bombing run,” Tibbets explained. He was not permitted to use radar. If he couldn't see the target, he was not to release his irreplaceable bomb.

Beside the runway, Tibbets walked around the
Enola Gay
, making the final preflight checks. Then he and his eleven hand-picked crew members climbed into the plane. “First we checked all the instruments and radio equipment,” recalled Tibbets. “Now it was time to fire the engines.”

Tibbets taxied the plane to the end of the runway. “More than a mile and a half of chipped coral runway stretched out before me in the darkness,” he said. Just the night before, four B-29s had crashed attempting to take off. Tibbets could see the planes' black, twisted skeletons still lying beside the runway. It was never easy to get these massive machines safely off the ground. And the
Enola Gay
was loaded with extra fuel and the bomb—fifteen thousand pounds more cargo than the B-29 was designed to carry. Tibbets knew he'd need every inch of the runway to build up enough speed to get his heavy plane into the air.

“I like to think that my reputation for keeping cool in moments such as this was deserved,” Tibbets said. “But now I found myself gripping the controls with a nervous tension I hadn't experienced since that first combat mission.”

This is the moment
, he told himself.
This is the reason they chose me.

“Gradually we picked up speed—75, 100, 125 miles an hour,” he said. “The end of the runway was approaching fast and the lights on both sides of the paved surface were running out.”

In the nearby control tower, William Laurence and a very tense General Thomas Farrell watched Tibbets's plane bouncing along the runway. With less than 100 feet left, they saw the plane ease off the ground and begin to climb.

Farrell exhaled. “I never saw a plane use that much runway,” he said. “I thought Tibbets was never going to pull it off.”

*   *   *

“I
T WAS A PLEASANT TROPICAL NIGHT,
” Tibbets remembered. “Around us were cream-puff clouds, their edges outlined by the faint glow of a crescent moon.”

The flight over the Pacific was easy and uneventful. Tibbets and the crew watched the sun rise as they passed over Iwo Jima. “And now we were winging toward Japan,” he said, “surrounded by scattered clouds that were edged with reddish gold from the slanting light of the newly risen sun.”

At 8:30 a.m., reports started coming in from the weather planes. The radio operator wrote down the coded messages and handed them to Tibbets. The copilot took control of the plane while Tibbets decoded and read the notes.

Then he lifted the intercom and announced to the crew: “It's Hiroshima.”

HIROSHIMA

“IT WAS A CLEAR
but sultry morning,” remembered Yohko Kuwabara, who was a thirteen-year-old girl on the morning of August 6, 1945. “The midsummer sun was so bright it almost hurt my eyes.”

She had just finished breakfast at her family's home in Hiroshima when she noticed the time. “It was already past seven. ‘I'll be late for school!' I started getting ready for school in a hurry.”

Yohko raced down the street to the streetcar stop near her home. A streetcar soon came, and she climbed onto the crowded car. “I pushed my way through until I was standing behind the driver,” she said. “Through the windshield I looked at the pedestrians hurrying on their way.”

*   *   *

“W
E WERE EIGHT MINUTES
away from the scheduled time of the bomb release when the city came into view,” recalled Paul Tibbets. “The early morning sunlight glistened off the white buildings in the distance.”

Through 31,000 feet of clear sky, Hiroshima looked just like the pictures Tibbets had studied. Located on the southeastern coast of Japan, the city stood on six long, flat islands. Between the islands ran branches of the Ota River as it fanned out into a delta near the sea. This was Japan's eighth largest city, and the location of an important army base. On August 6, there were about 280,000 civilians living in Hiroshima, and 43,000 soldiers.

Tibbets's bombardier, Thomas Ferebee, pressed his left eye against his bombsight, giving him a magnified view of the city below. It was his job to aim the bomb at the T-shaped Aioi Bridge—a centrally located feature that could be identified from high in the air.

“Okay, I've got the bridge,” announced Ferebee.

Ferebee pointed toward the target. Theodore Van Kirk, the navigator, looked down, comparing the view from the nose of the plane with the photo of Aioi Bridge in his hand.