Apparently the arguments that we still hear today concerning whether or not use of the Atomic Bomb in 1945 was justifiable popped-up right away. The following is a letter to the editor of
Yank Magazine written by a hard-charging fellow who explained that he was heartily sick of reading the
"-pious cries of horror [that] come from the musty libraries of well-fed clergymen and from others equally far removed from the war".
In ten lines the U.S. Army history section succinctly outlined Japan's grim situation and the events that led up to the dropping of the bomb:
"By the summer of 1945 it was obvious to most responsible leaders in Japan that the end of the war was near. For the first time those who favored ending the war came out in the open and in June, Japan sent out peace feelers through the Soviet Union. The rejection of the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, however, sealed the doom of Japan..."
Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years
"
The Manhattan Project" was the code name given to the allied effort to develop the
Atomic Bomb during World War Two. The research and development spanned the years 1942 through 1946 and the participating nations behind the effort were the Unites States, Great Britain and Canada. Within the United States, there were as many as three locations where the Manhattan Project was carried out however this article concerns the goings-on at the uranium-enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The article presents the point of view of your basic PFC on the base; how he had to maintain the necessary secrecy, what was it like living among such a plethora of pointy-headed slide-rule jockeys and how grateful they were to be living the comfortable life, while so many other draftees fared so poorly.
"The destruction of Nagasaki looks nothing like the debris in Cassino or Leghorn. The strange thing here is the utter absence of rubble. You can see a couple of square miles of reddish-brown desolation with nothing left but the outlines of houses, a bit of wall here and half a chimney there. In this area you will see a road, and the road will be completely clean. It is too soon after the bombing for the Japs to have done any cleaning of the roads and you can't see a single brick or pile of broken plaster or lumber on any street or sidewalk in town."
After Nagasaki, Japan surrendered - but there was a lapse of fifteen hours before the Japanese heard that their declaration had been accepted...
"Walking into
Hiroshima in broad daylight, wearing an American uniform and knowing that you were one of the first Americans the people in that utterly ruined city had laid eyes on since the bombing, was not a comfortable feeling."
After the war it was discovered that one quarter of the Hiroshima dead were Koreans who were there as slave laborers.
The October 3, 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution ran a front page headline declaring that Imperial Japan had successfully tested their own Atom Bomb during the summer of '45. Click here to read more on this topic.
Click here to read General Marshal's opinions regarding the Atomic Bomb.
"The story behind the atomic bomb is a detective story with no Sherlock Holmes for a hero. The number of scientists who took part in the search was without parallel...The dramatic story begins with Dr. Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968), a woman scientist and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1938 Dr. Meitner is bombarding
uranium atoms with neutrons and then submitting the uranium to chemical analysis. To her amazement..."
The Collier's article attached herein, The Atom Bomb's Invisible Offspring does not simply track the radioactive illnesses and contamination generated as a result of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also discusses the nuclear testings at Bikini and Alamogordo, New Mexico. Attention is paid to how the devastated people as well as all the assorted flora and fauna in the targeted regions.
Attached is a 1948 article by the Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton (1892 – 1962) concerning the widespread understanding among nuclear physicists to wrestle control of atomic energy away from the military and firmly in the hands of civil authorities, where it's benefits can be put to general use and harnessed as positive force in the lives of all mankind.
Awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1927, the SCRIPT MAGAZINE editors believed that Arthur Compton, more than anyone else, deserved the title "Daddy of the Atomic bomb". When the U.S. Government decided to proceed with the research and development of this weapon, Compton was assigned the double task of attempting a nuclear chain reaction and of designing the bomb itself.
Compton is remembered as the senior physicist at the Manhattan Project who hired Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.
Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years.
Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
Shortly after Tokyo's capitulation, an advance team of American Army researchers were dispatched to
Hiroshima to study the effects that the
Atom Bomb had on that city. What we found most interesting about this reminiscence was the narrative told by a young Japanese Army major as to how Tokyo learned of the city's destruction:
"Again and again the air-raid defense headquarters called the army wireless station at Hiroshima. No answer. Something had happened to Hiroshima..."
An anonymous columnist at
The Commonweal (New York) was quick to condemn the use of the
Atomic Bombs:
"... we are confronted with an obligation to condemn what we ourselves did, an obligation to admit that our victory has been sadly sullied not only because we used this weapon but because we have tacitly acceded to use it."
Three years before terms such as "Enola Gay" and "Atom Bomb" would become household words, this five page article appeared in an American magazine informing the folks on the home front that this monstrosity was being developed silently behind the scenes.
We have no doubt that the FBI was knocking at the publisher's door the very second that the issue appeared on the newsstands.
Here is the "Pathfinder Magazine" article about Air University; established in 1946 by the U.S. Department of War in order to train senior American Air Force officers to serve as strategic thinkers in the realm of national security. In 1949 that meant conceiving of ways to implement a successful strategy in which the Soviet Union would be defeated with nuclear weapons:
"At AU's apex is the Air War College. To its senior officer-students the question of destroying an enemy's will to resist is grimly real. Killing ten million citizens of an enemy nation is no haphazard problem to the Air War College. In the statistics of modern war, a loss of approximately 4% of a nation's population saps its will to resist..."
Six months after this article was first read, the Soviets tested their first Atomic bomb; click here to read about that event.
"Said Winston Churchill in offering thanks for Divine help in the race for atomic power, 'By His mercy British and American science outpaced all German efforts.'"
"Thank God, to be sure. But it should not be overlooked that for this work He had an able servant in Lief Tronstad. As saboteur par excellence, the young professor was a ball and chain on Nazi ankles in this race to the atomic finish line."
"On Sunday morning, August 5 (Washington time), an American airplane flew over Hiroshima, a Japanese army base
[!] on the Inland Sea. It dropped a single bomb. When that missile struck the earth, it blew up in the greatest man-made explosion in the history of the world. The United States had loosed an atomic bomb on Japan."
Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
"The Senate special committee on atomic energy had heard both pros and cons on atomic energy control. Last week it heard another kind of testimony - a terrifying eyewitness account by Dr. Philip Morrison, nuclear physicist of the Los Alamos atomic bomb laboratory, [who] spoke of the effects on Hiroshima."
Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn't possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.
During the Cold war, as many as 400,000 American military personnel were forced to witness Atomic explosions. Having been sworn to secrecy, this veteran wrote his testimony under the penname,
Soldier X:
"Then I saw the true power and fury of nature as a giant fireball sluggishly rolled upward through the thick layer of dust: I estimated its distance at about 1500 feet up. Surrounding the red mass are twisting white snakes of clouds....This is color as few humans have ever seen it, magnificent, threatening and horrible."
