In the view of many, thousands of American - and Japanese - lives were saved in the process. Though heartbreaking, the devastation meant US researchers at the nuclear warfare group known as the Manhattan Project had brought years of intense work to successful conclusion. Burned, disfigured and in excruciating pain, survivors were not necessarily the most fortunate. Scores more would perish from radiation exposure. Forty thousand people died when the device known as "Fat Man" detonated just after 11 am on Aug 9. Dubbed "Little Boy," the bomb was a wrathful intruder of unprecedented fury.Ī great blast of superheated air toppled much of the city and, in an instant, killed 80,000 residents - many of them literally vapourised as though in some dreadful science-fiction episode.īefore Japanese leaders could come to grips with the Aug 6 attack, the United States dropped a plutonium-based bomb on Nagasaki. Only three weeks after Trinity, a B-29 bomber plane named the Enola Gay dropped an A-bomb fuelled by uranimum on the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima. Science had harnessed the energy of the uncerse and at the same time nudged the planet toward extinction - a cruel dichotomy that haunted people then as now.
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Eliot's poem The Wasteland, a faint, existential whimper too.
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As the A-bomb's incandescent mushroom cloud imposed its false and frightening sunrise on the site code-named Trinity, Oppenheimer pondered a sobering verse from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."įifty years ago in July 16, the Atomic Age began with a bang equal to 17,000 tons of TNT and to paraphrase T.S. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, meditative physicist who helped build the bomb, said later he was reminded of a passage from sacred Hindu scripture. At the top was a metal shack and in the shed, the bulbous form known as "the gadget" - a strangely benign tag for a weapon so formidable that some wondered if the test soon to take place would consume the compound, the city of Los Alamos about 240km away, or the state of New Mexico, or whether detonation of this first atomic bomb would be simply set the atmosphere on fire and smother the world.ĭescribing the A-bomb's debut, a reporter for The New York Times - the only journalist invited - wrote: "On that moment hung eternity."īut J. Attention focused on the tower, again bathed in light. Bad weather retreated and scientists counted toward a 5.30 am zero-hour. As though in a final operatic flourish, nature was heralding its power and prerogatives. At 2.30 am, a floodlamp blew out briefly and the 100ft-tower it illuminated blended into the inky New Mexico horizon. Winds hit 30mph and rain flogged the barren acreage of the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico, United States. Screamed one Hiroshima victim: "This is hell on earth!"įRED BRUNING revisits the Hiroshima A-bomb - the controversy that won't go away.Ī STORM boiled in the desert. In photographs, the blank expression of survivors seemed to go beyond pain to disbelief - to realm of chaos and confusion that suggested souls had been seared as surely as flesh. Many endured the blast but lost body parts - ears, eyes, lips. A man riding his bike across a bridge was transformed into a charcoal statue.
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Desperate for relief, many victims pitched themselves into the city's rivers. A woman standing outside a bank was reduced to vapour - only a shadow of her form on the structure remained. Five consumed whole neighbourhoods and fanned incendiary updrafts that tossed burning timber heavenward. Packing 4.6 tons of force per square yard, the A-bomb reduced homes to cinde piles and drove concrete support pillars into the earth.
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The Star (Section 2) - Monday July 31, 1995įifty years ago on Aug 6, atomic warfare was unleashed on Hiroshima.