Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [110]
Why not? Why atomic bombs but no mustard gas? There are several reasons. First, the military branches regarded the use of chemical agents as unprofessional, even unsporting, in a way that dropping bombs or firing explosive shells was not. The Navy and Army Air Force especially also believed they might find themselves starved of their preferred weapons and resources should chemicals be authorized for use in island warfare. Institutional rivalry thus to some extent trumped a willingness to fight with absolutely no restraint. Second, and unlike atomic weapons, gas had a history of use in combat, and fairly or not a particularly ugly reputation among both military and civilian constituencies. The world had recoiled in revulsion when gas was used in the First World War; not only was American public opinion unreconciled to its use in 1945 but so was the international community, several of its European members having experienced the release of chemical agents first hand. If not absolute, prohibitions nevertheless existed on the use of gas, while no treaty or arrangements yet governed nuclear weapons. Finally, and most important, the resistance to using gas had much to do with the way in which gas killed. As noted earlier, death from explosion and fragment and fire—from outside in, as it were—was more readily countenanced than death by an insidious agent that might enter the body undetected and then kill from the inside out. Death by gas was a violation of the body, unfair in a way that bombing (bizarrely) was not. The difference was even partly aesthetic, with trauma by explosion held more bearable than an end brought on by slow suffocation. Small comfort, perhaps, but the general abdication of conscience undergone by the world’s citizenry had not altogether eradicated its scruples concerning chemical and biological weapons.67
An odd coda: just after Harry Truman’s final speech to the nation as president in mid-January 1953, Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray wrote seeking reassurance that Truman did not regard the use of atomic weapons as ‘immoral’. Truman responded: ‘I rather think you have put a wrong construction on my approach to the use of the Atomic bomb. It is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them by the wholesale.’68
Carried by an aging and ill-fated cruiser called the Indianapolis, the carefully cosseted core of the world’s first combat atomic bomb had arrived on Tinian on 26 July, the day of the Potsdam Declaration. It was joined to the rest of the bomb assembly on 1 August in an air-conditioned hut. When finished, Little Boy looked like ...a bomb. It was 14 feet long, 5 feet in diameter, and it weighed approximately 10,000 pounds. Its proximity fuse, set for an altitude of about 1,800 feet, was designed to touch off a small explosion at the rear of the bomb, which would send a uranium bullet hurtling toward the bomb’s nose. There it would collide with a ‘cap’ of fraternal U-235. If all went as planned, that would ignite an atomic explosion that would destroy the center of Hiroshima and transform the world.69
SIX - Japan: The Atomic Bombs and War’s End
There was a loud boom—of course there was. A 30,ooo-pound bomb had exploded less than a mile above the city. But what people in Hiroshima remembered most about the morning of 6 August was silence. A fisherman tending his nets on the Inland Sea, 20 miles from Hiroshima, heard a great explosion, but few in Hiroshima claimed later to have heard any noise at all. The silence that followed the bombing, with its blast and light and burning heat, was profound. ‘The hurt ones were quiet,’ wrote John Hersey, albeit in retrospect. ‘No one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people