Pandora's Keepers (34 page)

When the scientists piled into buses to return to Los Alamos, they sprawled exhausted in their seats and grew solemn. “It
was quiet,” recalled one who made the ride back. “We were busy with our own thoughts. We were still absorbing the impact of
it.”
⁹
The full import of Trinity was beginning to register. A physicist at Los Alamos vividly remembered seeing the grim, silent
expressions on the faces of the scientists as they stepped from the buses that evening. “I saw that something very grave and
strong had happened to their whole outlook on the future.”
¹⁰
At last they had a chance to pause and think about what they had done, to face the awesome and chilling consequences of their
labors. They realized—because they had seen and felt it—just how terrifying was the force they had unleashed. The bomb’s power
turned out to be far greater than they had imagined. They sensed the world would never be the same again.

Meanwhile, planning for dropping the bomb on Japan ground forward relentlessly. By July twenty-fourth, plans were set. The
bombs would be used when they were ready. Beforehand, Japan would be given a generally phrased warning of total destruction
unless it surrendered. This “last chance” warning, included in the Potsdam Declaration of July twenty-sixth, was dismissed
by the Japanese. Groves notified Stimson that a uranium bomb would be available soon after August first. The first plutonium
bomb, the type tested at Trinity, would be ready for delivery about August sixth, and a second was expected by August seventeenth
or eighteenth. Additional ones would be produced at an accelerated rate from possibly three in September to perhaps seven
or more in December. A specially trained B-29 unit in the South Pacific, the 509th Composite Air Group, was to deliver the
first bomb as soon as weather permitted visual bombing after August third. The list of targets included Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima was chosen as a target for the atomic bomb because its landscape was flat and it was one of the few Japanese cities
left by the summer of 1945 that had not yet been firebombed to ashes. These conditions would afford the most dramatic demonstration
of the weapon’s power and the most accurate measurement of its destructiveness. There was some military rationale, too: the
city was the headquarters of the Second Japanese Army, which commanded the defense of southern Japan. From here the Japanese
general staff prepared to direct the defense of the island of Kyushu against an impending American invasion. But it was also
the home of more than 300,000 noncombatants. In Hiroshima, civilians outnumbered soldiers by more than six to one.

On July twenty-third Oppenheimer informed Navy Captain Deak Parsons, the Los Alamos ordnance specialist who would ride aboard
the attacking aircraft, that the bombs were expected to perform well. “As a result of the Trinity shot we are led to expect
a very similar performance from the first Little Boy [U-235 bomb] and the first plutonium Fat Man.” Oppenheimer predicted
that the energy release of each bomb would fall between twelve to twenty thousand tons, and that the blast effect would be
equivalent to eight to fifteen thousand tons of TNT. The fireball would be of greater brilliance and longer duration than
the Trinity shot, since no dust would be mixed with it when it detonated at altitude. Yet lethal radiation from the bomb would
reach the ground.
¹¹

At 2:45
A.M.
on August 6, 1945, three B-29s belonging to the 509th lifted off from the island of Tinian in the Marianas and headed for
the Japanese home islands fifteen hundred miles to the north. In the belly of the lead plane, the
Enola Gay
, was Little Boy—chosen because it had been readied first. It contained twenty-five kilograms of U-235 encased within cordite,
steel tamper, casing, and firing controls.
^*
By 7:30
A.M.
the bomb had been armed. Fifteen minutes later the plane was over the Japanese mainland.

The morning of August sixth was sunny, calm, and warm in Hiroshima—a beautiful summer day. The sky was sharply blue. “Shimmering
leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden,” a resident of the city
noted in his diary.
¹²
People walked, bicycled, and rode streetcars to work. Soldiers exercised on parade grounds while schoolgirls swept city streets.
An air-raid siren sounded just before 8:15
A.M.
, but few scurried for cover—people were more concerned with getting to work than with sheltering themselves from three planes—although
many raised their eyes to watch the B-29s high in the sky. No military alert sounded when the
Enola Gay
and two trailing B-29s loaded with instruments to measure and photograph the blast approached Hiroshima; Japanese officials
assumed the three planes were on a routine reconnaissance flight. Unchallenged, the
Enola Gay
flew to the heart of the city.
¹³

A minute later the bomb was dropped. Ground Zero was the Aioi Bridge, spanning the delta islands of the Ōta River in central
Hiroshima. Whistling and spinning, the bomb had tiny holes where wires came out as it fell; these triggered its primary arming
system. Other holes on its casing took in air samples as it fell; when the bomb reached seven thousand feet, a barometric
switch activated the second arming system. Protruding out of the bomb’s spinning tail fins were numerous wispy radio antennae;
these received returning radio signals as a way of determining altitude.
¹⁴
At nineteen hundred feet—the height calculated for maximum damage—the bomb detonated. There was a tremendous flash of light
and heat. It lasted only a fraction of a second, but its intensity was sufficient to instantly incinerate everything up to
five hundred yards from Ground Zero. The temperature at Ground Zero reached seventy-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. People
within half a mile of the fireball were seared to smoking black bundles, their internal organs boiled away. Thousands of these
black bundles littered the smashed streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima. Farther out, the thermal flash instantly
blistered and tore loose people’s skin, leaving it hanging from the horribly swollen faces and bodies of severely injured
survivors who groaned and staggered like sleepwalkers as they called out names of loved ones in their shock and suffering.

The blast wave, rocketing from Ground Zero at two miles per second, threw up a vast cloud of swirling debris. The sickly sweet
odor of burning human flesh hung over all of Hiroshima, which had changed to a wasteland of scorched earth. Everything as
far as the eye could see was ashes and ruins. Smoke thick enough to obscure the sun covered the sky. Rain that was muddy and
chilly (and highly radioactive) began to fall. Children cried for their mothers; mothers searched desperately for their children.
Pain and suffering were everywhere. “I know of no word or words to describe the view,” a survivor later said.
¹⁵
Some people thought the world was ending. Others thought it was Hell on earth.

Hiroshima had been destroyed in an instant. Fire stations, police stations, railroad stations, post offices, telephone and
telegraph offices, broadcasting stations, and schools were demolished. Streetcars, roads, and electricity, gas, water, and
sewer facilities were ruined beyond use. Hospitals and first-aid clinics were destroyed. Ninety percent of all medical personnel
in the city were killed or disabled. An entire community had been shattered. And this was only the beginning. Within hours,
victims not killed or horribly burned began to vomit due to radiation poisoning. They seemed to improve for a time, but then
they worsened, slowly and painfully. It was a strange and agonizing form of illness: nausea, loss of appetite, bloody diarrhea,
fever, weakness, ulceration and bleeding in the mouth, the eyes, the lungs—a slow but progressive worsening until death. Those
who would survive suffered a greatly increased risk of leukemia. There would also be high mortality rates among fetuses exposed
to radiation in the womb, and many infants who lived showed retarded growth and abnormally small heads. Nearly 200,000 people
were killed outright or would die in Hiroshima in subsequent years from the effects of heat, blast, and fire. There was to
be a continuing toll of radiation-induced genetic disorders in children conceived years afterward.

Nagasaki was a densely populated and cosmopolitan city built around a harbor and up into surrounding hills like San Francisco.
And like San Francisco, it was a fabled port of spectacular beauty, particularly now, for autumn had come early to the city
and many of its trees were brilliant with red and yellow leaves. The Portuguese and the Dutch had arrived in Nagasaki in the
late sixteenth century and helped transform it from a fishing village into Japan’s chief port for foreign trade and Jesuit
missionaries. In 1945 Nagasaki remained the most Christianized city in Japan, a harmonious blend of Eastern and Western cultures
with its many churches and western-style houses, including the legendary home of Madame Butterfly, immortalized by Puccini,
overlooking the harbor. It was also where the Mitsubishi torpedoes used to devastating effect at Pearl Harbor had been made.

Nagasaki was not the intended target on the morning of August 9, 1945. The intended target was Kokura, on the northeast coast
of Kyushu, but heavy ground haze and smoke obscured Kokura and the aiming point could not be seen. So the B-29 flew on to
Nagasaki, and found that it, too, was obscured by clouds racing in from the East China Sea. Running low on fuel, the pilot
had time for one final pass over the city. At the last minute, the clouds broke just long enough to give the bombardier a
view of the target. A plutonium bomb fell from the B-29 and exploded 1,650 feet above Nagasaki just after 11:00 in the morning.

There was a blinding bluish-white flash, accompanied by intense glare and heat. The split-second flash was so intense that
it caused third-degree burns to exposed human skin up to a distance of a mile. Clothing ignited, telephone poles charred,
thatch-roofed houses caught fire. Black or other dark-colored surfaces absorbed the heat and immediately burst into flames.
A blast wave followed that roared like an earthquake. People forty miles away felt the concussion. The sky darkened ominously,
turning an eerie red and then a ghostly yellow. Huge radioactive raindrops fell from the sky. The scene on the ground was
obscured first by a bluish haze and then by a purple-brown cloud of choking dust and smoke. The victims of Nagasaki, like
those of Hiroshima, thought they had descended into Hell. They stumbled around, terrified and helpless, in the twilight gloom.
Bodies of the dead were so charred that one could not distinguish men from women, backs from chests. As the dust settled and
the smoke cleared, the search for victims buried in the rubble began. The flesh of survivors peeled off their bones like gloves
from hands as they were pulled screaming and moaning from the debris.

Far from the human suffering below, the crew of the B-29 stared in shocked amazement at a boiling cauldron where a beautiful,
vibrant city had been just moments before. Over four square miles in the center of the city had been flattened and blackened.
They watched as a gigantic ball of flame rose in a huge column of thick smoke two miles up in the sky. A massive, swelling
mushroom billowed at the top. It seethed like a thousand geysers, changing colors kaleidoscopically. Then it broke free from
the stem and a smaller mushroom took its place. It was like a decapitated monster growing a new head.

After a while, countless men, women, and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of the Urakami River.
Their hair and clothing were scorched and their burnt skin hung off in sheets like rags. Begging for help, they died one after
another in the water or in heaps on the banks. Then radiation began to take its toll. Seventy thousand people died in Nagasaki
that day and another 70,000 more over the next five years—a slightly smaller death toll than in Hiroshima because the surrounding
hills had deflected the blast and radiation. But the victims of Nagasaki endured equally unspeakable suffering. An American
naval officer who visited Nagasaki a month after the bombing described in a letter home to his wife what he felt when he saw
the once beautiful city:

A smell of death and corruption pervades the place, ranging from the ordinary carrion smell to somewhat subtler stenches with
strong overtones of ammonia (decomposing nitrogenous matter, I suppose). The general impression, which transcends those derived
from the evidence of our physical senses, is one of deadness, the absolute essence of death in the sense of finality without
hope of resurrection. And all this is not localized. It’s everywhere, and nothing has escaped its touch. In most ruined cities
you can bury the dead, clean up the rubble, rebuild the houses and have a living city again. One feels that is not so here.
Like the ancient Sodom and Gomorrah, its site has been sown with salt and
ichabod
[“the glory is departed”] is written over its gates.
¹⁶

Groves telephoned Oppenheimer from Washington on the afternoon of August sixth with the news that Hiroshima had been bombed.
Oppenheimer was tense. He had been pacing his office and chain-smoking. Groves told him he was proud of his lab. “It went
all right?” Oppenheimer anxiously asked. “Apparently it went with a tremendous bang,” the general replied. Remembering the
profound impression that the predawn Trinity test had made on him, and hoping that Hiroshima would similarly shock the world,
Oppenheimer asked Groves if the bomb had been dropped before sunrise. No, said Groves, the bomb had been dropped in daylight
in order to safeguard the plane’s crew. “Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it here and I extend my heartiest congratulations,”
Oppenheimer said to Groves, his voice trailing off. “It’s been a long road.” “One of the wisest things I ever did was when
I selected the director of Los Alamos,” the general crowed. “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves,” said Oppenheimer, in
no mood for self-congratulation at that moment.
¹⁷