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July 30 - August 9, 2025
Childers would comply without hesitation. He had no desire to commit mass murder. And yet the only thing that prevented the Soviet Union from destroying the United States with nuclear weapons, according to the Cold War theory of deterrence, was the threat of being annihilated, as well. Childers had faith in the logic of nuclear deterrence: his willingness to launch the missile ensured that it would never be launched.
At Vandenberg he had learned the general categories and locations of Titan II targets. Some were in the Soviet Union, others in China. But a crew was never told where its missile was aimed. That sort of knowledge might inspire doubt.
ON SEPTEMBER 18, 1980, the world was unsettled. The president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had announced the previous day that the treaty defining the border between his country and Iran was no longer in effect.
In Tehran, fifty-two American hostages were still being held captive, almost a year after being seized at the U.S. embassy there.
Meanwhile, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had reached their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan nine months earlier, deploying more than 100,000 troops in a campaign that many feared was just the first stage of a wider assault on the oil-producing nations of the Middle East.
Before leaving Los Alamos, two hundred miles to the north, some of the Manhattan Project’s physicists had placed bets on the outcome of the upcoming test, code-named Trinity. Norman F. Ramsey bet the device would be a dud. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s scientific director, predicted a yield equal to 300 tons of TNT; Edward Teller thought the yield would be closer to 45,000 tons.
Enrico Fermi, who’d already won a Nobel for his discoveries in physics, suggested that the odds of the atmosphere’s catching fire were about one in ten. Victor Weisskopf couldn’t tell if Fermi was joking. Weisskopf had done some of the calculations with Teller and still worried about the risk.
The idea of an “atomic bomb,” like so many other technological innovations, had first been proposed by the science fiction writer H. G. Wells. In his 1914 novel The World Set Free, Wells describes the “ultimate explosive,” fueled by radioactivity.
These atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind, as every nation seeks to obtain them—and use them before being attacked. Millions die, the world’s great capitals are destroyed, and civilization nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note, as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment of world government.
physicist Leó Szilárd—who’d met with H. G. Wells in 1929 and tried, without success, to obtain the central European literary rights to his novels—conceived of a nuclear weapon that would explode instantly. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Szilárd feared that Hitler might launch an atomic bomb program and get the weapon first. Szilárd discussed his concerns with Albert Einstein in the summer of 1939 and helped draft a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
the Manhattan Project was formed in 1942. Led by Leslie R. Groves, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army, it secretly gathered eminent scientists from Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, with the aim of creating atomic bombs.
Conventional explosives, like TNT, detonate through a chemical reaction. They are unstable substances that can be quickly converted into gases of a much larger volume. The process by which they detonate is similar to the burning of a log in a fireplace—except that unlike the burning of a log, which is slow and steady, the combustion of an explosive is almost instantaneous. At the point of detonation, temperatures reach as high as 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As hot gases expand into the surrounding atmosphere, they create a “shock wave” of compressed air, also known as a “blast wave,” that can
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plutonium core the size of a tennis ball had the potential to raise the temperature, at the point of detonation, to tens of millions degrees Fahrenheit—and increase the air pressure to many millions of pounds per square inch.
Leó Szilárd realized that bombarding certain heavy elements with neutrons could not only cause them to fission but could also start a chain reaction. Neutrons released from one atom would strike the nucleus of a nearby atom, freeing even more neutrons. The process could become self-sustaining. If the energy was released gradually, it could be used as a source of power to run electrical generators. And if the energy was released all at once, it could cause an explosion with temperatures many times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Two materials were soon determined to be fissile—that is, capable of sustaining a rapid chain reaction: uranium-235 and plutonium-239. Both were difficult to obtain.
typical sample of uranium is about 0.07 percent uranium-235, and to get that fissile material the Manhattan Project built a processing facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Completed within two years, it was the largest building in the world. The plutonium for the Manhattan Project came from three reactors in Hanford, Washington.
That was the assumption guiding the Manhattan Project scientists. In order to control a nuclear weapon, they had to figure out how to make fissile material become supercritical—without being anywhere near it.
The first weapon design was a gun-type assembly. Two pieces of fissile material would be placed at opposite ends of a large gun barrel, and then one would be fired at the other.
Many of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project—Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Bethe—later became well known. And yet one of the crucial design characteristics of almost every nuclear weapon built since then was perfected by George B. Kistiakowsky,
And a week before the Trinity test, an X-unit fired prematurely during a lightning storm. It had been triggered by static electricity in the air. The misfire suggested that a nuclear weapon could be set off by a lightning bolt.
At eighteen past three in the afternoon on July 13, 1945, the plutonium core was delivered to a steel tower a couple of miles from the McDonald Ranch House.
The nuclear device was an assortment of spheres within spheres: first, an outer aluminum casing, then two layers of explosives, then a thin layer of boron and plastic to capture neutrons that might enter from outside the core, then more aluminum, then a tamper of uranium-238 to reflect neutrons that might escape from inside the core, then the ball of plutonium, and finally, at the very center, the gumball–size neutron initiator—a mixture of beryllium and polonium that would flood the device with neutrons, like a nuclear fuse, when the shock wave from the lenses struck.
On September 1, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued a statement condemning the “inhuman barbarism” of aerial attacks on civilian populations. Nazi Germany had invaded Poland that day, and the Second World War had begun. Aerial bombardment promised to make the trench warfare of the previous world war—long a symbol of cruel, pointless slaughter—seem almost civilized and quaint. In April 1937 the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had attacked the Spanish city of Guernica, killing a few hundred civilians. Eight months later, the Japanese had bombed and invaded the Chinese city of
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New theories of airpower were applied on an unprecedented scale. Unlike “tactical” strikes aimed at an enemy’s military forces, “strategic” bombing focused on transportation systems and factories, the economic infrastructure necessary for waging war.
At first, the British refrained from deliberate attacks on German civilians. The policy of the Royal Air Force (RAF) changed, however, in the fall of 1941. The Luftwaffe had attacked the English cathedral town of Coventry, and most of the RAF bombs aimed at Germany’s industrial facilities were missing by a wide mark. The RAF’s new target would be something more intangible than rail yards or munitions plants: the morale of the German people.
During Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, RAF bombs started a fire in Hamburg with hurricane-force winds. The first “firestorm” ever ignited by aerial bombardment, it killed about forty thousand civilians.
Relying on the Norden bombsight—a device that combined a telescope, a mechanical computer, and an autopilot—the USAAF tried to destroy German factories, ports, military bases, and lines of communication. Precision bombing was rarely precise, and the vast majority of bombs still missed their targets.
In the Pacific War a different set of rules applied. The Japanese were considered racially inferior, often depicted as monkeys or vermin in American propaganda. The Japanese had attacked the United States without warning.
American planes struck Tokyo with two thousand tons of bombs containing napalm and jellied gasoline. Although a major industrial area was destroyed, the real targets were block after block of Japanese buildings made of wood, paper, and bamboo. Within hours the firestorm consumed one quarter of the city. It killed about one hundred thousand civilians, and left about a million homeless. This was truly, in the words of historian John W. Dower, “war without mercy.”
As Japanese cities vanished in flames, Leó Szilárd began to have doubts about the atomic bomb. He had been the first to push hard for its development in the United States, but he now opposed its use against Japanese civilians. In June 1945, Szilárd and a group of scientists at the University of Chicago sent a report to the leadership of the Manhattan Project, asking that the power of nuclear weapons be demonstrated to the world at “an appropriately selected uninhabited area.”
committee of presidential advisers had already decided that a public demonstration of an atomic bomb was too risky, because the weapon might not work; that Japan should not be given any warning of a nuclear attack, for much the same reason; that the bomb should be aimed at a war plant surrounded by workers’ housing; and that the goal of the bombing would be “to make a profound psychological impression” on as many workers as possible.
The first four choices of the president’s Target Committee were Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. Secretary of War Henry Stimson insisted that Kyoto be removed from the list, arguing that the city had played too central a role in Japanese art, history, and culture to be wiped out. Nagasaki took its place.
Franklin Roosevelt had never told his vice president, Harry Truman, about the Manhattan Project or the unusual weapon that it was developing.
Former President Herbert Hoover warned Truman that such an invasion would cost between “500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives.” At the War Department, it was widely assumed that American casualties would reach half a million. During the recent battle of Okinawa, more than one third of the American landing force had been killed or wounded—and a full-scale invasion of Japan might require 1.8 million American troops.
Unlike most presidents, Truman had firsthand experience of battle. During the First World War, half of the men in his infantry division were killed or wounded during the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
Enough fissile material for two nuclear weapons—a gun-type device loaded with uranium-235 and an implosion device with a plutonium core—were readied for use against Japan.
Both bomb types were rigged to detonate about 1,800 feet above the ground. That was the altitude, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “appropriate for the maximum demolition of light structures.”
If a B-29 carrying an implosion bomb was forced to return to its base, the president’s Target Committee decided that the crew should jettison the weapon into shallow water from a low altitude. The emergency procedure for a gun-type bomb was more problematic. The gun-type bomb was likely to detonate after a crash into the ocean.
“Little Boy,” the bomb was ten feet long and weighed about 10,000 pounds. It contained almost all the processed uranium in existence, about 141 pounds. The relative inefficiency of the design was offset by its simplicity. Although a gun-type bomb had never been tested, Oppenheimer assured Parsons that the odds of “a less than optimal performance . . . are quite small and should be ignored.”
three in the morning on August 6, 1945, Parsons and another weaponeer, Morris Jeppson, left the cockpit and climbed into the bomb bay of a B-29 named Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother.
The city of Hiroshima spread across half a dozen islands in the delta of the Ota River. Much of the population had fled to the countryside, leaving about three hundred thousand people in town.
Second Army, amid a residential and commercial district. The bomb was dropped from the Enola Gay at about 8:16 A.M., fell for about forty-four seconds, and detonated at an altitude of roughly 1,900 feet.
small amount of fissile material was responsible for the devastation; 98.62 percent of the uranium in Little Boy was blown apart before it could become supercritical. Only 1.38 percent actually fissioned, and most of that uranium was transformed into dozens of lighter elements. About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.
Meanwhile, another atomic bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” was being assembled at a special building on Tinian. The floor of the building had been coated with rubber and lined with copper wire to minimize the chance that static electricity would cause a spark.
Okinawa. Fat Man missed its aiming point by more than a mile. Instead of detonating above the central commercial district, the bomb went off above an industrial area on the western outskirts of Nagasaki. About one fifth of the plutonium fissioned, and the force of the explosion was equal to about 21,000 tons of TNT (21 kilotons). The bomb proved more powerful and efficient than the gun-type device used at Hiroshima, which had an explosive force of between 12 and 18 kilotons.
A series of hills protected much of the city from the blast wave, and a firestorm never erupted, despite winds that reached more than six hundred miles an hour. About forty thousand people were killed in Nagasaki, at least twice that number were injured, and more than one third of the homes were destroyed. Ground zero was approximately five hundred feet south of the Mitsubishi Steel Works. According to one report, the plant was left “bent and twisted like jelly.” The bomb also leveled the nearby Mitsubishi Arms Factory, where the torpedoes fired at Pearl Harbor were made.
The effects of ionizing radiation—primarily gamma rays emitted during the first minute after detonation—were even more disturbing. Perhaps one fifth of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were due to “radiation sickness.” People who’d survived the blast and the fires soon felt nauseated and tired.
These counterfactual arguments, though compelling, can never be proved. But the historical facts remain. Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6. Two days later the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Nagasaki was struck on the ninth, and the following day, General Korechika Anami, the minister of war, still urged the Japanese people to fight, “even though we have to eat grass and chew dirt and lay in the field.” On August 14, Emperor Hirohito overruled his generals and agreed to an unconditional surrender. “The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs,” he explained, “and the heavy
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There couldn’t be fuel vapors and oxidizer vapors in the silo at the same time; the two would have mixed and caused an explosion.
A white cloud floated from the silo exhaust shaft, like smoke rising from a chimney.
