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day. Pursued by flak and Japanese fighter planes, Sweeney tried three passes over Kokura, failing each time to discern his aiming point. He made a quick decision: proceed to the secondary target, Nagasaki. The plane had enough fuel for one bombing run, and even then it might not be enough to get them home. Nagasaki was clouded over. Navigating by radar, the plane’s bombardier, Kermit Beahan, found a target 2 miles north of the intended one, in the district where many of the city’s Catholics lived near the great Urakami Cathedral. Beahan released Fat Man. ‘Bombs away!’ he called. Then he corrected himself: ‘Bomb away!’ Sweeney got his plane back as far as Okinawa with two engines out and running on fumes. He and his crew were bruised and exhausted. They had left far worse in their wake. Fat Man had blasted to rubble the Urakami Cathedral, beheading some of its stone statues, and the Mitsubishi torpedo factory, whose workers had built the weapons used at Pearl Harbor. The merciful cloud cover and a series of ridges had protected the center of Nagasaki and much of its population, but the toll was nevertheless staggering: estimates of the dead ranged from about 40,000 to nearly

140,000 by 1950, with thousands more injured. Some 7,000 of the dead were Catholics, their families having accepted conversion by European missionaries some generations earlier. Only a few hundred of the Nagasaki dead were military men. Between 60 and 80 American POWs died, their presence in Nagasaki known in advance to US officials, who nevertheless judged their sacrifice necessary for the greater good of ending the war more quickly. More than a month after the bombing, a US navy officer visited Nagasaki. He wrote to his wife: ‘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 ...is one of deadness, the absolute essence of death in the sense of finality without hope of resurrection.’ Terai Sumie remembered the bombing with a sequence of haiku:

my child’s sleeping face

on this blue earth

radiation everywhere

to the unknown tomorrow

the bomb victims’

prayers turn to sobs

guidepost for the soul

sunflowers that fill

the blue vase

as if

the A-Bomb Maiden incarnate

a dove flies

constant vertigo

still I dread

the White Nagasaki46

10. The Big Six debates

The Big Six got its news of the bombing very quickly, from the governor of Nagasaki prefecture. The governor played down the impact of the attack, reporting that the number of dead was ‘small’, probably (he alleged) because the weapon had been less powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The news apparently had little effect on the impasse the Big Six had reached—though, as Richard Frank has pointed out, Toyoda’s argument, or hope, that the United States had few atomic bombs was undercut by the dropping of the second bomb so soon after the first. The debate went on. The meeting adjourned at 1.00 p.m., deadlocked over whether to insist that the United States meet four conditions or merely one.

That afternoon saw lobbying and intrigue by several groups and individuals on behalf of their positions. The veteran politician-diplomat Prince Fumimaro Konoe met Kido at the palace. Distressed to learn that the Big Six were considering four conditions, and that Kido and presumably Hirohito favored this approach, Konoe, joined in the effort by former foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and Hirohito’s younger brother Prince Takamatsu, urged Kido to convince the Emperor to issue a ‘sacred decision’ (seidan) to accede to Potsdam with just the one condition, thereby breaking the high-level deadlock. A small group of military officers pursued the same strategy on a parallel track. Meanwhile, Suzuki, at 2.30, convened an emergency cabinet meeting. There, for a larger audience, members of the Big Six rehearsed and embroidered the arguments they had put forward that morning. Yonai, who had first described the