On 9 August 1945, a B-29 named Bock’s Car lifted off from Tinian and headed toward the primary target: Kokura Arsenal, a massive collection of war industries adjacent to the city of Kokura.
The primary target was the city of Kokura, where the Kokura Arsenal was located, and the secondary target was Nagasaki, where two large Mitsubishi armament plants were located.
The weather had been reported satisfactory earlier in the day over Kokura Arsenal, but by the time the B-29 finally arrived, the target was obscured by smoke and haze. Two more passes over the target still produced no sightings of the aiming point. As an aircraft crewman, Jacob Beser, later recalled, Japanese fighters and bursts of antiaircraft fire were by this time starting to make things “a little hairy.” Kokura no longer appeared to be an option as there was only enough fuel on board to return to the secondary airfield on Okinawa, making one hurried pass as they went over their secondary target, Nagasaki.
At 11:02 a.m., at an altitude of 1,650 feet, ‘Fat Man’ exploded over Nagasaki. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 21 kilotons, 40 per cent greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb.
The Aftermath
Above: An ink wash drawing of four people carrying a stretcher with a man on it. Surrounding them were the still partly burning ruins of Nagasaki just after the atomic bomb had levelled the city to the ground. In the centre of the background, three figures pull a fourth out from under the rubble.
The photographs above are of Nagasaki before the bombing and after the fires had burned out.
Urakami Tenshudo (Catholic Church in Nagasaki) was destroyed by the bomb, the dome/bell of the Church, at right, having toppled off.
Partially incinerated child in Nagasaki. Photo from Japanese photographer Yōsuke Yamahata, one day after the blast and building fires had subsided. Once the American forces had Japan under their military control, they imposed censorship on all such images, including those from the conventional bombing of Tokyo; this prevented the distribution of Yamahata’s photographs. These restrictions were lifted in 1952.
(The photograph above) A rescue crew is searching for the injured throughout the burning streets and ruins of Nagasaki.
Above: A wounded woman and child
A pencil drawing (above) is of a man lying on a mat. The man has bandages around his head and right ankle. Near his head is a can with the words, “Whole milk,” written on it.
(Photo above) Two survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Japanese cities at the end of World War II at the time, accompanied by two female Japanese doctors, visited London.
The two women walked past Buckingham Palace with their companions. From left to right: Mrs Shinobu Hizume, a 52-year-old housewife from Hiroshima; Miss Kikeu Ihara, a 43-year-old school teacher from Nagasaki; Doctor Kimiko Honda and Dr Sugiko Yamamoto. They stay in London to be questioned by doctors to investigate the effects of atomic bomb explosions. Mrs Hizume lost four members of her family, including her husband, in the bombing of Hiroshima. (Photo taken 15 March 1955.)
I will not pass judgment about the event which involved the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Enola Gay. Nothing would be easier than to judge in hindsight. I try to stick to the facts as much as possible. These facts actually started in 1937.
What is often ignored in the whole debate of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima are the years that lead up to that fateful day of 6 August 1945.
The Japanese Imperial Army started the industrial scale of mass murder before the Nazis did. The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (sometimes called Nankin) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning on 13 December 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. The perpetrators committed additional war crimes, such as mass rape, looting, and arson. The massacre is considered one of the worst atrocities in pre-World War II history. In those six weeks, it is estimated that approximately 200,000 to 350,000 civilians were raped and murdered.
The average death rate of Allied nationalities of POWs in the Pacific War was 27%. The American mortality rate was 34%, the Australian 33%, and the British 32%. The Dutch mortality rate was below 20%. The number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000.
The exact number of civilians and POWs murdered by the Japanese Imperial regime is difficult to determine due to the sheer scale of it, but it well exceeds 10 million. The Japanese Imperial Army and Navy showed they were willing to sacrifice themselves. We have all seen footage of the Kamikaze attacks.
The Japanese government and its head of state Emperor Hirohito, determined the destiny of Japan on 7 December 1941, when they attacked Pearl Harbor.
Before 1943, work on the design and functioning of the atom bomb itself was largely theoretical, based on fundamental experiments carried out at several different locations. That year, a laboratory directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer was created on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 34 miles (55 km) north of Santa Fe.
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.
The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on the then-known as the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. It was renamed the White Sands Proving Ground on 9 July 1945.
In the early morning of 6 August 1945, three B-29 bombers departed from Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean. Six hours later, they changed the course of history. A single atomic bomb dropped from the Enola Gay exploded over Hiroshima, Japan. In an instant, over four square miles of the city and an estimated 90,000 inhabitants ceased to exist.
On 5 August 1945, during the preparation for the first atomic mission, Captain Paul Tibbets assumed command of the aircraft. He named it after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets (1893–1983), who herself had been named after the heroine of the novel Enola. When it came to selecting a name for the plane, Tibbets later recalled that: “…my thoughts turned at this point to my courageous red-haired mother, whose quiet confidence had been a source of strength to me since boyhood, particularly during the soul-searching period when I decided to give up a medical career to become a military pilot. At a time when Dad had thought I had lost my marbles, she had taken my side and said, ‘I know you will be all right, son.’”
Before embarking, a flight surgeon handed Tibbets a dozen cyanide capsules to distribute to crew members in case the plane was shot down. He said, “The capsules would take three minutes to work.” Although crew members possessed limited information, they were not to be taken captive. Tibbets was ordered to shoot anyone who refused, under those circumstances, to swallow the capsule. Tibbets explained, “I had been given the order by the Commander-In-Chief, Pacific, shortly before take off. It was a hell of a thing to know you might have to kill your own crew.”
Tibbets understood that there was very little risk of getting shot down. Lt. Morris “Dick” Jeppson, the crew’s weapons specialist, said Tibbets referred to the flight as “a milk run.” “And it really was,” Jeppson confirmed, “there were no problems, there was no opposition from the Japanese—the plane was flying so high their fighter planes couldn’t get that high anyway. I wasn’t nervous. I tell people I was shot in the ass with confidence. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”
Twenty-seven-year-old Brooklyn-born Irishman Robert Lewis expressed his optimism differently by putting a packet of condoms into his flight jacket, wanting to be ready for the postwar party. When Tibbets told his copilot about the suicide pills, Lewis showed him the condoms. Tibbets did not find this amusing.
Hiroshima was the primary target of the first nuclear bombing mission on 6 August, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternative targets. Enola Gay, piloted by Tibbets, took off from North Field, in the Northern Mariana Islands, about six hours flight time from Japan, accompanied by two other B-29s, The Great Artiste, carrying instrumentation, and a then-nameless aircraft later called Necessary Evil, commanded by Captain George Marquardt, to take photographs. The director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves Jr., wanted the event recorded for posterity, so the takeoff was illuminated by floodlights. When he wanted to taxi, Tibbets leaned out the window to direct the bystanders out of the way. On request, he gave a friendly wave to the cameras.
After leaving Tinian, the three aircraft made their way separately to Iwo Jima, where they rendezvoused at 2,440 meters (8,010 ft) and set course for Japan. The aircraft reached the target in clear visibility at 9,855 meters (32,333 ft). Navy Captain William S. “Deak” Parsons of Project Alberta, who was in command of the mission, armed the bomb during the flight to minimize the risks during takeoff. His assistant, Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jeppson, removed the safety devices 30 minutes before reaching the target area.
The release at 8:15 a.m. (Hiroshima time) went as planned, and the Little Boy took 53 seconds to fall from the aircraft flying at 31,060 feet (9,470 m) to the predetermined detonation height of about 1,968 feet (600 m) above the city. Enola Gay travelled 11.5 mi (18.5 km) before the plane felt the shock waves from the blast. Although buffeted by the shock, neither Enola Gay nor The Great Artiste was damaged. In a 1989 interview, Paul Tibbets said: “Well, as the bomb left the aeroplane, we took over manual control, made an extremely steep turn to try and put as much distance between ourselves and the explosion as possible. After we felt the explosion hit the aeroplane, that is the concussion waves, we knew that the bomb had exploded, and everything was a success. So we turned around to take a look at it. The site that greeted our eyes was quite beyond what we had expected, because we saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us with this tremendous mushroom on top. Beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima.”
The detonation created a blast equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ). The U-235 weapon was considered very inefficient, with only 1.7% of its fissile material reacting. The radius of total destruction was about one mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11 km2). Americans estimated that 4.7 square miles (12 km2) of the city were destroyed. Japanese officials determined that 69% of Hiroshima’s buildings were destroyed and another 6–7% damaged. Some 70,000–80,000 people, 30% of the city’s population, were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm, and another 70,000 were injured. Out of those killed, 20,000 were soldiers and 20,000 were Korean slave laborers.
In 2000, Paul Tibbets told NPR about the attack of 6 August 1945. Tibbets remembered his bombardier, spotting their target from 31,000 feet above Japan.
“As we approached the target, finally, Ferebee says I got the aiming point, which was Aioi Bridge if I remember the name of it correctly. We then all got ready for the bomb, the final bomb run. I gave him the countdown. I hooded the circuits, and then the next thing that happened, the bomb had left the aeroplane.
I saw the sky in front of me light up brilliantly with all kinds of colours. And at the same time, I felt the taste of lead in my mouth. And where – we had seen the city on our way in, I saw nothing but a bunch of boiling debris with fire and smoke and all that kind of stuff. It just—it was devastating to take a look at it.”
About the death toll, Paul Tibbets said: “I said to myself, if you’re going to be a bombing pilot, you can’t worry about these things. This is not anything that you’ve thought of, but it’s something that you were told to do to fulfill your duty. The thing of it is there is no morality in warfare, that’s where you start. So there is no morality to anything that goes on in war. War itself is immoral, and I can’t buy that bit of statement. They would have gone on and on and they would have been many more people killed.”
Enola Gay returned safely to its base on Tinian to great fanfare, touching down at 2:58 pm, after 12 hours and 13 minutes. The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil followed at short intervals. Several hundred people, including journalists and photographers, had gathered to watch the planes return. Tibbets was the first to disembark and was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross on the spot.
Many have argued that the bombing of Hiroshima, and the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki, were atrocities and war crimes. In retrospect, and taken out of the wider context, that is a valid argument. However when you put it in the context of World War II, an enemy that was so evil and brutal that it was even willing to murder its own people. An enemy that didn’t appear to have any compassion and carried out numerous atrocities, murdering, maiming and raping millions. In that context, you may just come to a different conclusion.
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Little Boy was the name of the atomic bomb which was dropped from Enola Gay , over Hiroshima on August 6,1945. at 8.15 AM.The bomb exploded about 1,500 feet above the city with a force of 15,000 tons of TNT. The name of the plane was Enola Gay, named after the pilot’s mother. The pilot, attached to the 509th, was Col. Paul Tibbets. The copilot was Capt. Robert Lewis. Little Boy destroyed 5 square miles of the city and caused about 140,000 deaths by the end of 1945.
The gun-type weapon possessed the power of 26,000,000 pounds of high explosives. Nuclear fission was achieved by the collision of two parts of active material (Uranium-235). A U-235 projectile fired down a gun barrel collided with a stationary element, causing a mass increase leading to nuclear fission. Little Boy was dropped untested. Previously, on July 26, the bomb, along with “Fat Man” was transported to Tinian Island by USS Indianapolis (CA-35) for final assembly. Four days later, Japanese submarine, I-58, sank Indianapolis, northeast of Leyte. the atomic attacks, the US Air Force dropped pamphlets in Japan. They advised the citizens of “prompt and utter destruction” and urged civilians to flee.
Prior to the atomic attacks, the US Air Force dropped pamphlets in Japan. They advised the citizens of “prompt and utter destruction” and urged civilians to flee.
The result of the Manhattan Project, begun in June 1942, “Little Boy” was a gun-type weapon, which detonated by firing one mass of uranium down a cylinder into another mass to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Weighing about 9,000 pounds, it produced an explosive force equal to 20,000 tons of TNT.
The crew of the Enola Gay consisted of 12 men. Prior to the war in the Pacifc and taking command of the Enola Gay, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr had flown the lead bomber ‘Butcher Shop'(aka Big Tin Bird) for the first American daylight heavy bomber mission on 17 August 1942, a shallow penetration raid against a marshaling yard in Rouen in Occupied France.
First Lieutenant Jacob Beser was the radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay, 3 days later, he was a crew member aboard Bockscar when the Fat Man bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He was the only crew member to be on both missions.
Max Planck, was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.He had foreseen that the Nazi regimes racial law would have consequences for science in Germany.
An immediate consequence upon passage of the law was that it produced both quantitative and qualitative losses to the physics community. Numerically, it has been estimated that a total of 1,145 university teachers, in all fields, were driven from their posts, which represented about 14% of the higher learning institutional staff members in 1932–1933.Out of 26 German nuclear physicists cited in the literature before 1933, 50% emigrated. Qualitatively, 11 physicists and four chemists who had won or would win the Nobel Prize emigrated from Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, most of them in 1933.These 15 scientists were: Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn, Peter Debye, Dennis Gabor, Fritz Haber, Gerhard Herzberg, Victor Hess, George de Hevesy, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Stern, and Eugene Wigner. Britain and the United States were often the recipients of the talent which left Germany. The University of Göttingen had 45 dismissals from the staff of 1932–1933, for a loss of 19%.
Eight students, assistants, and colleagues of the Göttingen theoretical physicist Max Born left Europe after Hitler came to power and eventually found work on the Manhattan Project, thus helping the United States, Britain and Canada to develop the atomic bomb; they were Enrico Fermi,[50] James Franck, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Robert Oppenheimer (who was American, but had studied under Born), Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann. Otto Robert Frisch, who with Rudolf Peierls first calculated the critical mass of U-235 needed for an explosive, was also a Jewish refugee.
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, had been right in assessing the consequences of National Socialist policies. In 1933, Planck, as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (Kaiser Wilhelm Society), met with Adolf Hitler. During the meeting, Planck told Hitler that forcing Jewish scientists to emigrate would mutilate Germany and the benefits of their work would go to foreign countries. Hitler responded with a rant against Jews and Planck could only remain silent and then take his leave. The National Socialist regime would only come around to the same conclusion as Planck in the 6 July 1942 meeting regarding the future agenda of the Reichsforschungsrat (RFR, Reich Research Council), but by then it was too late.
Hans Geiger was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger–Marsden experiment which discovered the atomic nucleus.
In 1925, Geiger accepted his first teaching position, which was at the University of Kiel, Germany. Here, he and Walther Müller improved the sensitivity, performance, and durability of the counter, and it became known as the “Geiger-Müller counter.” It could detect not only alpha particles but also beta particles (electrons) and ionizing photons. The counter was essentially in the same form as the modern counter.
In 1929, Geiger moved to the University of Tübingen (Germany), where he was named professor of physics and director of research at the Institute of Physics. In 1929, while at the Institute, Geiger made his first observations of a cosmic-ray shower. Geiger continued to investigate cosmic rays, artificial radioactivity, and nuclear fission after accepting a position in 1936 at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, a position he held until his death. In 1937, with Otto Zeiller, Geiger used the counter to measure a cosmic-ray shower
Beginning in 1939, after the discovery of atomic fission, Geiger was a member of the Uranium Club, the German investigation of nuclear weapons during World War II. The group splintered in 1942 after its members came to believe (incorrectly, as it would later transpire) that nuclear weapons would not play a significant role in ending the war.
Although Geiger signed a petition against the Nazi government’s interference with universities, he provided no support to colleague Hans Bethe (winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics) when he was fired for being Jewish.
Politicization of the German academia under the Nazi regime had driven many physicists, engineers, and mathematicians out of Germany as early as 1933. Those of Jewish heritage who did not leave were quickly purged from German institutions, further thinning the ranks of academia. The politicization of the universities, along with the demands for manpower by the German armed forces (many scientists and technical personnel were conscripted, despite possessing technical and engineering skills), substantially reduced the number of able German physicists.
The German nuclear weapons program (German: Uranprojekt; informally known as the Uranverein; English: Uranium Club) was an unsuccessful scientific effort led by Germany to research and develop atomic weapons during World War II. It was mainly unsuccessful because of the immigration, purge and murder of so many brilliant scientists. The scientists that remained and worked in the Uranium Club weren’t brilliant enough to figure out that their work was leaked to foreign intelligence agencies.
From April through December of 1945, ten of Nazi Germany’s greatest nuclear physicists were detained by Allied military and intelligence services in a kind of gilded cage at Farm Hall, an English country manor near Cambridge. The physicists knew the Reich had failed to develop an atomic bomb, and they soon learned, from a BBC radio report on August 6, that the Allies had succeeded in their own efforts to create such a weapon. But what they did not know was that many of their meetings and private conversations were being monitored and recorded by British agents.
Just imagine what could have happened if Hitler did not have such a hate for the Jews. His own hate lost him the war.
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There are very few items of fashion that please both women and men. The Bikini would be one of them, women like to wear them and men like to look at them, although nowadays some men wear them too, why? I do not know.
The bikini was born at a Paris poolside photo shoot on July 5, 1946, a week before Bastille Day and in the midst a global textile shortage. The designer, former automobile engineer Louis Réard, hired the only model willing to expose so much model, a 19-year-old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini. She put on the four small patches he had strung together and showed the fashion world the female belly button.
Benardini agreed to model, on 5 July 1946, Louis Réard’s two-piece swimsuit, which he called the bikini, named four days after the first test of an American nuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll.
However Réard’s bikini was not the first 2 piece bathing outfit . For that we have to go back to about 5800 bc.
In the Chalcolithic era, the mother-goddess of Çatalhöyük, a large ancient settlement in southern Anatolia, was depicted astride two leopards while wearing a bikini-like costumes Two-piece garments worn by women for athletic purposes are depicted on Greek urns and paintings dating back to 1400 BC.[ Active women of ancient Greece wore a breastband called a mastodeton or an apodesmos, which continued to be used as an undergarment in the Middle Ages. While men in ancient Greece abandoned the perizoma, partly high-cut briefs and partly loincloth, women performers and acrobats continued to wear it.
In Coronation of the Winner, a mosaic in the floor of a Roman villa in Sicily that dates from the Diocletian period (286–305 AD), young women participate in weightlifting, discus throwing, and running ball games dressed in bikini-like garments.
Even in the modern era that there had been two piece swimsuits. Actresses like Jayne Mansfield had been wearing two-piece bathing suits, But never with the navel showing. That was deemed to be scandalous .
Bernardini modeled the bikini on July 5 at the Piscine Molitor. The bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.
Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy passed measures prohibiting bikinis on public beaches but later capitulated to the changing times when the swimsuit grew into a mainstay of European beaches in the 1950s. Réard’s business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini mystique alive by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn’t a genuine bikini “unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.”
The bikini has spawned many stylistic variations. For example the Monokini.
A monokini, more commonly referred to as a topless swimsuit and sometimes referred to as a unikini, is a women’s one-piece swimsuit equivalent to the lower half of a bikini.
In 1964, Rudi Gernreich, an Austrian fashion designer, designed the original monokini in the US. Gernreich also invented its name, and the word monokini is first recorded in English that year.
Despite the bikini’s initial success in France, worldwide women still stuck to traditional one-piece swimsuits. Below a picture of an Italian police officer issuing a woman a ticket for wearing a bikini on an Italian beach, 1957.
The bikini was banned from beaches and public places on the French Atlantic coastline, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Australia, and was prohibited or discouraged in a number of US states.
The Vatican declared it sinful. The United States Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, enforced from 1934, allowed two-piece gowns but prohibited the display of navels in Hollywood films.
Increasingly common glamour shots of popular actresses and models on either side of the Atlantic played a large part in bringing the bikini into the mainstream. During the 1950s, Hollywood stars such as Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Tina Louise, Marilyn Monroe, Esther Williams, and Betty Grable took advantage of the risqué publicity associated with the bikini by posing for photographs wearing them—pin-ups of Hayworth and Williams in costume were especially widely distributed in the United States.
By the end of the 20th century, the bikini had become the most popular beachwear around the globe.
Now that bikinis have become a normal part of summer wardrobes, we have to tackle the next discussion of who is “allowed” to wear them. An international conversation has been taking place over the internet and within the fashion industry surrounding inclusivity and representation of all bodies, not just some. In my humble opinion women should be allowed what they want to wear whatever it is. However I still have issues with man wearing bikini type of fashion garments. the so called ‘mankini’ made popular by Borat.
Who would have ever imagined though, that something so destructive as an atom bomb would become the inspiration of something so beautiful as the bikini.
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Today marks the 74th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. So much has already been documented about this, so therefore I will focusing more on the lesser known facts about that fateful day and the aftermath
The crew of the Enola Gay consisted of 12 men. Prior to the war in the Pacifc and taking command of the Enola Gay, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr had flown the lead bomber ‘Butcher Shop'(aka Big Tin Bird) for the first American daylight heavy bomber mission on 17 August 1942, a shallow penetration raid against a marshaling yard in Rouen in Occupied France.
First Lieutenant Jacob Beser was the radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay, 3 days later, he was a crew member aboard Bockscar when the Fat Man bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He was the only crew member to be on both missions.
It was a common practice before the war for American Issei, or first-generation immigrants, to send their children on extended trips to Japan to study or visit relatives.There was, therefore, a sizable population of American-born Japanese living in their parents’ hometowns of Hiroshima. It is estimated that up to 11,000 Japanese-Americans died that day.
However about 3,000 of them are known to have survived and returned to the U.S. after the war.Like other survivors they were called Hibakusha-person affected by a bomb’ or ‘person affected by the exposition to a bomb.
Before the atomic attacks, the US Air Force dropped pamphlets in Japan. They advised the citizens of “prompt and utter destruction” and urged civilians to flee.
The Lonesome Lady was shot down on 28 July, 1945 while bombing the Japanese Battleship Haruna, in Kure Harbor. Only the pilot, Thomas Cartwright, and Tail Gunner, Bill Abel, returned home from that mission.
Three planes that were flying missions over Hiroshima were shot down in the days before the bombing, with the crew of Lonesome Lady all managing to bail out and survive the crash… before being quickly captured and imprisoned in a base in Hiroshima. the instructions given to captured airmen was to tell captors the truth, as the US assumed that Japanese already knew what was planned, and telling the truth would possibly limit torture. But despite Captain Tom Cartwright telling his captors the truth, he was not believed and he was shipped off to Tokyo for a more ‘rigorous’ interrogation. This actually saved his life, as when the bomb hit Hiroshima. But six of his crew men died as a result of blast wounds and radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945.
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Most people will have heard of the “Manhattan Project” it was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada.
Despite the data gathered from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing, the nuclear testing were still conducted in an extremely reckless manner far in to the 1950s and 1960s.
The picture on the top shows five air force officers standing directly below ground zero for an atmospheric nuclear test. 18,500 feet above their heads, a two-kiloton atomic bomb is about to go off.
Their goal is to prove that these nuclear tests are safe. When an NPR reporter tried to look into these men’s fate, the photographer told them, “Quite a few have died from cancer. No doubt it was related to the testing.”
A pig is placed into an aluminum barrel before a nuclear test.
This pig, and others like it, were placed in barrels in various places around ground zero for various nuclear tests so that researchers could study the effects of radiation on living things.
San Antonio, Texas. 1957
Just after a nuclear bomb was detonated, two soldiers use their hands to frame the mushroom cloud for the camera.
Nye County, Nevada. May 1, 1952.
An “atomic pin-up girl” at a Las Vegas party dances for the camera while a nuclear bomb explodes behind her.
Nevada. April 6, 1953.
Military men watch as the mushroom cloud from a nuclear blast drifts up overhead.
Nye County, Nevada. April 22, 1952
The U.S. Army 11th Airborne Division sit and watch the mushroom cloud rise.
Yucca Flats, Nevada. November 1, 1951.
From a parking lot in Nevada, miles away from the test site, a mushroom cloud is still visible. Radioactive particles can be seen drifting through the air, toward the neighboring towns.
Frenchman Flat, Nevada. June 24, 1957.
After the first nuclear test in Bikini Atoll, a man is put through a medical examination to see how being exposed to radiation has affected him.
Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands.
A mushroom cloud erupts over Bikini Atoll during a nuclear test. July 25, 1946.
The people of Bikini Atoll are relocated to the nearby island of Rognerik Atoll so that the U.S. Government can continue nuclear testing.
Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. March 7, 1946.
A crowd, mostly news correspondents, lines up to hop on the bus so they can watch an “Open Shot” nuclear test.
“Open Shot” tests were open to the public. Reporters and dignitaries were invited to come out to the Nevada desert and watch a nuclear bomb explode.
Las Vegas, Nevada. March 16, 1953.
“Explosives,” reads a warning sign, one of the only lines of defense keeping civilians from wandering onto the site of an underground nuclear test.
Lamar County, Mississippi. September 1964.
Photographers set up their camera to film the first ever nuclear test to appear on national television.
Nye County, Nevada. April 1952.
An audience at an “Open Shot” nuclear test gaze up in excitement to watch a nuclear bomb explode.
Nye County, Nevada. April 6, 1955
Marines participating in a nuclear test run their morning exercises around the Nevada Proving Grounds.
Nye County, Nevada. June 22, 1957.
A Goodyear Blimp, flying five miles away from ground zero, crashes into the ground, torn down by the heat of the blast.
Nye County, Nevada. August 7, 1957.
The USS Independence after being stationed too close to a nuclear test.
Navy officers are on the ship, trying to study its remains and salvage what’s left of it.
It is often assumed that “Little Boy” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was the first atomic device to be detonated, however truth is “the Gadget” was the 1st atomic bomb.
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was then the USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (now part of White Sands Missile Range). The only structures originally in the vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present on the weekend of the test.
The code name “Trinity” was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, inspired by the poetry of John Donne.
The test was of an implosion-design plutonium device, informally nicknamed “The Gadget”, of the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The complexity of the design required a major effort from the Los Alamos Laboratory, and concerns about whether it would work led to a decision to conduct the first nuclear test. The test was planned and directed by Kenneth Bainbridge.
The term “Gadget” was a laboratory euphemism for the bomb, from which the laboratory’s weapon physics division, “G Division”, took its name in August 1944. At that time it did not refer specifically to the Trinity Test device as it had yet to be developed, but once it was, it became the laboratory code name. The Trinity Gadget was officially a Y-1561 device, as was the Fat Man used a few weeks later in the bombing of Nagasaki. The two were very similar, with only minor differences, the most obvious being the absence of fuzing and the external ballistic casing. The bombs were still under development, and small changes continued to be made to the Fat Man design.
The Gadget was an implosion device, which means the plutonium core is surrounded by many small explosives, these compress the plutonium and bring it closer to the point of causing it to go super critical. All those wires are attached to different explosives which burn at different frequencies. The trick of the 20 explosions is that they push the pieces of uranium (or plutonium) together to a ball with an over-critical mass, which explodes. They have to time this extremely accurately, however. Microseconds differences will make the ball lopsided and less effective. Part of the solution is to make each and every cable the same length which is why the Gadget looks like a ball of wires.
Assembly of the nuclear capsule began on 13 July 1945 at the McDonald Ranch House, where the master bedroom had been turned into a clean room. The polonium-beryllium “Urchin” initiator was assembled, and Louis Slotin placed it inside the two hemispheres of the plutonium core. Cyril Smith then placed the core in the uranium tamper plug, or “slug”. Air gaps were filled with 0.5-mil (0.013 mm) gold foil, and the two halves of the plug were held together with uranium washers and screws which fit smoothly into the domed ends of the plug. The completed capsule was then driven to the base of the tower.
For the test, the gadget was lifted to the top of a 100-foot (30 m) bomb tower. It was feared by some that the Trinity test might “ignite” the earth’s atmosphere, eliminating all life on the planet, although calculations had determined this was unlikely even for devices “which greatly exceed the bombs now under consideration”. Less wild estimates thought that New Mexico would be incinerated. Calculations showed that the yield of the device would be between zero (if it did not work) or 20 kilotons of TNT. In the aftermath of the test, it appeared to have been a blast equivalent to 18 kilotons of TNT..
An estimated seven or eight thousand people were killed in a single morning on May 29, 1945 in what is now known as the Great Yokohama Air Raid, when B-29s firebombed the city and in just one hour and nine minutes reduced 42% of it to rubble.
High-altitude, daylight attack on Yokohama urban area. 517 B-29s were escorted by 101 P-51Ds. 2,570 tons of bombs were dispensed, 6.9 square miles burned out
79,017 houses were destroyed, and 42 percent of the city area was burnt to ashes. The cities of Japan were vital to the ongoing war effort. Japan dispersed manufacturing to prevent precision attacks from interfering with productions. Small factories were extremely vulnerable to incendiary attack.
Yokohama did escape a fate worse afterwards. It was actually one of the intended targets for the atom bomb.Ironically Nagasaki wasn’t even on the list
When the atom bomb “Fat Boy” devastated on the 9th of August 1945, one of the buildings reduced to rubble was the city’s Urakami cathedral — then among the largest churches in Asia.
The blinding nuclear flash that would claim more than 70,000 lives in the city also, in an instant, blew out the stained glass windows of the church, toppled its walls, burnt its altar and melted its iron bell.
But, in what local Christian followers have likened to a miracle, the head of a wooden Virgin Mary statue survived amid the collapsed columns and scorched debris of the Romanesque church flattened on August 9, 1945.
The appearance of the war-ravaged religious icon is haunting. The Madonna’s eyes have become scorched, black hollows, the right cheek is charred, and a crack runs like a streaking tear down her face.
The remains of the statue of the Virgin Mary have found a new home inside a rebuilt church, also called St Mary’s, built on the same site, only 500 metres from the bomb’s ground zero.
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