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May 8 - June 7, 2023
At the side of the memorandum, in bold script, whether from exhaustion or impatience or because he understood that the matter had been taken out of his hands, Henry Stimson struck finally: “No.”
facial tissue and Scotch tape.
Oppenheimer watched over them, conspicuous in his pork-pie hat, wasted to 116 pounds by a recent bout of chicken pox and the stress of months of late nights and sevenday weeks.
Had astronomers been watching they could have seen it reflected from the moon, literal moonshine.
flight engineer Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenbury, thirty-two, a former Michigan tree surgeon who thought the bomb looked like a tree trunk.
“It’s Hiroshima,” Tibbets announced to the crew.
A young ship designer whose response to the bombing was to rush home immediately to Nagasaki:
More recent estimates place the number of deaths up to the end of 1945 at 140,000. The dying continued; five-year deaths related to the bombing reached 200,000.
“Those scientists who invented the . . . atomic bomb,” writes a young woman who was a fourth-grade student at Hiroshima—“what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”
Of course they were exalted by the success of their work, but it seemed rather ghoulish to celebrate the sudden death of a hundred thousand people, even if they were “enemies.”
he expressed regret that the schedule could not be advanced two days instead of only one since good weather was forecast for August 9
It was Ashworth’s call and rather than waste the bomb he authorized a radar approach.
The young writer Yukio Mishima found the suspense surreal:
