Bomb (23 page)

“No question about it,” Van Kirk agreed.

Tibbets guided the plane toward the bridge.

“We're on target,” said Ferebee.

Tibbets picked up the intercom and said: “Put on your goggles. Place them up on your forehead. When the countdown starts, pull the goggles over your eyes and leave them there until after the flash.”

At 8:15 the bomb bay doors opened. The bomb dropped out and fell toward the city.

“With the release of the bomb, the plane was instantly nine thousand pounds lighter,” Tibbets said. “As a result, its nose leaped up sharply and I had to quickly execute the most important task of the flight: to put as much distance as possible between our plane and the point at which the bomb would explode.”

*   *   *

F
ORTY-THREE SECONDS
after dropping from the plane, at an altitude of 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, the bomb's two pieces of uranium slammed together, setting off an explosive chain reaction. The blinding flash and raging fireball looked just like the ones at Trinity—only this time, there was a city underneath.

The blast heated the ground beneath the explosion to over 5,000 degrees. Nearly every person within 1,000 yards in all directions was instantly killed. Many were vaporized.

A ten-year-old boy named Shintaro Fukuhara was standing outside his school with his younger brother at the moment of the explosion. “I saw a red dragonfly winging along and finally alighting on the wall right in front of me,” he remembered. “Just as my brother reached out to catch the dragonfly, there was a flash. I felt I'd suddenly been blown into a furnace.… When I opened my eyes after being flung eight yards, it was still dark as if I were facing a wall painted black.”

Yohko Kuwabara was still on the crowded streetcar, headed for school. “I was blinded for a moment by a piercing flash of bright light,” she later said, “and the air filled with yellow smoke like poison gas. Momentarily, it got so dark I couldn't see anything. There was a loud, dull, thunderous noise. The inside of my mouth was gritty, as if there were sand in it, and my throat hurt.”

Described by survivors all over the city, the sudden darkness was caused by the enormous amount of dust and debris thrown into the air by the force of the blast.

“The view, where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny, was now dark and hazy,” said a doctor named Michihiko Hachiya. Pushing and wriggling out from under fallen pieces of his home, Hachiya stood. He was bleeding badly, his skin pieced with splinters and broken glass. Like people all over Hiroshima, he assumed a large, but ordinary bomb had fallen right near him.

“Yaeko-san!” he called to his wife. “Where are you?”

She rose from the rubble, bleeding, her clothes torn.

“We'll be all right,” he told her. “Only let's get out of here as fast as we can.”

Together they ran to the street. Hachiya tripped over something, looked down, and saw it was the body of a soldier, crushed under a fallen gate. Then he looked out at the neighborhood—and knew this had been no ordinary bomb. Everywhere houses were swaying and falling, flames rising from the ruins.

*   *   *

Y
OHKO
K
UWABARA TUMBLED
out of the streetcar. Buildings all around her were on fire. “I picked my way through the rubble and made it out to the main street,” she said. “I stood there dumbfounded.… I heard children crying, buildings collapsing, men and women screaming. I saw the bright red of blood and people with dazed expressions on their faces trying to get away. Where should I go?”

The ten-year-old boy, Shintaro Fukuhara, also felt the need to move, to get away. “I had unconsciously taken my brother's hand and started running,” he said. “I just ran home as fast as I could.”

He passed people with horrible burns, their faces swollen, their blackened skin hanging in strips. Bodies on the ground, and bodies floating in the river. “I cannot describe the countless tragic things I saw,” he said.

An image that haunted many in Hiroshima was the horrific parade of victims on the streets. “They stagger exactly like sleepwalkers,” said one survivor; “like walking ghosts” said another.

“They held their arms out in front of their chest like kangaroos,” said a high school girl, “with only their hands pointed downward.”

Dr. Hachiya saw this as he was wobbling toward the hospital where he worked. “They moved as though in pain, like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies with forearms and hands dangling,” he said. “These people puzzled me until I suddenly realized that they had been burned and were holding their arms out to prevent the painful friction of raw surfaces rubbing together.… One thing was common to everyone I saw—complete silence.”

*   *   *

“I
F
I
LIVE A HUNDRED YEARS,
I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind,” said Robert Lewis, copilot of the
Enola Gay
.

The plane was nine miles from the explosion when the bomb's shock wave hit.

“The plane bounced,” Theodore Van Kirk remembered, “it jumped and there was a noise like a piece of sheet metal snapping.”

Tibbets held tight to the controls. The plane was undamaged.

“Now that I knew we were safe from the effects of the blast, I began circling so that we could view the results,” said Tibbets. “We were not prepared for the awesome sight that met our eyes.”

The men saw a purple-gray mushroom cloud rising above Hiroshima, its top reaching three miles above their plane. The cloud boiled and writhed, they said, like a living thing.

“Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below,” said Tibbets. “At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar.… The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge.”

The entire city, said Van Kirk, looked like “a pot of boiling black oil.”

“A feeling of shock and horror swept over all of us,” said Tibbets.

Robert Lewis picked up his pencil and made a note in his logbook: “My God, what have we done?”

After turning back toward Tinian, Tibbets wrote out a coded report and handed it to the radio operator. “Clear-cut successful in all respects. Visual effects greater than Trinity.… Proceeding to regular base.”

As the plane headed home, the crew felt a mix of emotions, including relief that the job was done and hope that the war would now end. But something else entered the mix, a thought Paul Tibbets would never forget.

“We were sobered by the knowledge that the world would never be the same,” he said. “War, the scourge of the human race since time began, now held terrors beyond belief.”

REACTION BEGINS

PAUL TIBBETS'S REPORT
was relayed from Tinian to Leslie Groves's office in Washington, D.C. Groves picked up his phone and called Los Alamos. Robert Oppenheimer lifted the receiver to his ear.

“I'm proud of you and all of your people,” Groves said.

“It went all right?” asked Oppenheimer.

“Apparently it went with a tremendous bang.”

“I extend my heartiest congratulations,” Oppenheimer said. “It's been a long road.”

“Yes, it has been a long road, and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.”

“Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.”

“Well, you know I've never concurred with those doubts at any time.”

*   *   *

P
RESIDENT
T
RUMAN WAS ON A SHIP
back to the United States, eating lunch with the crew. An officer walked in and handed him a message that had just come in from Secretary of War Stimson, along with a map of Japan. On the map, circled in red, was the city of Hiroshima.

Truman read the note. He jumped up, grabbed a fork from beside his plate, and began banging it against the side of his water glass. Everyone in the mess hall turned to the president.

“Keep your seats, gentlemen,” Truman said, an excited smile on his face as he waved the note in his hand. “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!”

The room erupted in cheers.

In Washington, the White House released a statement that Truman had prepared ahead of time. “An American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima,” Truman announced to the world. “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.… 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 this earth.”

*   *   *

A
T
L
OS
A
LAMOS,
most scientists first heard the news over the public address system.

“Attention please, attention please,” announced a voice over the Tech Area intercom. “One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan.”

Richard Feynman described his first reaction as “very considerable elation and excitement.”

“There was a sudden noise in the laboratory, of running footsteps and yelling voices,” remembered Otto Frisch. Scientists ran from door to door shouting, “Hiroshima has been destroyed!”

Frank Oppenheimer, who was standing outside his brother's office, remembered thinking, “Thank God it wasn't a dud.” But a second thought followed quickly. “Before the whole sentence of the broadcast was finished, one suddenly got this horror of all the people who had been killed.”

Frisch saw fellow scientists rushing to the phone to make reservations at Santa Fe restaurants to celebrate. “Of course they were exalted by the success of their work, but it seemed rather ghoulish,” he later said. “I still remember the feeling of unease, indeed nausea.”

As the news spread, children of scientists grabbed pots and pans and ran outside banging them together and shouting. Parties started all over the mesa.

Feynman sat on the hood of a jeep, playing bongos as people danced in the dirt streets. “I was involved in this happy thing,” he remembered, “with the excitement running over Los Alamos—at the same time as the people were dying and struggling in Hiroshima.”

Almost everyone was feeling that same strange mix of pride and horror. That night Oppenheimer went to a party in one of the men's dorms, carrying in his hand a message from Washington with more details on the destruction in Hiroshima. As he showed the note around, the mood in the room darkened. The party broke up early. As Oppenheimer walked home, he saw one of his scientists bent over a bush, vomiting.

He thought to himself, “The reaction has begun.”

*   *   *

J
UST BEFORE DINNER
time at Farm Hall, the English mansion at which Germany's top scientists were being held, a British officer named T. H. Rittner asked to speak to Otto Hahn in private.

Hahn had discovered fission less than seven years before. Now Rittner told him the news: The Americans had just dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

“Hahn was completely shattered by the news, and said he felt personally responsible,” Rittner reported. “He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of his discovery and he felt that now these had been realized and he was to blame.”

Rittner forced Hahn to gulp down a glass of whisky. Slightly calmer, Hahn walked to the dining room, where the other German scientists were gathered for dinner. He announced the news.

“The guests were completely staggered,” recalled Rittner. “At first they refused to believe it.”

Rittner excused himself and shut the door. With no idea they were being recorded, the Germans talked freely.

“Did they use the word
uranium
in connection with this atomic bomb?” Heisenberg asked.

Hahn said he wasn't sure.

“Then it's got nothing to do with atoms,” insisted Heisenberg. The Allies may have used a very powerful bomb, he said, but not a
real
atomic bomb, not a bomb based on the fission of uranium atoms.

“If they have really got it,” said Hahn, “they have been very clever in keeping it secret.”

“I still don't believe a word about the bomb,” said Heisenberg, “but I might be wrong.”

A little later that night they turned on a radio and heard Truman's official announcement. Forced to concede that an atomic bomb had destroyed Hiroshima, the German scientists began trying to figure how the bomb had been made. They discussed the technical challenges and lack of key materials that had slowed their own bomb-making efforts.

Then they began trying to convince themselves they could have built the bomb—if they had really wanted to.

“If we had all wanted Germany to win the war, we would have succeeded,” claimed Carl von Weizsacker.

“I don't believe that,” said Hahn, “but I am thankful we didn't succeed.”

“The Americans could do it better than we could, that's clear,” added Horst Korsching.

Weizsacker wasn't convinced. “If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945,” he said, “we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter of 1944–1945.”

“The result would have been that we would have obliterated London but still would not have conquered the world,” said Karl Wirtz. “And then they would have dropped them on us.”

“I thank God on my bended knees that we did not make the uranium bomb,” said Hahn.

Heisenberg said, “I would like to know what Stalin is thinking this evening.”

*   *   *

T
HE
S
OVIET DICTATOR WAS FURIOUS.