Another day of infamy. Sixty-five years ago on August 6,1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima–

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates valley Ersa, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” (Harry Truman, from his diaries, as quoted in The Making of the Atomic Bomb).

Okay, Mr. President. Here’s the situation. You’re about to invade Japan’s main islands. Your best generals say hitting these beaches will mean half a million American casualties or more. Based on horrific battle experience—from Guadalcanal to Okinawa—you believe the Japanese will fight to the death. They have six million battle-hardened troops who have shown complete willingness to fight to the death for their homeland—a samurai tradition of complete devotion to the divine Emperor that is incomprehensible to Americans. A ten-year guerilla in Japan war is a possibility.

Now you have a bomb with the destructive power of 20,000 tons of TNT that can force Japan’s surrender. It worked in a test. But it may not work when you drop it out of a plane.

Modern history has presented this pair of options—the Big Invasion versus the Bomb—as “Truman’s Choice,” a choice Truman inherited with the Oval Office. President Roosevelt had responded to Albert Einstein’s 1939 warning—a warning Einstein later regretted—of the potential of an atomic bomb by establishing the Manhattan Project in 1943. Known to a handful of men, Truman not among them, the project was a $2-billion (in pre-inflation 1940s dollars) effort to construct an atomic weapon. Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), atomic scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a “Nazi bomb.”

The first atomic bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Truman was alerted to the success of the test at a meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, a city in defeated Germany. Almost since the day the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, critics have second-guessed Truman’s decision and motives. A generation of historians have defended or repudiated the need for unleashing the atomic weapon.

What history has confirmed is that the men who made the bomb really didn’t understand how horrifying its capabilities were. Of course, they understood the destructive power of the bomb, but radiation’s dangers were far less understood. As author Peter Wyden tells it in Day One, his compelling account of the making and dropping of the bomb, scientists involved in creating what they called “the gadget” believed that anyone who might be killed by radiation would die from falling bricks first.

“Some 70,000 people probably died as a result of initial blast, heat, and radiation effects. This included about twenty American airmen being held as prisoners in the city. By the end of 1945, because of the lingering effects of radioactive fallout and other after effects, the Hiroshima death toll was probably over 100,000. The five-year death total may have reached or even exceeded 200,000, as cancer and other long-term effects took hold.”

(US Dept. of Energy History of the Manhattan Project. Link below)

Today should not be a day to argue about the politics of the bomb. It should be a day of solemn remembrance of these victims. And of contemplating the horrific power of the weapons we create.

You can read more about Hiroshima and the dropping of the atomic bombs in Don’t Know Much About History from which this blog has been adapted. Other “Must Reads”: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes; Truman by David McCullough]
This is a link to the Hiroshima City Museum of Peace (there is an English language site): http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/
This is a link to the Dept. of Energy History of the Manhattan Project: http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm
This link is from the National Science Foundation and was created for the 60th anniversary of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: http://hiroshima-remembered.com/