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Times past
1945
The Atom
Bomb
On the 70th anniversary
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
a look at the long shadow
of nuclear war
By veronica majerol
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n Aug. 6, 1945, 8-year-old
Shigeaki Mori was walking
across a bridge on his way
to summer classes when
“suddenly, I felt a massive
shock wave and a blast from above,” he
recalled recently. That blast destroyed
Mori’s hometown of Hiroshima, Japan.
It was caused by the world’s first
nuclear attack.
Mori was blown off the bridge and
into a shallow river. When he came to
his senses, nearly everything around him
was wrapped in thick black smoke. The
few things Mori could see, like a woman
walking toward him, were horrifying.
A mushroom cloud
towers above Hiroshima,
following the atomic bombing
on Aug. 6, 1945.
“She was swaying . . . and holding
something white,” he said. “I realized she
was holding the contents of her stomach.”
The United States dropped an atomic
bomb on Hiroshima, and three days
later on the Japanese city of Nagasaki,
70 years ago. It was to force Japan to
surrender and end World War II (193945). The bombings killed as many as
250,000 and led to Japan’s official surrender three weeks later. The surrender possibly saved many thousands of
American lives.
But dropping those bombs also
had long-lasting consequences for the
U.S. and the world. In the years since,
Watch a video on the Manhattan Project. Download nuclear scientists’ 1945 petition to President Harry S. Truman. 18 U p f r o n t • u p f r o n t m a g a z i n e . c o m
more nations have developed their own
nuclear weapons. Today, the threat of an
attack by unruly nations like North Korea
or Iran (or from a terrorist group that gets
its hands on a bomb) remains a terrifying security problem for the U.S. and the
world, with no easy solution.
Einstein’s Letter
How did the U.S. come to possess
the most destructive weapon the world
had ever known? It started with a letter that physicist Albert Einstein wrote
to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The
letter was dated Aug. 2, 1939, a month
before Nazi Germany invaded Poland and
started the Second World War. Einstein
was Jewish and had fled Germany in
1933. In his letter, he warned Roosevelt
about the potential destructive power of
opposite: SuperStock/Corbis; Peace Memorial Museum/epa/Corbis (Hiroshima); AFP/Getty Images (Boys); Jim McMahon (Map); Photo 12/UIG/Getty Images (U.S. Troops)
Devastation in Hiroshima following
the atomic bomb blast; a boy carrying
his badly burned brother (inset).
a nuclear weapon. He urged the president to fund a project to develop an
atomic bomb. He said it had to be done
quickly, before Germany’s dictator Adolf
Hitler beat him to it.
Roosevelt listened to Einstein’s
warning and partnered with Britain and
Canada to recruit thousands of scientists to
collaborate on the Manhattan Project. The
program was so named because it began
in an obscure office in New York City. At
isolated sites in Tennessee, Washington
State, and New Mexico beginning in 1942,
the scientists worked feverishly. They
were trying to figure out how to set free the
enormous amounts of energy contained
in atoms. Einstein had first theorized the
relation between matter and energy in
his 1905 equation E=mc2 (see Timeline,
p. 20). Because other countries, like the
Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan, were
also racing to develop an atomic weapon,
the Manhattan Project was kept top secret.
Roosevelt never got to see the project’s
completion. He died on April 12, 1945.
Shortly after, Secretary of War Henry
Stimson sent President Harry S. Truman
a brief memo referring to “a highly secret
matter” that “has such a bearing on
our present foreign relations . . . that I
think you ought to know about it with-
out much further delay.” (Truman had
become vice president in January 1945.
But Roosevelt had never told him about
the Manhattan Project.)
The first test to see whether the bomb
worked took place three months later.
On July 16, 1945, scientists and military
experts gathered at Alamogordo, New
Mexico. Just before dawn, a giant fireball exploded into a mass of dust and
gaseous iron, soaring a mile a minute
and forming a mushroom cloud. The
blast carved a 1,200-foot crater in the
desert floor. The blinding light and enormous roar traveled hundreds of miles.
The atom bomb came too late to affect
the war in Europe. Germany had already
surrendered in May. More than 300,000
American soldiers had died in Europe
by then. But fighting still raged in the
Pacific. Japan, which drew the U.S. into
World War II by attacking Pearl Harbor in
Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, showed no signs
of giving up. Dropping the atomic bomb
as opposed to committing U.S. troops to
CHINA
RUSSIA
HOKKAIDO
N
JAPAN
NORTH
KOREA
Sea of Japan
(East Sea)
Hiroshima
SOUTH
KOREA
HONSHU
E
W
S
PACIFIC
OCEAN
Tokyo
SHIKOKU
Nagasaki
KYUSHU
Area of
detail
ASIA
OKINAWA
0
0
100 MI
200 KM
an invasion of mainland Japan would
save half a million lives, Truman said.
America’s use of the atom bomb (to this
day, the only time it was ever used) is still
controversial (see Debate, p. 22).
“The Americans had concluded that
the Japanese, [with] their kamikaze
suicide attacks and their refusal to
surrender—you couldn’t fight people
U.S. troops on the island of Okinawa, 1945. More than
100,000 Americans died in the Pacific during World War II.
19052
1942
E=mc
Albert Einstein (above)
publishes modern
science’s most famous
equation: E=mc2. It says
that vast amounts of
energy can be unleashed
from tiny amounts of
matter. It’s the basis for the development of nuclear weapons.
1945
The Manhattan
Project
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki
Thousands of scientists
are recruited to work on
a top-secret effort to
develop an atomic bomb
for the U.S. during World
War II. Three years later,
they successfully test
the bomb in the New
Mexico desert.
like that with anything but full measures,” says Christopher Hamner, a
history professor at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Virginia.
On August 6, an atomic bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima, a city of several
hundred thousand people in southern
Japan. The bomb was named Little Boy
by one of the nuclear physicists. Nearly
70 percent of Hiroshima’s buildings
and houses were leveled or damaged
beyond repair. The War Department
(today the Defense Department) said
the bomb packed more explosive power
than 20,000 tons of TNT.
1949
1951
A U.S. spy plane learns
that the Soviet Union
has tested an atomic
bomb. Schools begin
conducting “duck and
cover” drills (above)
in case of a Soviet
nuclear attack.
Americans Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg are
convicted of conspiring
to steal designs for
America’s atomic bomb
and deliver them to the
Soviet Union. They are
executed two years later.
Soviet Bomb
“The force from which the sun draws
its power has been loosed against those
who brought war to the Far East,”
Truman declared.
Three days later, a second bomb, called
Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, about
200 miles southwest (see map, p. 19).
The two bombs killed between 150,000
and 250,000 people. Some died immediately, while others died from radiation
sickness later on.
On August 15, Japan accepted the
Allies’ peace terms. And it formally
surrendered on September 2, officially
ending World War II.
The Nuclear Club
(formerly the Soviet Union)
YEAR
UNITED
STATES
1945
ESTIMATED
WARHEADS
TODAY
7,315
8,000
COUNTRY
The first
atomic bomb is
tested in the New
Mexico desert,
July 16, 1945.
RUSSIA
1949
Homegrown Spies
The Cold War
After the war, America found itself
in a new conflict with the Communist
Soviet Union. This war, which would
last five decades, became known as
the Cold War. The Soviets had been an
ally in the fight against Nazi Germany
in World War II. The U.S. assumed it
would have the upper hand in this new
battle because it was the only country
in the world with atomic weapons.
But America’s nuclear monopoly suddenly ended in September 1949. That’s
when it became clear that the Soviets
had developed their own bomb, helped
Who’s got nukes, and when did they get them?
U.K. FRANCE CHINA ISRAEL INDIA PAKISTAN NORTH
KOREA
1952 1960 1964 1967
1974
1998
2006
225
300 250 80–100 90–110 100-120
<10
Sources: Federation of American Scientists; Arms Control Association; Dates for Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are approximate.
NOTE: India, Israel, and Pakistan haven’t signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea did but later withdrew. Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons.
20 U p f r o n t • u p f r o n t m a g a z i n e . c o m
Corbis (Albert Einstein, Manhattan Project); AP Images (Soviet Bomb)
Timeline the atomic age
A North Korean missile
test last month; the country’s
dictator Kim Jong-Un (inset).
October 1962:
President John F. Kennedy
addresses the nation on the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
1962
1968
1969-’91
2010
Today
U.S. spy planes discover
Soviet-built nuclear
missile sites in Cuba,
just 90 miles from
Florida. After a tense
13-day standoff with the
U.S., the Soviets agree to remove the missiles.
The U.N. approves the
Non-Proliferation Treaty
to halt the spread of
nuclear arms. Nuclear
nations agree to help
other countries use the
technology for peaceful
purposes, like electricity.
The treaty has been
signed by 189 countries.
The Strategic Arms
Limitation Treaty (SALT)
between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union in 1969
is the first of several
agreements over the
next two decades to
reduce nuclear arsenals. President Obama, who
vowed to make nuclear
disarmament an administration priority, signs
a major arms-reduction
agreement with Russia,
called New Start. Obama
has since pushed for further reductions, but Russian President Vladimir
Putin has resisted.
The U.S. fears North
Korea could sell nuclear
arms to terrorists who
could target the U.S. The
U.S. and its allies have
imposed economic sanctions on Iran to curb its
suspected nuclear weapons program; ongoing
talks with Iran have so
far yielded no progress.
Bettmann/CORBIS (Cuban Missle Crisis); KCNA/Reuters (North Korea); Wong Maye-E/AP Images (Kim Jong-Un);
Hasan Sarbakhshian/AP Images (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei)
Cuban Missile
Crisis
U.N. Treaty
SALT
‘New Start’
in part by information from American Armageddon, dozens of countries
spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
signed the United Nations’ 1968 NonThe nuclear arms race between the Proliferation Treaty. And in the decades
U.S. and the Soviets was fierce.
leading up to the Soviet
The irony was that both sides
Union’s collapse in 1991, the
were extremely hesitant to use
Soviets and the U.S. signed
any of their bombs. They realseveral treaties to reduce their
ized an attack from either side
respective nuclear arsenals.
would result in immediate
(In recent years, the U.S. and
retaliation. That belief became
Russia, which controls the
known as “mutually assured Iran’s supreme leader, old Soviet arsenal, have furdestruction” (or the appropri- Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. ther reduced their stockpiles.)
Iran is suspected
ately named acronym MAD).
Despite
these
efforts,
of
developing nuclear
In schools across the U.S.,
the nuclear threat remains.
weapons.
students took part in “duck
Today, at least nine counand cover” drills. During these drills, tries, including the U.S., have the bomb
students practiced huddling under their (see “The Nuclear Club”). And Iran is
desks in case of an attack. (Never mind suspected of being close to developing
that ducking under a desk in the face of nuclear weapons. That poses a seria nuclear attack is pretty useless.) And ous threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia,
the Cold War almost turned hot in 1962 both longtime U.S. allies in the region,
with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which and most of Europe. The U.S. and its
brought the U.S. and Soviets to the allies have imposed economic sanctions
brink of nuclear war. (Read an Upfront on Iran. They’ve also tried negotiating
article on the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
with Iran’s leaders to end its nuclear
To reduce the chances of a nuclear program. So far, they’ve had no success.
North Korea & Iran
North Korea joined the nuclear club
in 2006. It’s now led by the mysterious
and unpredictable Kim Jong-Un. There’s
fear that he’ll use his nuclear weapons to
attack South Korea or Japan. American
leaders are also worried that he’ll sell
them to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda
or ISIS, which could target the U.S.
Speaking at a nuclear-security summit
in Belgium last year, President Obama
said one of his biggest concerns is “the
prospect of a nuclear weapon going off
in Manhattan.” The massive destruction that one terrorist could cause, even
without a military force behind him, is
perhaps the most frightening legacy of
the creation of the atom bomb.
“[Before 1945], if you wanted to do that
kind of damage, you had to field an army
of 75,000 men,” says Hamner, the history professor. “Today, a very determined
small group of people can do an incredibly
disproportionate amount of damage.” •
With reporting by Reuters and Sam Roberts
of The New York Times.
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