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Dec 24, 2015 · The United States already had crippled Japan with an embargo, however, they knew from other invasions in the Pacific that they wouldn't surrender, so the only options were to invade, or use the new nuclear technology, which did the trick.
- During the war the policy of the United States Congress and the President and the chiefs of the armed services was to attack Japan and Germany with...
- Because only an invasion, or a credible threat of it, will have brought unconditional surrender. The latter let the Allies neutralise the strategic...
- Overview
- Early atomic research
- The American atomic program takes shape
- From Stagg Field to Los Alamos
- The Trinity test
- The bombing of Hiroshima
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were American bombing raids on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, which marked the first use of atomic weapons in war. Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was a gun-assembly fission bomb using uranium, whereas Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was an implosion fission bomb utilizing plutonium.
When were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The first atomic bomb, named Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima from the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, at 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945. The second bomb, named Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki from the Bockscar, also a B-29 bomber, at 11:02 AM on August 9, 1945.
Who was involved in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer headed the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs for the United States, and Edward Teller was among the first scientists recruited for the project. Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor. Ernest Orlando Lawrence was program chief in charge of the development of the electromagnetic process of separating uranium-235. The person who oversaw the project, however, was not a scientist. He was U.S. Army Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves. In all, more than one hundred thousand people were employed for the Manhattan Project. The bombings themselves were carried out by the pilot of the Enola Gay Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., and pilot of the Bockscar Major Charles W. Sweeney and their respective crews.
Why did the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen?
The turning point in the quest for atomic energy came in January 1939, eight months before the start of World War II. German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, following a clue provided by Irène Joliot-Curie and Pavle Savić in France (1938), proved definitely that the bombardment of uranium with neutrons produced radioisotopes of barium, lanthanum, and other elements from the middle of the periodic table.
The significance of this discovery was communicated by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, two Jewish scientists who had fled Germany, to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. Bohr had been preparing to journey to the United States, and he arrived in New York on January 16, 1939. He discussed the matter with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and others before announcing to the world on January 26 the discovery of a process that Meitner and Frisch had termed fission. Enrico Fermi proposed to Bohr that neutrons might be released during the fission process, thus raising the possibility of a sustained nuclear chain reaction. These revolutionary suggestions triggered a flurry of activity in the world of physics. Subsequent studies by Bohr and Wheeler indicated that fission did not occur in uranium-238, the isotope of uranium most commonly found in nature, but that fission could take place in uranium-235. Gradually many of the riddles surrounding fission were resolved, and by June 1940 the basic facts concerning the release of atomic energy were known throughout the scientific world.
While engaged in one war in Europe and another in the Pacific, the United States would launch the largest scientific effort undertaken to that time. It would involve 37 installations throughout the country, more than a dozen university laboratories, and 100,000 people, including the Nobel Prize-winning physicists Arthur Holly Compton, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Ernest Lawrence, and Harold Urey.
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The first contact between the scientific community and the U.S. government regarding atomic research was made by George B. Pegram of Columbia University. Pegram arranged a conference between Fermi and officers of the U.S. Navy in March 1939. In July Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner conferred with Einstein, and the three later went to New York to meet with National Recovery Administration economist Alexander Sachs. Supported by a letter from Einstein, Sachs approached Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt and explained the significance of nuclear fission to him. Roosevelt formed the Advisory Committee on Uranium, appointing Lyman Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards, to serve as its chair. In February 1940 a fund of $6,000 was made available to begin research; by the time of its completion, the project’s budget would exceed $2 billion.
U.S. officials were now well aware of Adolf Hitler’s atomic ambitions. In his letter to Roosevelt, Einstein explicitly called attention to uranium reserves in Czechoslovakia that had fallen under the control of the Third Reich in March 1939. The British had also begun studying fission, and Urey and Pegram visited the United Kingdom to see what was being done there. By August 1943 a combined policy committee had been established with the United Kingdom and Canada. Later that year a number of scientists of those countries moved to the United States to join the project that by then was well underway.
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On June 18, 1942, the War Department assigned management of construction work related to the project to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan District (much early atomic research—most notably Urey’s group—was based at Manhattan’s Columbia University). On September 17, 1942, Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves was placed in charge of all Army activities relating to the project. “Manhattan Project” became the code name applied to this body of atomic research that would extend across the country.
The first experimental reactor—a graphite cube about 8 feet (2.4 metres) on edge and containing about seven tons of uranium oxide—had been set up at Columbia University in July 1941. By the end of that year, reactor work had been transferred to the University of Chicago, where Arthur Holly Compton and his cryptically named “Metallurgical Laboratory” were considering related problems. On December 2, 1942, the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was carried out under Fermi’s supervision in Chicago Pile No. 1, a reactor that Fermi had constructed in a squash court under the bleachers of Stagg Field, the university’s football stadium. It had now been proven that the controlled release of atomic energy was feasible for the production of power and the manufacture of plutonium.
In February 1943 construction began on a pilot uranium enrichment plant located on the Clinch River in the Tennessee Valley, about 15 miles (about 24 km) west of Knoxville, Tennessee. The Clinton Engineer Works (later known as Oak Ridge) occupied a 70-square-mile (180-square-km) tract of land and came to employ roughly 5,000 technicians and maintenance personnel. For the project’s full-sized reactors, however, a more isolated site would be necessary. Groves had expressed concern about the pilot reactor’s proximity to Knoxville, and the larger reactors would have significantly greater power needs than could be accommodated in the Tennessee Valley.
In January 1943 Groves had selected a 580-square-mile (1,500-square-km) tract in south-central Washington for the project’s plutonium production facilities. The location was desirable for its relative isolation and for the availability, in large quantities, of cooling water from the Columbia River and electric power from the Grand Coulee Dam and Bonneville Dam hydroelectric installations. The creation of what came to be known as the Hanford Engineer Works required a significant displacement of the local population. Residents of the towns of Hanford, Richland, and White Bluffs were given just 90 days to vacate their homes, and the Wanapum Native American people were forced to relocate to Priest Rapids, losing access to their traditional fishing grounds on the Columbia. At its peak in the summer of 1944, the huge complex at Hanford employed more than 50,000 people.
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and within 24 hours Pres. Harry S. Truman had been briefed about the atomic bomb program by Stimson. Germany surrendered in May 1945, thus ending the war in Europe, but combat raged on in the Pacific. Sanguinary battles at Iwo Jima (February–March 1945) and Okinawa (April–June 1945) offered a preview of what an invasion of the Japanese home islands might look like, and there remained a strong impetus to see the Manhattan Project through to its conclusion. By the summer of 1945, the production plants had delivered a sufficient amount of fissionable material to produce a nuclear explosion, and bomb development had advanced to a point that an actual field test of a nuclear weapon could be conducted. Such a test would obviously be no simple affair. A vast array of complex equipment had to be assembled so that the success or failure of the test could be analyzed.
The bomb development teams at Los Alamos had settled on two possible designs. One, fueled by uranium-235, would utilize a “gun assembly” that used high explosives to shoot two subcritical slugs of fissionable material together in a hollow tube. The violent collision of the two slugs would cause the uranium-235 to reach critical mass, thus triggering a chain reaction and explosion. Engineers were confident that this comparatively simple design would work, but a sufficient quantity of uranium-235 would not be available until about August 1, 1945. The Hanford site would be able to deliver enough plutonium-239 for testing by early July, but Los Alamos scientists had determined that the gun assembly model would not be compatible with plutonium as a fuel source. An alternative design had been proposed, one that would use concentric layers of high explosives to implode the fissionable material under enormous pressures into a denser mass that would immediately achieve criticality. It was believed that this “implosion” design would be the most efficient way to weaponize the meagre amount of plutonium that had been produced thus far.
For the test, Oppenheimer selected a location on the Alamogordo Bombing Range (now White Sands Missile Range), 120 miles (193 km) south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He called the site “Trinity” in reference to one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. The first atomic bomb—a plutonium implosion device called “Gadget”—was raised to the top of a 100-foot (30-metre) steel tower that was designated “Zero.” The area at the base of the tower was marked as “Ground Zero,” a term that would pass into common parlance to describe the centre of an (often catastrophic) event. Military officials and scientists occupied observation posts at distances ranging from 10,000 to 17,000 yards (9 to 15.5 km). They had been instructed to lie down with their feet toward the tower and to protect their eyes from the blinding flash of the explosion.
On the morning of the test, the skies were dark and it was raining, with occasional lightning. “Gadget” was detonated at 5:29:45 am on July 16, 1945. The explosion caused a flash that illuminated the mountain peaks 10 miles (16 km) away. Soon there followed a tremendous sustained roar accompanied by a tornado-like burst of wind. Where the tower had stood, there was a great surging ball of fire, followed by a mushroom cloud that rose some 40,000 feet (12,200 metres) into the sky. The heat of the explosion had completely vaporized the tower; in its place was a saucer-shaped crater about a half mile (800 metres) in diameter and 25 feet (almost 8 metres) deep. The floor of the crater was fused into a glassy jade-coloured mineral subsequently dubbed trinitite. The bomb had generated an explosive power equivalent to approximately 21,000 tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT). The blast was visible from a distance of 50 miles (80 km), and it shattered windows 125 miles (200 km) away. Residents of Gallup, New Mexico, more than 180 miles (290 km) from Ground Zero, reported feeling the ground shake. In an attempt to head off questions about the world-changing event that had occurred at Trinity, the army issued a brief statement to the press: “A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded, but there was no loss of life or limb to anyone.”
On July 16, just hours after the successful completion of the Trinity test, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis left port at San Francisco with the gun assembly mechanism, roughly half of the U.S. supply of uranium-235, and several Los Alamos technicians. The remainder of the U.S. uranium-235 stockpile was flown to Tinian on transport planes. Upon the arrival of the Indianapolis at Tinian on July 26, assembly began on the bomb, dubbed Little Boy. The Indianapolis departed Tinian after the delivery, but it was sunk en route to the Philippines by the Japanese submarine I-58 on July 30. Hundreds of crew members who survived the torpedo attack died in the water while awaiting a rescue. The components of a second bomb, a plutonium device nicknamed Fat Man, were transported to Tinian by air. By August 2, 1945, both bombs had arrived at Tinian, and U.S. commanders were waiting only for a break in the weather to order the execution of Special Bombing Mission 13—an atomic attack on the Japanese home islands.
Groves had chaired the committee responsible for target selection, and by the end of May 1945 the list had been narrowed to Kokura, Hiroshima, Niigata, and Kyōto, all cities that had not yet been subjected to Gen. Curtis LeMay’s strategic bombing campaign. Kyōto, Japan’s ancient capital, was consistently placed at the top of the list, but Stimson appealed directly to Truman to remove it from consideration because of its cultural importance. Nagasaki was added in its place. Hiroshima became the primary target because of its military value—the city served as the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army—and because planners believed that the compactness of the urban centre would most vividly demonstrate the destructive power of the bomb.
The pilots, mechanics, and crews of the 509th Composite Group of the Twentieth Air Force had all trained with the specially modified B-29s that would serve as delivery vehicles for the bombs. Col. Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the commander of the 509th, would pilot the B-29 that would drop the first bomb. His 11-man crew included Maj. Thomas Ferebee as bombardier and Manhattan Project ordnance expert Capt. William (“Deak”) Parsons as weaponeer. Tibbets personally selected plane number 82 for the mission, and, shortly before taking off at approximately 2:45 am on August 6, 1945, Tibbets asked a maintenance worker to paint his mother’s name—Enola Gay—on the nose of the aircraft. Two other B-29s accompanied the Enola Gay to serve as observation and camera planes. Once the Enola Gay was airborne, Parsons added the final components to Little Boy. This was done because a number of the modified B-29s had crashed on takeoff, and there was some concern that a crash would cause a fully assembled bomb to detonate, wiping out the installation at Tinian.
The skies were clear, and the Enola Gay encountered no opposition while approaching the target. At 7:15 am (Tinian time) Parsons armed the weapon, and the Enola Gay ascended to an attack altitude of 31,000 feet (9,450 metres). A trio of B-29s had flown ahead of the strike force to perform weather reconnaissance over the primary (Hiroshima) and secondary (Kokura and Nagasaki) targets. The pilot of the Hiroshima mission radioed Tibbets that there was little cloud cover and that he should proceed to the primary target. Just after 8:00 am local time (9:00 am Tinian time), the crew of the Enola Gay sighted Hiroshima. At around 8:12 am Tibbets relinquished control of the aircraft to Ferebee, who began his bombing run. Ferebee’s aim point was the Aioi Bridge, a distinctive T-shaped span over the Ōta River. Tibbets ordered his crew to don their protective goggles, and at 8:15 am the bomb was released. Tibbets immediately put the Enola Gay into a sharp turn that, he hoped, would carry it beyond the bomb’s blast radius.
It took roughly 45 seconds for Little Boy to descend to an altitude of 1,900 feet (580 metres), at which point it exploded in the sky directly above Shima Hospital. Within a fraction of a second of the detonation, the temperature at ground level exceeded 7,000 °C (12,600 °F) and a powerful blast wave scoured the landscape. Out of a population of 343,000 inhabitants, some 70,000 people were killed instantly, and by the end of the year the death toll had surpassed 100,000. Two-thirds of the city area was destroyed. “Nuclear shadows” were all that remained of people who had been subjected to the intense thermal radiation. A massive mushroom cloud rose to a height of more than 40,000 feet (more than 12 km). Although less than 2 percent of the uranium-235 contained in Little Boy had achieved fission, the bomb was horrifying in its destructive power. The explosive yield was the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. Sgt. Bob Caron, the Enola Gay’s tail gunner and the only member of the crew to directly observe the blast, described the scene as a “peep into hell.” A series of shockwaves rocked the Enola Gay as it departed the area, and at a distance of nearly 400 miles (640 km) the mushroom cloud was still visible. Upon returning to Tinian, after a flight of just over 12 hours, Tibbets was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
Later that day, Truman addressed the people of the United States:
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