Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world. Proponents of the A-bomb-such as James Byrnes, Truman's secretary of state-believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided-over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists-to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. In late July, Japan's militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with "prompt and utter destruction" if they refused.General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed "Operation Downfall." They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S.
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In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device-a plutonium bomb-at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.īy the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Robert Oppenheimer worked to turn these materials into a workable atomic bomb. They sent them to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a team led by J. Over the next several years, the program's scientists worked on producing the key materials for nuclear fission-uranium-235 and plutonium (Pu-239). Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with spearheading the construction of the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program, codenamed "The Manhattan Project " (for the engineering corps' Manhattan district. government began funding its own atomic weapons development program, which came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. So, when that day came.Įven before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists-many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe-became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. And I practised and practised until, without even thinking about it, I could do it in between 40 and 42, all the time. The tail was shaking dramatically and I was afraid of it breaking off, but I didn't quit. I got myself to 25,000ft, and I practised turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it where I could pull it round in 40 seconds. I went back to Wendover as quick as I could and took the airplane up. PT: I had dropped enough practice bombs to realise that the charges would blow around 1,500ft in the air, so I would have 40 to 42 seconds to turn 159 degrees. ST: How many seconds did you have to make that turn? "Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded." What is tangency in this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. I said, "Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. But what should we do this time? He said, "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there." He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave.
I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb.
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So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened.