Unleashing Hell upon Earth in 44 Seconds — — 8:15 am— August 6 — 1945
Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay wipes out Hiroshima with Little Boy
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Trinity was the code name for the first detonation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known as the Jornada del Muerto. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945.
Less than one month later the United States used the bomb against Japan, delivering doomsday to the city of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, Japanese time.
President Truman made the decision unilaterally — he did not require the approval of Congress, nor did he allow a test as a warning to Japan. Officially, he made the decision so as to cut short the Pacific aggression by the Japanese in WWII. It was a political decision, not a moral one. He had a toy and wanted to use it.
Enola Gay was flown by Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. At least 70,000 civilians in Hiroshima were killed instantly. By the end of the year radiation and fallout had killed twice that number. The landscape was razed.
Libraries of books describe the decision itself, what led up to it, Truman’s intransigence regarding ending the war, and the aftermath. My own education into this came for the first time upon finding Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. In this classic 1967 study, which won the 1969 National Book Award in Science, Lifton studies the psychological effects of the bomb on 90,000 survivors. I saw for the first time in the 1970s film clips of Hiroshima’s destruction that had been kept classified by the U.S. government until then.
