THE U.S. AT WAR 1945: The Peace: The Bomb Ends WWII

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THE PEACE The Bomb

The greatest and most terrible of wars ended, this week, in the echoes of an enormous event—an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance. In what they said and did, men were still, as in the aftershock of a great wound, bemused and only semi-articulate, whether they were soldiers or scientists, or great statesmen, or the simplest of men. But in the dark depths of their minds and hearts, huge forms moved and silently arrayed themselves: Titans, arranging out of the chaos an age in which victory was already only the shout of a child in the street.

With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age. The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. 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?

When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul.

"My God!"

The run was short and straight. At 9:15 a.m. Major Thomas Ferebee pressed the toggle and the single bomb was away, down through the substratosphere. Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, the pilot, took back the controls and ten pairs of eyes strained at the plexiglass windows as Tibbets turned the plane broadside to the city of Hiroshima.

It took less than 60 seconds. Then the brilliant morning sunlight was slashed by a more brilliant white flash. It was so strong that the crew of the Superfortress Enola Gay felt a "visual shock," although all wore sun glasses.

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!"

Hiroshima had once harbored 344,000 people. Reconnaissance photographs showed 4.1 square miles—60% of the city's built-up area—destroyed by fire and blast. There was no crater in which the blast effect would have been largely wasted; the bomb had exploded well above ground. How many tens of thousands of Hiroshima's people had perished was not yet and might never be known.

Three days later, the Superfort Great Artiste was out on a similar mission. Major Charles W. Sweeney had a rough trip to Japan in bad weather; his primary target was socked in. Over the second-choice target, Nagasaki, he had just enough gas left for one run.