THE BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA BLASTED
the world into the atomic age. James Agee wrote in TIME, "The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself." Some highlights from our coverage of that dreadful yet awesome event:
A new era was born—the age of atomic force. Like many an epoch in man's progress toward civilization, it was wombed in war's destruction. The birth was announced one day this week by the President of the United States. His words: 'Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base...."
From Birth of an Era
Aug. 13, 1945
Now that Japan had felt the blast of the first atomic bomb, how long would the war go on? War Secretary Stimson merely said that the new weapon would 'prove a tremendous aid' in shortening the conflict.
From Short Cut?
Aug. 13, 1945
So far as any discernible, immediate effect on Japan last week was concerned, the Potsdam offer of surrender terms was a flop.... But the offer was not necessarily a failure. Its authors had not expected an instant success; it was a slow-burning fire. And it had been timed to precede the shock of the new atomic bomb, a weapon which would hit Japan and the Japanese as no land or people had ever before been hit. Soon the survivors might be more receptive.
From The Height of Impertinence
Aug. 13, 1945
For scientists and laymen alike, this week's historic blast was the first indication of the progress made in the greatest and most-secret research race of the war. Except for a few breathless tales of mysterious walled laboratories and factories whose workers were interned for the duration, scarcely a word leaked out.... Hidden under the official designation "Manhattan Project," the vast forbidden areas in Tennessee, Washington and New Mexico got top priorities not only on matériel but on scientific brains and effort.
From Atom Smasher
Aug. 13, 1945
The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself. Was man equal to the challenge? In an instant, without warning, the present had become the unthinkable future. Was there hope in that future, and if so, where did hope lie?
From The Bomb
By James Agee
Aug. 20, 1945
The first atomic bomb had been dropped. A few seconds after the flash, the shock wave from the blast reached the Enola Gay, several miles away, and rocked it like a giant burst of flak. From the men who had rung up the curtain on a new era in history burst nothing more original than an awed 'My God!'
From "My God!"
Aug. 20, 1945
What finally happened to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? As the first guinea pigs of atomic warfare, they are still being watched closely—and will be for many a year to come
From Generations Yet Unborn
Apr. 7, 1947
This year the memorial services were marked with a new bitterness. The Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun editorialized: 'We hope these commemorative events will bring home to those concerned with the dropping of the bomb that they were guilty of acts so shameful that Japan will never forget them.'
From 13th Anniversary
Aug. 18, 1958
The eleven crewmen of the 6-29 Enola Gay stood silently in the early-morning darkness, eyes fixed on a solemn, balding Navy captain with a staggering burden: two cans filled with 137.3 Ibs. of uranium 235. At 0245 hours on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted heavily from the long runway at Tinian. Within minutes. Captain William Sterling Parsons climbed into the stuffy bomb bay.
From Five Fateful Hours
Aug. 25, 1958
The Bomb was originally conceived as a counter to the threat of Hitler and the further threat that Nazi Germany might build it first. But it was not ready until after Germany had surrendered. Thus only by historical circumstance was the Bomb ever juxtaposed to an even bloodier alternative—the massive invasion of the Japanese mainland.
From What If Hiroshima Had Never Happened
Aug. 10, 1970
Similar scenes are taking place throughout the country this year as Japanese pay their final farewells to friends and relatives who died in 1945. The casualties that year were staggering: the Japanese estimate that they lost 300,000 in the Philippines, 20,000 at Two Jima, 200,000 at Okinawa, 140,000 in Hiroshima, 70,000 at Nagasaki and 100,000 in the firebombings of Tokyo.
From The Last Sayonara
Jun. 13, 1977
Some of the details are agonizingly familiar: trees and utility poles turned into charred matchsticks by the intense heat (temperatures reached millions of degrees at the centers of the explosions); earthquake-resistant buildings crumpled by the shock waves; human flesh burned 2½ miles from the targets. Less well known, perhaps: the sticky black rain, triggered by hot ash and dust blasted up into the cold air, that showered deadly radioactive fallout on the cities.
From Inventory of Holocaust
By Frederic Golden
Aug. 17, 1981
No, I wasn't on the Enola Gay. I was on the Great Artiste, the instrument plane, which measured the yield, the size of the blast. We were right next to the Enola Gay when she dropped the Bomb. It was I who got the pictures.
From A New World, A Mystic World
Jul. 29, 1985
So began Kawamoto's morning, Aug. 6, 1945. Yoshitaka Kawamoto is 53 today, a small, solid man who dresses formally in blue or brown suits and carries himself with a quick-moving dignity. When he tells the story of what happened 40 years ago, however, he can become a 13-year-old on the spot
From A Fire In the Sky
Jul. 29, 1985
Forty years later, what is Hiroshima? What happened there to make it impossible for the world to turn back? How has the Bomb served the world, and how is the world supposed to live with it?
From The Atomic Age
By Roger Rosenblatt
Jul. 29, 1985
If nuclear weapons are so great at keeping the peace, why shouldn't everyone have them? And what happens when the Bomb falls into the hands of those who don't remember the legacy of Aug. 6--or simply choose not to? Sixty years after Hiroshima, 14 years after the Soviet Union imploded, the great question facing strategists--facing all of us--is less how a nation might array its nuclear forces and more how to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons from spinning out of control.
From Living Under the Cloud
By Michael Elliott
Aug. 1, 2005
When you're looking at it, you know that a tremendous amount of energy has been released. There was one thought that was uppermost on everyone's mind. Somebody said, and I thought too, 'This war is over.' You didn't see how anybody--even the most radical, militaristic, uncaring for their people--how anybody like that could stand up to something like this.
From The Men Who Dropped the Bombs
By Carolina A. Miranda;Tim Padgett;Coco Masters
Aug. 01, 2005
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