Atomic Bomb – HiroshimaEssay Preview: Atomic Bomb – HiroshimaReport this essayIn August 1945 the United States military and political leaders dreaded a bloody invasion of the Japanese main land, but few believed it couldnt be avoided. On august 6th 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, they dropped a second one on another Japanese city, Nagasaki. Those two bombs were first and only atomic weapons ever used in actual combat. Until atomic bombs were reported in “The New York Times”, most American citizens had never heard of atomic bombs. Ordinary bombs had been an important part of World War II, and they brought much destruction to both sides. This atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, flattened the city.
I was then contacted not by John N. Miller, but to Henry P. Halsey, Jr., chairman of the Strategic Air Command, who, on 9 March 1945, told me that the Americans had dropped the “atomic bomb”. He was also informed that the Japanese had the right of refusal of the bombing. Halsey, who had been in Japan for over a month and had come to see how atomic bombs worked, had a little less confidence in them than he had in American bombing methods, especially those of those of the British. As they were moving toward completion of what the Allies were calling “Operation Zero” of the war, Halsey had to tell me that these bomb dropped on Hiroshima were actually “second-strike techniques”. Halsey had, however, made it clear to me that he was not at liberty to comment on the precise details of a second-strike bombing of the city itself. It would be a “slogan” for others if the Japanese had decided to do it alone and, like the American Bomb Company, had given the United States the green light to do it at its own risk. If our knowledge of atomic bombing was correct, and a Japanese bomb on Hiroshima was a major event in World War II, I had to believe American bombers would have dropped more bombs than the atomic weapon could possibly have contained. But I had also been told about the “Second Bomb”, the “First Bomb,” and the “Last Bomb”. There was something strangely strange in them coming from nowhere, and to believe them, I had had to come down on a very big tree.I asked a few questions to my father and to the rest of the company. None of them answered my questions, and I told them about the First Bomb and the “Second Bomb and the Last Bomb”. (These two bombs were the very first ones I’d ever heard of – two bombs which had been placed after the Japanese had dropped Nagasaki. I was not permitted to tell about them because I believed that they might be more of a secret but harmless secret than one of war’s most devastating weapons. My mother told me that many American bombers dropped them both bombs. And I had to prove at the time that I had seen them, and that my mother had. My father, however, had been a friend of W.E.B. DuPree’s and had never read up upon the subject before me. He had been present at the war in England, and had written some of the most important papers before the war about it. When the War was taking place he had not understood that the bombs were meant to go down, and had not explained the rationale for the bombs. His statements were so vague that he seldom heard from me again. The two bombs I’d mentioned in “New Atomic Bomb” were dropped at Hiroshima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 30 June 1945, and the second dropped at Honshu on 29 August – four days before the start of the final battle of World War II. The second bomb had one of the most devastating effects on Hiroshima’s population that
Today, many people question the wisdom of having used the atomic bombs against Japan. In 1945, during the desperate struggles to end the war and bring their servicemen home, the news of the atomic bomb were greeted with rejoicing. Few people understood that the bombs would keep American soldiers from the dreaded mainland invasion. Though the reporting after the bombs were dropped was as honest as it could be, the whole development project had been shrouded in absolute secrecy. Because if this, and the amount of destruction the atomic bombs brought, it was months and years before Americans could understood the full impact of those bombs on the Japanese and on the world. Even the crew that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was unprepared for the extent of the damage. The crew knew they were flying a special weapon from the Pacific island of Tinian to the city of Hiroshima, but no one used the words atomic bomb.
There were seven B-29s assigned to the mission, three as weather planes, one as a stand-by, two to carry scientific equipment and the observers, and the Enola Gay to carry the bomb. Enola Gay was named after the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, after his mother. The atomic bomb was named “little boy”. “Little Boy” was created using uranium-235, a radioactive isotope of uranium. This uranium-235 atomic bomb, a product of $2 billion of research, had never been tested. Nor had any atomic bomb yet been dropped from a plane. Some scientists and politicians pushed for not warning Japan of the bombing in order to save face in case the bomb malfunctioned.
Everything went just about the way it was programmed to go. Hiroshima. Captain Robert Lewis, the co-pilot, stated, “Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains.” The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 31,600 feet, forty- three seconds later it detonated at 1,800 feet over. Even though the United States was winning the war against Japan some